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That's why he tapped your pads.

Yeah.

Six years I've played with him. He never said a word about having a daughter who was anything. He barely says he has a daughter.

He's not good at words. He told me.

No, Owen types. He's not. Then, a second later: Neither am I.

I look at that. The bus goes over a bump and Sorel's head knocks against the window and he swears in French.

You're better than you were, I type.

In the second row, Owen turns his head. Just a little. Just enough that I can see the side of his face, and the corner of his mouth, and the place where a smile would go.

At the arena, while the rest of the guys are taping sticks and pretending not to be nervous, I go looking for Owen in the training room. He disappeared the minute we got off the bus.

The door's half open. I can see him through the gap. He's lying on the table in shorts with his right leg out straight, and Dana's standing over him with a syringe. A big one. The needle's long. She's pulling back on the plunger, slowly, and the syringe is filling up with something yellow and cloudy.

I stop in the doorway. I didn't know it looked like that. I thought drain meant something small.

He's got his head turned away, looking at the wall. His jaw's tight. His hand's gripping the edge of the table so hard his knuckles are white.

Dana sees me first. She looks at me over her glasses. She doesn't say anything, but her face does something. It's not a friendly look. It's the look you give somebody when you're asking them a question you're not allowed to ask out loud.

Then Owen turns his head and sees me.

"Get out, Rémy," he says. Not mean. Just tired.

"Is that⁠—"

"It's routine. Get out. I'll see you on the ice."

I back out of the doorway. I stand in the hall with my back to the wall and my heart pounding.

That's not routine. I don't know anything about knees, but I know that's not routine. You don't grip a table like that for routine.

Wear and tear, he said. Nothing I haven't done before.

I think about rule two. I think about the way he looked me in the eye on the orange couch cushion and said I'm not lying.

I push the thought away, hard, the way you shove a guy off the puck. It's game seven. It's game seven, and I can't think about this right now.

We win.

It's two to one, and it's the hardest game I've ever played in my life. Owen scores the winner in the third, standing in front of the net like a fence post, taking a slapshot from Webb off the back of his shoulder, and it goes in off his body, and he doesn't even see it go in. He just hears the horn and turns around and looks for me.

I'm already there. I don't jump on him. I don't do the slide. I just grab the front of his jersey with both hands and hold on, and he puts his glove on the back of my helmet, and for one second nineteen thousand people in Denver disappear.

Then the guys pile on and we're gone under a mountain of bodies.

Somewhere at the bottom of it, with somebody's elbow in my ear and somebody's skate on my ankle, I hear Kowal's voice, right next to my head.

"Keep it down, rook," he says, and I swear to God he's laughing.

We're going to the conference final. Four more wins and we play for the Cup.

In the handshake line after, I shake every Denver player's hand, the way you're supposed to, and I watch Owen skate down the line ahead of me. Every time he pushes off his right leg, there's a hitch in it. A catch. Small. So small nobody else would see it.