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It takes him fourteen seconds.

He picks the puck off the wall on his first shift, the same way he did a year ago. He walks it straight at their defenseman, and he doesn't reach, and he doesn't cheat, and when the D commits, he's gone. He cuts across the top of the circle and snaps it high, glove side.

It doesn't hit the crossbar this time.

It goes in clean.

The building comes apart. Josée's screaming in French. Karen's hitting me with the foam finger. Maya Kowal's on her feet with both arms in the air, and Jen Webb's kid is crying because everybody's too loud.

Rémy doesn't do the slide right away.

He turns around at the top of the circle and looks up at section 112. He points at me, right at me, with his whole arm, the way he pointed at his mother on the first night.

Then he taps his chest. Twice. Flat. With his glove. Right over his heart.

Same place.

Then he drops to his knees and slides the whole length of the zone, and nineteen thousand people scream his name, and I sit there in a jersey that doesn't fit, crying in front of my sister and his mother and a fifteen-year-old with a rainbow pin, and I don't care who sees.

"Mon Dieu," Josée says, wiping her eyes. "Every time. Every time with that slide. He's going to ruin his knees."

"I know," I say.

"You'll make him stop?"

"No," I say. "Never."

She looks at me for a long moment. Then she puts her arm through mine and holds on, the way my mother does.

"Good," she says. "Christmas. Rimouski. You're coming. I already bought the pie."

"You bought the pie last year."

"I bought it again," Josée says. "I told you. The offer does not expire."

We live in the West Loop now. Not the gray apartment. A new one, three floors up in an old brick building with big windows and radiators that clank all winter, and not a single gray thing in it.

The orange couch is in the living room, on the blue rug with the triangles. The fern's on the windowsill in its cat pot. It's three times bigger than it was. There's a second fern next to it now, in a pot shaped like a dog. There's a whole shelf of mismatched bowls from a garage sale in Rimouski.

The Christmas lights are up in the window. It's October. They've been up since we moved in. They're never coming down.

We get home after midnight, after the ring ceremony dinner and the team party and Josée crying on both of us in the lobby of her hotel. He's still wearing his game-day suit. I'm still wearing the jersey that doesn't fit.

He stops in the doorway of the living room and looks at me in it.

"Take it off," he says.

"It's your jersey."

"I know," he says. "That's why. Rule five."

"We're not in here yet. We're in the doorway."

"The doorway counts," Rémy says, and grabs the front of it in both fists and pulls me inside.

Later, he's asleep on his stomach with his face in the pillow and one arm thrown across me. Like always. Like I'm going to fall off the world.

I can't sleep. I'm too happy. It turns out that's a thing that can happen.