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I'm careful. I'm very careful. Somebody reminds me to be, every morning.

I coach now.

Not here. Not the big club. They offered, Pruitt and Moretti both, in July, in the same office where I told them about the picture. Assistant coach. Video. Penalty kill. I said no.

It wouldn't be right. Not with him on the roster. Not with everybody watching.

So I coach the under-sixteens instead. The youth program. Play Proud. The one Nadia built the banner for. Three nights a week in a community rink on the West Side with bad lights and a Zamboni that sounds like it's dying, with twenty kids who can barely stop on their edges yet. I stand at the boards with a whistle and a clipboard and a cane, and I yell at them about their sticks.

I don't yell. I yell with my eyebrows. That's what they tell me.

One of them, a skinny fourteen-year-old goalie named Jordan, told me after practice in September that he was gay. Just like that, standing at the bench with his mask pushed up on his head, sweaty and red in the face. He'd practiced it. I could tell.

I said, "Okay. Thank you for telling me." Then I said, "Your glove side is still too low."

He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the ice.

I went out to the parking lot after and sat in my truck for twenty minutes with the engine running. Not because I was upset. Because I had to call Rémy and tell him, and I couldn't do it without crying, and I didn't want the kids to see.

His father taught me that. It's what the truck's for.

Danny came in August.

Moretti set it up. Danny drove down from Brandon with his husband and their two boys, fifteen hours, and ran a two-day skating clinic for my kids at the West Side rink. I stood at the boards and watched him teach twenty fourteen-year-olds how to cross over, and he was funny. He did impressions. He did me, standing at the boards with the cane and the eyebrows, and the kids laughed so hard one of them fell over.

On the second day, after the kids were gone, we sat on the bench together in the empty rink with our skates off.

"I'm sorry," I said. "For all of it. For the bus. For the parking lot. For getting in my car."

"I know," Danny said. "I got your coach's letter ten years ago. I got the clip from the hallway in June. I've been knowing for a while, Owen."

"It took me fifteen years."

"Yeah," he said. "It did." Then he bumped my shoulder with his, the way he used to on the bus, before. "You were worth waiting for, though. Tell the kid I said so."

I told him. That night, in bed. Rémy cried. I did too.

The lights go down. The anthem singer comes out. The team lines up on the blue line.

Brandt's got the C now, full-time. Pruitt made it official in August. He gave a speech at the ring ceremony before warmups tonight, the worst speech I've ever heard, and the whole building cheered for him anyway. Webb's got the A. Kowal's still Kowal.

Rémy's at the end of the line, with his helmet under his arm.

His laces are pink. They'll always be pink now. He had them embroidered. They say 27 on the tips in tiny gold thread.

He's looking up at the stands. At 112. At row two.

At me.

He did an interview this morning, on the morning show, the same station that called him a circus pick a year ago. The host asked him if he had any predictions for opening night.

"I'm going to score on my first shift," he said. "I'm dedicating it to my boyfriend. He's in section 112. He's the one in the jersey that doesn't fit him."

It's doing numbers.

The anthem singer holds the last note too long. The crowd cheers over her. I don't think about anything during the anthem. I never have.

I think about him.