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“We do not discuss number,” Erik said, with enormous dignity. “Is vulgar.”

And that was when it hit me. It came up through the floor, up through my feet and my knees, and it took my legs out from under me, the whole crushing mountain I’d been carrying since a man signed a paper in the spring, the banks and the house and the phone I picked up and put down. It all let go at once, and my knees went.

Dante caught me.

Of course he did.

He’d been standing right there, at my side, where he’d been the whole autumn. He got an arm around me before I hit anything and propped me up. I turned into him and grabbed two fists of his shirt and put my face down against his neck and came apart, all the way apart, in front of the whole bar, in front of everybody I loved. The big man in the gray beard finally broke completely open—and I didn’t care.

I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried.

“They saved it,” I said into Dante’s neck. I couldn’t get the words to work. I sounded like a kid. “Dante, they saved our family. I couldn’t. I tried so hard. I couldn’t. And they—”

“I know,” he said. His hand was on the back of my head. His voice was steady, the way it always was when I needed it to be. “I know, babe. Let them. You let people carry things now, remember? You taught yourself that. Let them carry this one.”

“I gave up my house—”

“And I made you take it back. Because look.” He turned my head, gently, made me look at the room. “Look what they did. Really look, Mark.”

The whole bar was coming apart the way I was. Benji was screaming and sobbing at the same time, both hands in his hair. Chase had his fists in Finn’s shirt the way I was gripping Dante’s. Rod had sat straight down on a bar stool with his hand over his mouth, and now it was Adrian’s arm around him, the two of them switched, the held holding the holder. Brendan wrapped them both in his arms and was sobbing into Adrian’s hair.

Grant Harmon was writing nothing, just crying and laughing at the same time.

And the four of them, my four ridiculous, enormous hockey boys, stood in the middle of it all getting mobbed. Erik lifted Benji clean off the floor in a hug. Murph finally, finally understanding what he’d walked into, went misty. Tyler filmed the whole thing, narrating through tears of his own, “. . . and here we see the bartender, absolutely losing it. Folks, this is what we came for—”

They’d done the thing I couldn’t, the thing none of us could. They’d reached into a fire I’d already surrendered to and pulled the whole bar back through it.

It was Jacks who cut me open, though. Because in all of it, all the noise and the crushing and the joy, I caught sight of Jacks standing a little apart, not celebrating, just staring at his husband, at Skyler. His face was doing something I couldn’t bear to watch, joy and something torn underneath it. I saw him push through the crowd to Skyler, and I was close enough to hear.

“You knew.” Jacks didn’t sound angry. He sounded wrecked, which was worse. “This whole time, you knew, and you let me . . . Sky, I cried myself to sleep for weeks. You held me while I cried about losing this place and you knew—”

“I didn’t know it would work.” Skyler had both hands on Jacks’s face, and Skyler, who was the calmest man any of us had ever met, the steadiest man in any room, was barely holding himself together. “I swear to God, baby. I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t give you hope and then rip it back if it fell apart. It did almost fall apart, a hundred times, right up until that last minute. I couldn’t watch you lose it twice, so I sat on it, and I let you think the worst. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m so sorry, babe, but I’d do it again. I’d let your heart break a little now to keep it from breaking all the way later. I love you that much, Jacks.”

Jacks grabbed Skyler by the jersey and kissed him, hard, and then shoved him in the chest, and then kissed him again, which was the whole of Jacks right there in three moves. I had to look away, because some things a man shouldn’t watch.

But as quickly as they’d embraced, Skyler freed himself from Jacks’s grip and found me. He gripped my shoulder, gave me one solid nod, and said, “Let’s talk. Just you and me.”

Not Finn and me.

Just me.

He waited until the roar had pulled everyone else toward the middle of the room, led me to the far corner, near the booth where I always ran my numbers, and leaned in close and quiet, so it was only the two of us.

“There’s a part nobody else can hear,” he said. “Not tonight, maybe not ever. I need you to keep it between us. Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “’Course. Anything, Sky. Right now, you could ask for anything.”

He smiled weakly and rubbed the back of his neck. He couldn’t quite look at me, which sent the tiny hairs on my neck standing at attention.

“The money was ours, the guys and me. It was a lot, and you can thank them till you’re blue, but money was never the problem. We make a shit ton playing a stupid game. Money’s never an issue for us, but Meridian didn’t want to sell to anybody at any number.”

“They told me that to my face,” I mumbled.

“Somebody had to make them want to sell, had to give them a reason they couldn’t refuse.” He dropped his voice further. “I went to the owner myself. I asked him for a favor, as the captain, the one thing I’ve never done in all my years. I asked him to lean where I couldn’t lean, to make some calls a bartender couldn’t make. And he did, Mark. He got them to the table. Then he went one better without me asking. He had the team name Barbacks the official bar of the franchise. Meridian couldn’t come out as the fund that bulldozed an official team institution in the heart of Ybor. Instead, he convinced them to come out the partner who saved it and handed it to the Lightning. That’s the trade, the private bargain beneath the public releases. That’s what actually moved them, not the money, the owner’s influence and the team’s name.”

“Sky—”

“That part stays here, all right?” He gripped my forearm, firm. “The official-bar thing, the sign, all of that’s public, and that’s fine. Let Benji scream about it from a rooftop, but the owner leaning on Meridian, personally, for us, that never happened. He can’t have it out there that he strong-armed a real-estate fund to save a gay bar. That’s not a headline a man in his position can wear. He knows that, and he did it anyway. He did it quietly, for no credit, because I asked him, and because he’s a better man than people know. So it doesn’t leave this conversation, okay? Nobody hears it. Not Finn, not the guys, not Jacks, not even Dante. Just you.”