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Twice, Cade lines Jax up along the boards and lays him out clean, and both times they climb up off the ice grinning at each other. Reminding me of us being kids playing in my driveway, and it does something to my chest to see them so happy.

"They're enjoying this," I say. "They're actually enjoying trying to kill each other."

"Boys." Harper says it like a diagnosis.

Third period. Still tied. Clock bleeding under four minutes, the whole season on the head of a pin, and the building forgets how to breathe.

Harper's got my hand crushed in hers.

Two minutes left, and Jax goes into the corner after a loose puck against, of all the people on this earth, my brother.

It's a clean, ugly, gorgeous battle, two grown men who love each other throwing everything they have into a fistful of boards, and it ends with Cade on his backside and Jax spinning out into open ice, puck on his tape, and the barn is already screaming before it leaves his stick.

Bar down.

The place detonates. Blizzards up one, under two minutes to a playoff spot, the horn still blaring, and Jax wheels away from the net, and here's the part I've watched him do all season from behind a lie. The celly. The stick point. Every goal all year he found me and pointed.

He finds me now. Jax points his stick at me, and there’s nothing fake in it. Just a man pointing at his girl, telling everyone the thing he was too scared to tell me for years.

That he’s mine and I’m his.

I'm crying in a hockey arena in my green sweater and I couldn’t care less who sees. We’ve come so far.

They bleed the last two minutes dry, and when the final horn goes the barn comes apart at the seams. They did it. Last night of the season, and the Blizzards clinched. They're going to the playoffs.

"Go on," Harper says, already nudging me toward the aisle, glassy-eyed and grinning. "I’ll meet you in the family room. I'll see you down there, I've got my own giant idiot to collect."

I don't remember the walk.

I come back to myself in the family room off the tunnel. I've stood in here lots of times as staff and never once as this, waiting with the wives, girlfriends and kids All of us watching the door, waiting for our men.

Torres comes in first, scooping up his kid. Ryker next, going to his partner and holding his baby.

Then a flood of them, huge and grinning, filling the little room, and every time the door swings I hold my breath.

And there he is.

Jax comes through the door helmet in hand, hair soaked, the goal still burning off him, and he's got Cade right behind him, my brother, still in black and gold.

And the two of them are wearing matching expressions that make the whole room quiet down a little without knowing why.

"He wouldn't let me leave," Cade says, jerking a thumb at Jax, but he's grinning at me. "Said I had to be here for something." He crosses the room and hugs me, quick and hard, and puts his mouth to my ear so only I hear.

"Whatever he says, don't you dare be scared." He pulls back, taps two fingers to his temple, our dad's old signal, and steps aside.

And Jax is already crossing the room to me.

"Hi," he says, grinning and mine.

"Hi." I can barely get it out. "You made the playoffs."

"I’m doing something a lot more important than that tonight." He takes both my hands, and his are shaking, and Jax Hunter's hands never shake.

And right there, Jax drops down onto one knee.

Chapter 26: Jax

I've taken slapshots to the face. I've dropped the gloves with men twice my size.