Page 119 of Her Player

I shifted the ice pack on my shoulder and winced. The doctor looked at me sharply.

“Don’t,” he said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re thinking about getting up.”

“I’m sitting completely still.”

“You’re thinking about it,” he said flatly, and went back to his chart.

Brynn snorted softly beside me. Then she pressed her lips together and looked at her hands. “She’s out there watching,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”

I hadn’t been wondering. I knew. The same way I always knew where Victoria was in a building, some internal compass that had been calibrated to her for three years and showed no signs of stopping.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

Brynn considered the question carefully, the way someone did who knew her mother very well. “She’s Victoria,” she said finally. “So she’s standing completely still with her arms crossed looking like she’s running a board meeting. But her hand is pressed against the boards.” She paused. “She only does that when she’s scared.”

I stared at the ceiling.

I thought about the photograph. The gray morning light and the iron gate and her face tilted up toward mine like gravity just decided. I thought about her flipping her phone face down on the kitchen counter with that look in her eyes. Together, she’d said. Like she was still deciding what the word meant.

I thought about three years of turned lefts instead of rights.

Three years of watching her clip-clop down hallways in those impossible heels of hers and knowing, with a certainty that had never once wavered about anything that mattered, that she was it for me. Before she’d seen it herself. Before she was ready. Before she had any idea that I was already completely and irreversibly gone.

Three years.

And she was out there at the boards with her hand pressed against them.

The crowd noise didn’t spike this time.

It exploded.

A sound so complete and total that it stopped being sound and became something physical, a pressure wave that moved through the concrete walls and the floor beneath my feet and up through the bench and into my bones. The doctor’s pen rolled off his clipboard. Brynn shot to her feet with both hands pressed to her mouth.

I already knew what it meant.

“They did it,” Brynn breathed. Her eyes went glassy immediately. “Oh my God, they actually⁠—”

Her voice broke.

I stood up.

The doctor pointed at me. “Calloway⁠—”

“We won the championship,” I said. “I’m going out there.”

He opened his mouth.

“I’m going out there,” I said again, pleasantly, in a tone that ended the conversation.

I grabbed my helmet off the bench, tucked it under my good arm, and walked down the tunnel toward the ice.

The scene that greeted me when I stepped out of the tunnel was something I knew I’d be trying to describe for the rest of my life and never quite getting right.

The ice was pure chaos. Beautiful, gold-and-black chaos. The guys were everywhere. Jett had his stick raised above his head and was screaming something at the ceiling that I couldn’t make out over the noise. Moose had his mask off and was bear-hugging Langley, which looked genuinely dangerous given the size difference. Two of our defensemen were chest-bumping repeatedly like they’d forgotten how to stop. Confetti was falling from somewhere above, thick gold and black streams of it drifting down through the arena lights and settling across the ice like the most expensive snowfall I’d ever seen.