Page 118 of Her Player

I thought about Ryan.

Not with grief. Not with the weight I'd carried his absence in for fourteen years. Just him. Just the thought of him watching this, wherever he was. This city he loved. This team he built. These forty thousand people on their feet in an arena his wife had spent fourteen years holding together through sheer force of goddamn will.

I thought he would have been loud about it.

He always was.

Jett got the puck with thirty seconds left and I stopped breathing. I watched him make the decision in real time, that split second where every other option disappeared and the only thing left was the one that was either brilliant or insane, and Jett had never in his damn life been able to tell the difference, which was exactly why it worked.

He drove the full length of the ice.

I pressed both hands to the glass.

The shot went up. The goalie got a piece. The rebound kicked left and Jett, who had absolutely no business being in that position, who had followed the play the full length of the ice on pure goddamn instinct, the way only Jett could, buried it.

The goal alarm screamed.

I felt it in my chest before I heard it.

Five to four.

The clock hit zero.

Holy fucking hell.

The Vipers side of the arena became something I had no words for. Forty thousand people in a moment I had spent three years building toward and fourteen years grieving toward and every single day of my life since Ryan died working toward without ever knowing that this was where it was all headed.

Brynn found me somehow in the chaos and I held onto her and I cried.

Not the quiet, controlled tears I allowed myself in private.

The real ones.

The ones Ryan would have laughed at me for, gently and with complete love, before he wrapped me up and told me I did good.

You did good, Victoria.

I pressed my face into my daughter's shoulder and let myself believe it.

40

RHETT

I watched my team win the championship from a tunnel.

That was the part nobody told you about. The part that didn’t make it into the highlight reels or the trophy ceremony footage. The part where you sat in a concrete corridor on a medical bench with ice packed against your shoulder and a doctor shining a light in your eyes every four minutes while the muffled roar of forty thousand people filtered through the walls around you like something happening in another dimension.

Brynn sat next to me.

She hadn’t said much. She didn’t need to. She just sat there with her elbows on her knees and her eyes on the floor and every time the crowd noise spiked she looked up at the ceiling like she was trying to read what it meant through the concrete.

“They’re still up,” I said after the third surge.

She looked at me sideways. “How do you know?”

“Different sound. When the other team scores it drops first and then builds. When we score it just—” I paused as another wave rolled through the walls. “Like that.”

She listened. Then she nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I hear it.”