Page 120 of Cherry Picking

Something goes through me hard enough to take my legs half out from under me. I put a glove on the glass to steady myself, and I don’t know which of them I’m looking at anymore.

Evie lifts her free hand, palm out, so I know she sees me seeing them both.

“Maxwell!” A TV guy has me by the elbow, dragging me back to the world. “Thirty seconds, they want you first—”

Bellan is yelling something over the noise. Augie is trying to dump a water bottle over my head. The building is still shaking under my skates.

I hold their faces across nineteen thousand people for one more second—my father on his feet, and the woman who got him there.

Then I let them turn me toward the microphone.

CHAPTER 34

EVIE

We’re tucked into a small lounge adjacent to the family tunnel, a space dominated by a single coffee machine and a monitor looping post-game highlights, and Murphy stubbornly refuses to sit.

“He’s still tied up with the press,” a woman in a Kings quarter-zip informs us for the second time. “Another twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.”

“Son’s a blabbermouth,” Murphy grumbles, his eyes never leaving the hallway.

He’s white-knuckling the head of his cane while his other hand braces against a chair back. Every few heartbeats, he swivels to track the footsteps echoing in the corridor.

“Take a load off, Murph.”

He grunts. “I’ve done enough sitting to last a lifetime.”

“You’ve been vertical since the final horn sounded,” I say, “and your ankles are going to be a liability on the flight home.”

“Let ’em swell.” He jerks his chin toward the screen, where four men are dissecting his son’s performance. “Turn the volume up.”

“It’s already maxed out.”

On the monitor, Briggs is standing at a podium, a Kings cap tugged on backward, deferring credit to the rest of the room. He looks utterly drained and about ten years younger than he did back in February.

A small, hitching sound escapes Murphy’s throat.

“Don’t you go getting soft,” I warn him.

“I am perfectly composed.”

“You’ve been misty-eyed since midway through the third period.”

“Documented case of chronic dry eye,” he says, though he swipes a rough palm across his cheek regardless. “If we’re taking an inventory of tears, let’s talk about yours.”

“There was an airborne irritant in my eyes.”

He smirks. “In both of them.”

“The ventilation in this arena is notoriously poor, Murphy.”

He huffs a laugh that dissolves into a dry cough, which I let slide without the usual lecture, knowing he’d only snap at me for the concern.

The latch clicks at the twenty-six-minute mark.

Briggs fills the doorway, his suit jacket discarded and his tie trailing from a pocket. He makes a direct line for his father, and I watch as a six-foot-three professional athlete folds himself nearly in half to get his arms around him.

Neither of them says anything for a long, heavy stretch.