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Ford didn’t let himself dwell on how good it felt being looked after by the one man he’d never once asked to do it. God, he had it bad.

In the crease, nothing could reach him. He talked himself through the warm-up in the same low murmur he’d used since he was nineteen—there you go, track it, stay square—and his body ran the pattern by habit, even on the mornings he didn’t trust his leg to cooperate.

It was the lateral pushes that took the greatest toll on his body. Deluca opened every practice the same way, post to post, over and over, and by the sixth rep, the joint was a hot wire from his waist to his knee. Ford buried it under chatter so nobody would clock the half-second he stole between pushes to get his weight where it needed to be.

He kept the noise up right to the whistle, and it wasn’t until he skated over to the bench to refill his water that he found Theo Brandt waiting on him.

Theo had come on as the team’s athletic therapist at the start of last season, and Ford still didn’t have a full read on him. It needled at him more than he’d admit. Reading people was the one thing he was reliably better at than anyone else in the building, but he couldn’t crack Theo.

The trainer was quiet, and not from shyness. He had a flat, unhurried stare that made you feel he’d already spotted whatever you were working to hide. He leaned on the boards now with a roll of tape he made no move to use and said, without looking up, “You’re loading off that left hip.”

“I’m loading off twenty years of terrible decisions,” Ford said. “It’s a rich tapestry. I’m fine.”

“Mm.” Theo looked up, and his eyes did the thing Ford didn’t care for, the thing that felt like being handed back to yourself with the wrapping already off. “Come see me after. Five minutes.”

“I’m good, Theo. Save it for the kids who actually bleed on the ice.”

“I hear you.” Theo pushed off the boards without hurry and tucked the tape into a pocket he seemed to keep for props. “Lucky for you, I get paid just as much to deal with you guys who are old, stubborn, and don’t want to admit your own limitations. Treatment room after practice, or I’ll tell Coach.”

He moved down the bench to where Carter Walsh was riding out a rotation with one shoulder hitched up near his ear and a look on his face that dared anybody to say a word about it. At least Ford wasn’t the only stubborn old mule on the roster. He watched Theo set two fingers against the joint and say something short. Carter, who complained about damn near everything, went quiet and let himself be handled. Ford filed that under small miracles and none of his business and skated back out to his net.

Two reps later, the drill swung wide, and Cole was suddenly at the top of the crease when he had no reason to be, taking his own sweet time digging a puck out of the corner so the rep died on the whistle a half-second before Ford would have had to make a hard push across. He did it without a glance, without a word. Anybody watching saw a teammate sandbagging. Ford saw a favor, quiet and deliberate, and it got to him worse than the hip did.

Cole doing little shit like that irritated him in a way it shouldn’t have. He’d built his whole life on being the one who carried other people, and here was his younger teammate seeing straight through him, covering for him on the ice. What scared him was how badly he wanted to let him.

He watched Cole the rest of practice. The young guys ended up wherever Cole was, pulled there without being called, and Cole made space for them like it cost him nothing. Steadiest man on the ice, and the last one who’d ever say so. Ford had spent years admiring hockey players, and somewhere in the last year, he’d lost the line between professional admiration and whatever the hell this was.

When Deluca finally whistled them off the ice, Ford skipped the treatment room. He told himself he’d catch Theo tomorrow, which was what he’d told himself yesterday, and he was still congratulating himself on the dodge when Russ caught him in the tunnel, half out of his gear, wearing the easy grin of a man who had never once had to hide a thing.

“You hear the news? Finally lit a fire under our boy. Delgado’s got that place over the hardware store opening up, and I told Cole to grab it before somebody with sense does.” Russ grinned and shook his head. “Been what, a year the poor guy’s been camped in your spare room? About time he got his own four walls.”

“Not exactly a hardship. He helps out with Charlotte and fixes shit I’ve been telling myself I’d get to for years.” Ford made himself grin back. “I should be paying him at this point.”

“Fair point, but you can’t say you’re not looking forward to having your own space back. Can’t imagine spending day and night with any of these assholes.”

Russ clapped him on the shoulder and moved off toward the showers, leaving Ford standing in the cold coming up off the concrete, trying to look happy that his roommate might finally be moving out.

He got dressed alone in his corner stall, and when he was sure nobody was looking, he pressed two fingers into the joint. The heat in it confirmed what he’d known for weeks: this was worse than last season, and not by a little. He put his shirt on and buried the knowledge with the rest of the truths he couldn’t say aloud.

The house felt empty when Ford hobbled through the door. Since the team was loading up for a road trip in the morning, Nadine had picked up Charlotte after school. This was their routine, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to her not running up to tackle his legs the second he walked in.

He pulled out his phone to check whether there was anything Charlotte had decided she couldn’t live without over at his place. The answer wasn’t what he expected.

Nadine

She wants to bring the class hamster home over break. I said we’d discuss it as a family, lol. Good luck, goalie.

Absolutely not. Can you imagine trying to shuffle a rodent between our places? Knowing my luck, the damned thing gets out of the cage and freezes to death.

He set the phone down and stood in the kitchen a minute, Charlotte’s drawings marching across the fridge, and let himself feel exactly how much he did not want the spare room to go back to being an oversized closet for all the shit he couldn’t get rid of. He gave it about four seconds. Then he opened the freezer and got out the ice.

He stretched out on the couch, hoping Cole was down at the Penalty Box with the rest of the guys. He’d gotten good at this. Nobody in the house had ever caught him, not the kid and not Cole, because he never left the wrapper out and never did it where either of them might walk in. Twenty minutes, the pack back in the freezer, the towel in the wash, and he’d be moving like a whole man again before anybody got home.

For one second, with the cold biting through the towel, he let himself imagine Cole at the other end of the couch, knowing about the hip, the two seasons the doctors gave it, and not ragging him about fixing his shit before he did permanent damage. Then he shut the door on it because Cole was twenty-eight, tradeable, and already half-gone to the place over the hardware store. When his phone timer went off, he put the ice away and straightened his shirt.

Headlights swung across the kitchen wall.

He forced a smile onto his face and had a dish towel in his hands, doing nothing with it, by the time Cole let himself in on a gust of cold air.