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I look at him. The sling. The shoulder that ended his season and maybe a lot more than his season, the surgery he makes jokes about so fast and so often that nobody’s managed to ask him how he’s actually doing. He catches me looking. He always does.

“You can’t play,” I say. Plain. Not unkind. Just the fact — because the fact’s the thing I can do for him. I won’t pretend the shoulder isn’t what it is. He gets enough of that.

“No.” Easy. Unbothered, or a very convincing version of it, which from Beau is the same thing most days. “But I can sit in a freezing barn and heckle a man who can. Somebody’s got to keep you humble — God knows the draft’s going the other way.” He’s already easing off the stool, careful with the arm, hiding the careful inside the motion so you’d miss it if you weren’t watching. “Besides. You’ve got a look.”

“I don’t have a look.”

“You’ve got the exact look you get when you’re trying to skate something off.” He says it light. But he says it. And Beau doesn’t usually say the true thing out loud — that’s supposed to be my job — so him doing it means he’s been paying closer attention than I gave him credit for. “Whatever it is. Or whoever.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Sure.” He says it the way Sloane said it was a dig at you — agreeing with the words and not one single thing behind them.

Then he turns to Sloane. “You mind? It’s your morning too.” And it is — first day of the year, the two of them not twelve hours into whatever softer thing they turned into last night, and he’s checking before he leaves her in a kitchen with two hungover forwards and a sink full of grease.

“Go.” Easy. No weight on it. Then, quieter, into her mug, aimed at him and not the room: “He needs you.”

I hear it anyway.

And it should be nothing — a girl telling her guy to go be a friend to his teammate, the most ordinary sentence in the world. Except for how she says it. Certain. Like she already knows the exact shape of the thing I’d need him for this morning. Like she could name it herself if I asked. And I would rather eat the puck than ask.

I catch her eyes over the rim of the mug. She doesn’t look away. Neither do I. And I get the clear, unwelcome read that Sloane Beckett knows something — about last night, about the name I didn’t hand Beau ten minutes ago. I can’t work out what she knows or how she’d know it. She just watches me, and lets me not know, and drinks her coffee.

“Get your bag,” Beau says. “Before Cash burns the house down and we all have to move back in with our parents.”

“I heard that,” Cash says. “And it’s a low blow, Sorensen. My place burned down for narrative reasons and you know it.”

I get my bag. Beau gets his coat, one-armed and stubborn about it, waving Sloane off when she moves to help and then letting her tug the collar straight anyway, because letting her is its own thing they’ve got now.

Here’s the thing about the ice. It’s the one place my head goes quiet.

No phone. No father texting me a stranger’s kid under stadium lights like we’re close, like he was ever once in my stands. No draft on my chest, no scout’s clipboard, no count of every dollar between me and getting my mom out of a job that’s grinding her down a shift at a time. None of it makes it past the boards. There’s just the cold and the geometry — me and the gap and the simple honest job of not letting the dangerous thing through. Gap control. Box him out. Eat the puck before it gets behind you. That’s the whole game I play, on the ice and off it: stand in the lane, keep the thing that can hurt you on the outside, never once let it in clean.

I’m good at it. Best on the team, and I’m not being modest, because modesty’s a thing you can afford when there’s a safety net. I learned to stand in the gap before I learned to do most things. I don’t let it through.

We take my car. He doesn’t offer to drive one-armed and I don’t make him explain why. The barn’s fifteen minutes out and dark the whole way, roads empty, the plows the only other things awake. I’ve almost got my head where I want it — cleared off, idling — when the phone lights up in the cupholder.

MOM.

She beat me to it. She always does.

“Happy New Year, baby.” Her voice is sanded down to nothing. She’s been on since seven last night — she takes the holidays, holidays pay double, and she’s never once met a double she’d turn down. I can hear the unit behind her, the beeping, somebody paging somebody two floors up.

“Happy New Year, Ma. You’re supposed to be sitting down for this.”

“I’m sitting.” She’s not sitting. “I’ve got four minutes and I wanted your voice before the next one rolls in. Tell me you did something last night that wasn’t standing in a corner glowering at a party.”

Beau, in the passenger seat, mouths glowering, thrilled with himself. I watch the road.

“Party at the house. It was fine. Taking Beau to the rink now.”

“On New Year’s Day.” A tired smile in it, and under the smile the thing that’s always under it with her — the worry she won’t say out loud, that I don’t rest, that I never learned how. “You work too hard, Theo.”

“Learned it somewhere.”

She lets that go by. Then, lighter, too light, the exact register she uses right before the thing she actually called to ask: “Have you heard from your father?”

There it is. Half the reason for the four minutes, maybe.