Page 96

you good for tonight

Margo

wouldn’t miss it

section four

Margo

same as always

I look at the exchange longer than it probably warrants. There’s nothing wrong with it, technically — the words are right, the rhythm is right, the specific shorthand we’ve built over months is all present and accounted for. But something in it reads muted to me in a way I can’t fully name. A half-second delay before the response that wasn’t there two weeks ago. The absence of the extra line she usually adds — a joke, a jab, something with her actual voice in it instead of just the information.

I’ve been noticing it for a few days now. Not dramatically. Nothing I could point to and build a case around, the way she’d build a case around something. Just — off. A muted quality under the brightness she runs on. The specific texture of someone performing normal instead of just being normal. I know the difference. I’ve spent months learning the difference. Reading Margo Ashby accurately has become one of the only things I do as well as I read a defensive zone.

It’s small things. She’s been skipping breakfast at Raven House the last week and a half, which she never used to do — she’d steal a piece of toast off my plate before she even said good morning, and now she just has coffee, or half a cup of it, and pushes the rest away. She’s been quieter at practice, according to Wren, who mentioned it once in passing without meaning anything by it. And twice this week she’s fallen asleep against me before nine, dead weight, gone in a way that’s different from her usual tired.

I don’t push.

That’s the part I keep circling back to. Turning it over while I get my bag ready. While I drive to the rink. While I go through the motions of a day that’s supposed to be entirely about hockey. I’ve watched her manage her whole family — the easy one, the fine one, the one who performs harder the second someone gets close to the real thing underneath. If I push now, before she’s ready, I don’t get the truth. I get a better performance. I get I’m fine, Theo, delivered with more conviction than usual. She goes back to carrying whatever it is completely alone. Except now she’s also carrying the fact that I noticed and made her defend it.

So I don’t push. I tell myself it’s Nationals. The stunt sequence, the pressure, five weeks out and closing fast. I almost believe it. I want to believe it badly enough that I mostly do.

But I put it away. Not gone — just somewhere I can find it again, the way I hold onto everything that matters to me. I decide: after tonight. After Conference Finals, after my dad, after whatever tonight is going to cost me, I’m going to find a way to ask her the real question instead of the easy one.

Tonight there isn’t room for two things this size. Tonight I’ve only got room for one.

Warmups start at six-forty, same as always. I do the same lap I always do — checking the edges, checking my knees, letting the cold air do the thing it does to my head before a game like this.

I find Margo first. Section four, front row, green coat, Sloane beside her. She sees me look and does the small thing she always does. Not a wave. Just a shift in her posture that means I see you, I’m here. For a second the muted quality I’ve been tracking all week seems less present. Maybe it’s the crowd. Maybe it’s the occasion. I let myself believe it for exactly as long as the look lasts.

Then I scan two rows back, out of habit more than intention, and I find them.

Noah and Logan, in Whitmore jerseys that still have the fold creases from the packaging. Both grinning. Both practically vibrating with the specific unfiltered excitement of kids who’ve never been to a game like this and don’t know yet what it means to be here. And beside them, Lucas. Dark jacket, hands in his pockets. Looking exactly like a man who drove three hours to watch his son play the biggest game of the season and is entirely at peace with the fact that his son didn’t ask him to come.

I hate how long I let myself look.

Because that’s the part nobody warns you about — not the anger, which I know how to hold, but the specific vertigo of cataloguing your own father’s face and finding your own in it. The jaw. The set of the shoulders. The particular way he stands with his weight on one leg, hands in his pockets, like he’s perpetually deciding whether to commit to a room. I’ve caught myself standing that exact way in mirrors. The dark hair, mine cut shorter, his going gray at the temples now in a way that does something uncomfortable to my chest, because it means I’m looking at a preview. Thirty years from now, if I’m not careful, if I let the wrong things calcify the way they calcified in him — that’s the face I get. That’s the stance. That’s the man who shows up late and calls it generosity.

I don’t want to look like him. I’ve never wanted to look like him. And every single time I see him in person, for exactly as long as it takes my eyes to do the involuntary work of comparison, I can’t help it.

My face does nothing. I’ve had a lifetime of practice at my face doing nothing.

Internally, everything happens at once. The specific vertigo of seeing him in a building where he has never once stood for me — at a game that finally matters enough to draw him here. Understanding with total clarity that it isn’t me he came for. It’s the version of tonight. The big one. The one with stakes he can tell people about later.

I finish my lap. I don’t look up again before the horn sounds for warmups to end.

First period, I’m not myself.

I know it the way you know your own body isn’t cooperating. A half-second delay in every read. A gap I’m not closing as fast as I should be. My stick a beat behind where it needs to be. Camden’s forwards find seams I’d normally close on instinct, and twice in the first ten minutes I’m reaching instead of positioning, which is the exact mistake Coach has spent three years training out of me.

The second time, it costs us. Providence’s winger gets a clean look off my late gap and buries it top corner.

1-0, Prividence College.

I skate to the bench with my jaw tight and my whole chest doing something I can’t fully separate from the game. Coach doesn’t say anything right away, which is worse than if he had. Beau, beside him in the brace, catches my eye for half a second — a read, not a question — and I look away first, which never happens.

I know what’s wrong. I know exactly what’s wrong, and it has nothing to do with Camden’s forwards or my gap control or anything Coach could diagram on a whiteboard between periods. It’s two rows back in section four in a jacket he probably bought for the occasion, and I can’t get it out of my head long enough to do my actual job.