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It's just us.

"What did you say?" I ask him. "On the dance floor. When I shook my head."

He looks at me for a second, like he's deciding.

"I said, one day," he says. "One day you'll dance with me."

"No, I won't."

"One day," he says again, cheerfully, and grabs his jacket off the back of the stool. "Come on, Captain. Let's get you home before you turn into a pumpkin."

He walks toward the door. After a second, I follow him.

In the cab back to the hotel, he falls asleep against the window with his mouth open. The streetlights go over his face, orange and then dark, orange and then dark. I sit on the other side of the back seat with my hands on my knees and look straight ahead the whole way.

It's the job. I've been the one looking out for the kids on this team since before he could skate, and he needs more looking out for than most.

That's all it is.

The cab stops at the hotel. He wakes up, blinks, and smiles at me like he forgot where he was and is glad it's here. I get out first and hold the door, and I don't look at his mouth when he thanks me.

Chapter Ten

RÉMY

I find out from Sorel, which is how I find out everything. Sorel is basically my newspaper. He's a newspaper with a neck pillow.

He sits down next to me on the bus after morning skate, shoves his phone in my face, and says, "Don't let him see this."

It's a gossip site. The headline is in big pink letters over a photo of Hale in his suit, coming out of an office building in Chicago with his head down. The same suit he wore to the rink the day of the Denver game.

HOCKEY STAR'S "LONELY" MARRIAGE: FRIEND OF LAUREL HALE SPEAKS OUT.

I scroll. I shouldn't. I do.

It's the kind of article that's mostly nothing, three hundred words of sources say and a close friend reveals. But there are quotes. She tried for years. He was never really there. And the worst one, pulled out in a big box in the middle of the page so you can't miss it: "They hadn't been intimate in a very long time. Laurel used to joke that she was married to a roommate."

I hand the phone back. I feel sick, the specific kind of sick from eating gas-station sushi on a bus, which I've done, and don't recommend.

"Where is he?" I ask.

"Front of the bus. With Webb." Sorel puts his phone in his pocket. "Webb already knows. I saw him reading it."

I look up the aisle. Hale's in his usual seat, second row on the left, looking out the window at the palm trees going by. He doesn't have his phone out. His hands are flat on his knees.

He knows, too. I can tell from the back of his neck.

The team hotel in L.A. is in Santa Monica, a few blocks from the beach, and when the bus pulls up out front there are photographers on the sidewalk.

Not a lot. Five, maybe six. But they're the real kind, the kind with the big lenses and the vests with all the pockets, and they're not here for the hockey team. Nobody in L.A. cares about the hockey team. They're here for a story, and there's only one story on this bus.

"Oh, shit," Adeyemi says.

Beth, the travel coordinator, stands up at the front. "Okay, everybody. There's a side entrance through the parking garage. We're going to⁠—"

But Hale's already standing up. He grabs his bag off the rack.

"Owen," Webb says, low. "Wait for the garage."