Page 22 of Her Rival

I stood in the elevator and read it twice.

He'd changed the venue. Moved us out of the formal media room where Brynn had been chaperoning and into one of the team's working spaces, the rooms where actual hockey happened. His territory. He was making a chess move. I didn't know what kind yet.

The video review room turned out to be a long narrow box halfway down the staff side of the second floor. A wall-sized screen at one end, a long table running its length, the team logo cleaner and smaller on the side wall, like the room knew it was for people who didn't need reminding what they did for a living. Jett was already there. Not sitting. Standing at the back, behind a chair he'd put out for me, a laptop open in front of him and a remote in his hand. Long-sleeve practice shirt, sweats, and the kind of black ball cap pulled low that hockey players wear when they don't want their face read.

He glanced at me as I came in. Once. Up, down, away. The whole look took less than a second.

"Sit," he said. "Or stand. Whatever. I'm putting up the goal."

No hello. No small talk. No charm version of him.

I sat.

He clicked something and the wall lit up with a paused frame of a hockey game I knew without being told was the championship. The Vipers' colors. The arena logo behind the goal. A scoreboard showing the third period, two seconds left, tied. The man on the ice with his stick raised was him.

"Brynn said you wanted to walk through it," he said. "Last time. So I figured we'd actually walk through it." He clicked the remote. The frame unfroze. Two seconds of play unfolded, the puck flying off Rhett's stick, across the slot, onto Jett's, and Jett doing whatever the impossible thing was that he'd done with it, the wrist flick that ended the season and won a championship. The recorded crowd went up. The screen froze on the moment the goalie's glove came down too late.

I watched it twice. Three times. He played it on a small loop without comment while my body decided whether or not to remember to breathe.

"You scored that," I said. The first thing I'd said in the room. It came out smaller than I meant.

He almost smiled. Caught himself. Killed it.

"Rhett scored that," he said. "I was the empty net at the right end of the ice."

"That wasn't an empty net."

"It was open enough."

"It was open for half a second."

"That's all you need."

He paused the remote. He didn't look at me. He looked at the frozen frame on the wall, at the second of his own life he'd just made me watch four times in a row, and I realized, with a small painful click of recognition, that he hadn't come into this room to give me nothing today. He'd come to give me hockey.

He couldn't give me himself. Couldn't give me his childhood, his family, his hometown, any of the doors he'd locked. But he could give me this. The thing he'd actually earned. The thing he was actually proud of. The thing he could talk about without lying.

It was a peace offering and a wall at the same time, and he knew it and I knew it, and neither of us was going to name it out loud.

"Okay," I said. "Walk me through what was happening in your head."

He clicked back to the moment Rhett got the puck. Hit play. Started talking.

And the man who'd given me forty-five minutes of nothing on Monday talked for the next fifteen.

I couldn't even tell you, later, exactly how the shift happened. He started where I'd asked, the moment Rhett got the puck off the boards. He explained the geometry of the rink the way I'd never had a play explained to me. The angles. The way two defenders had set up on the wrong side of the ice because their captain read a Vipers line change wrong. The way Moose drew the goalie a half-step out of position by faking a screen. The way Jett had been exactly where he was supposed to be because Coach had drilled them on this exact set since training camp.

"It looks like instinct on tape," he said, the remote moving in small precise motions, pausing, freezing on the frame that mattered. "It wasn't. Every part of that was a play we ran a hundred times. I just got to be the guy at the end of it that night."

"Why you, though."

"Because I was the guy at the end of it. Rhett was tired. Moose had played sixty minutes and his shoulder was wrecked. Tank was on the bench. I was rested because Coach had been benching me strategically in the second. Freshest leg they had, and the captain trusted me with the puck."

"That's a lot of structural answer for a goal everybody else calls magic."

"Everybody else doesn't live inside it."

He froze the frame on his own face the half-second before he scored. He looked at the man on the screen with a flatness I couldn't place at first. Then I placed it, and the placing of it did something to my chest I was not going to examine in his video room with him three feet away.