Page 122 of Her Player

“We are.”

She glanced sideways at the forty thousand people currently losing their collective minds around us. Then she looked back at me with those steel gray eyes and the corner of her mouth curved upward into something that wasn’t quite a smile yet but was getting there.

“You better make sure that shoulder is cleared by the press conference,” she said.

I grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And Rhett?”

“Yeah?”

She straightened the collar she’d already straightened. “Good game.”

I laughed then, full and loud and real, the sound swallowed up immediately by forty thousand people celebrating around us, and I reached across the boards and pulled her toward me one more time.

Behind us, Jett was chanting something.

I chose not to hear what it was.

EPILOGUE

VICTORIA

The trophy looked good in the display case.

I stood in the corridor outside my office on a Tuesday morning in March with my coffee in one hand and my clipboard in the other and I looked at the championship trophy sitting behind its glass panel in the new display case we’d had installed three weeks after the win, and I thought about how long I’d been waiting to see something in that spot.

Seventeen years of empty glass.

Seventeen years of walking past that case every single day on my way to my office at Caldwell Arena. Seventeen years of knowing what it was built for and watching it sit there collecting the silence of something that was supposed to hold a thing it didn’t have yet.

Ryan had always said it was optimistic.

He was right about a lot of things.

He was right that this city needed something to believe in. He was right that hockey was the thing, this particular loud and physical and unforgiving game that Las Vegas had never quite known what to do with until it did. He was right that the arena was too big for what we had and that the right team would grow into it eventually, and he was right that the display case needed a trophy in it, and he was right, God he was right, that optimism was not the same thing as foolishness even when it looked exactly like it from the outside.

He was right about all of it.

He just didn’t get to see it.

That was the part I had spent fourteen years trying to make peace with and never quite managing. Not the grief exactly, not anymore, grief had softened into something I could carry without it stopping me in my tracks. But the specific unfairness of it. The fact that he had believed in all of this before there was any reason to and then wasn’t here for the part where it turned out he was right.

I stood in the corridor with my coffee and I looked at the trophy and I let myself feel it without flinching away from it, the way I’d been learning to do. Not just the loss. All of it. The seventeen years and the franchise and the foundation and the gala every November where I sat across tables from senators and made them look at numbers until they couldn’t look away. The four-poster bed in an estate I finally lived in. The man currently sitting in my chair reading an investor packet at seven in the morning because he showed up before I did and let himself in with the key I gave him without making a thing of it.

Ryan would have liked all of it.

He would have liked it enormously, and he would have been completely insufferable about being right, and I would have thrown a throw pillow at him and he would have caught it, and that thought didn’t hurt the way it used to.

It just felt like him.

Like he was still here in all the small things, the way he always would be.

“You’re allowed to be happy, Vee.”

I picked up my coffee and went to find out what was in the Hargrove packet.

I had always said it was impatient.