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Webb sits in the fourth row, next to Kowal, and doesn't come up to talk to me. Kowal looks at me once, when I get on, a long gray look, and then puts his headphones on and closes his eyes. Brandt's across the aisle from me, reading something on his phone. Halfway through the flight he puts it down and looks over.

"Cap," he says.

"What."

"Just so you know," Brandt says, "I don't care. About the picture. Whatever it is." He shrugs. "Guys are saying stuff. I told them to shut up."

I stare at him.

"You told them to shut up."

"We're down three-one in the Final," Brandt says. "I don't care who's in whose hallway. I care about game five." He picks his phone back up. "Also, the kid's playing like garbage. So are you. Fix it."

He goes back to his phone. I sit there, looking at the back of the seat in front of me.

Moretti splits us up at the morning skate on game day.

He doesn't make a big deal about it. He just props the whiteboard against the boards the way he did in November, and skates away. Top line: BRANDT — CASTEL — SOREL. Second line: HALE — KOWAL — PRATT.

Nobody says anything. Rémy looks at the board for a long time. Then he skates away without looking at me.

Moretti skates over when I'm alone at the far blue line.

"It's not a punishment," he says.

"I know."

"You two couldn't find each other last night if you were handcuffed together. I can't have that. Not in an elimination game." He watches Rémy skate laps at the other end. "Whatever's going on, it's none of my business. I told you that in January. It's still none of my business."

"Coach—"

"But I watched you in Pruitt's suite," he says, not looking at me. "I watched you say that word. I watched his face when you said it."

I don't say anything.

"I told you not to do it twice," Moretti says. Very quietly. "You did it twice."

He skates away. I stand at the blue line with my stick across my knees and look at the ice.

Game five. Chicago. Nineteen thousand people in red, and somewhere up in section 112, a small dark-haired woman with his exact eyes and a man in a toque who drove seventeen hours to be here.

I see the truck on the way in. It's parked on the street outside the arena, right under a light, a red pickup with a crack in the windshield and a Quebec license plate. There's a sign taped to the back window, handwritten in marker. ALLEZ RÉMY! #27!

I stand on the sidewalk in my suit and look at it longer than I should.

The game is ugly. It's the ugliest game I've ever played. Nashville scores four minutes in on a bad bounce off Kowal's skate. We tie it in the second on a power play, Sorel from the slot. Rémy gets the secondary assist, and he doesn't celebrate. He taps Sorel's glove and skates to the bench with his head down.

Up in 112, I can see his mother on her feet, clapping so hard I can see it from the ice.

I'm on the ice in the third, one-one, when it goes.

It's nothing. It's nothing at all. I'm skating backward on a Nashville rush, and I plant my right foot to cut toward the boards, the way I've done ten thousand times, and my knee goes sideways.

There's no pain at first. There's a sound, a wet pop I feel more than hear, deep inside the joint. Then my leg isn't there anymore. It just isn't there. I go down on the ice like somebody cut a string, and the puck goes past me, and a Nashville winger goes past me, and I'm lying on my side at our blue line, holding my knee in both hands.

Then the pain comes.

It comes all at once. A slapshot to the inside of the knee, no pads. White and hot and huge. I hear somebody screaming and realize it's me.