“I should have explained that Dom needed us there for something important instead of sending you a message that sounded exactly like my father had overruled my plans.” He takes my hand. “I'm sorry. I'm not going to pretend I handled it well. I didn't.”
The tight, scared knot in my chest starts to loosen. “I need you to talk to me when things come up. Not a text that says something came up. A real conversation. Because my brain fills in the blanks when you're vague, and it fills them in with the worst possible version.”
“I will. I promise.”
“And I'm sorry for going cold on you. That wasn't fair either.”
“I deserved a little cold.”
“You deserved an honest conversation. I gave you silence instead. When I'm hurt, I shut down.”
He squeezes my hand. “Then we're both working on something.”
“I guess we are.”
He pulls me into his chest and wraps his arms around me. I press my face against his jacket and breathe in deeply.
Then he pulls back and looks at me. “Now where's that leftover jollof?”
I laugh. “In the fridge. Second shelf.”
“Is there enough for two plates?”
“I made enough for six. Mom's recipe doesn't scale down.”
He opens my fridge, pulls out the container, and holds it up like a trophy. “Lorraine Bennett's jollof rice. I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a decade.”
And all is right in my world again seeing him smile.
For now.
16
Logan
“Listen up.”
Mercer is standing in the middle of the locker room with his arms crossed and his jaw set. We're twenty minutes from puck drop against the Ottawa Breakers, and the room is dead quiet.
Three losses in a row. The energy that carried us through November is gone, and every man sitting in this room knows it.
“I'm going to be straight with you because I respect you too much to blow smoke up your asses,” Mercer says. “We've dropped three straight. Three games where we came out flat, played like we were scared of the puck, and got outworked by teams that want it more than we do.
“That's not who we are. That's not the team I coached to four straight wins after Pittsburgh.”
He paces between the stalls. Nobody moves. Cole is sitting with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. Blake is beside me, his jaw tight. Liam, who is never quiet, is quiet.
“I don't care about the scoreboard tonight. I care about effort. I care about compete level. I care about whether the man sitting next to you can count on you to do your fucking job whenthe puck drops. Because right now I'm not sure he can. And that's on every single one of you.”
He stops in the center of the room. “Go out there and play like the team I know you are. Leave everything on the ice. Every shift, every battle, every loose puck. If we lose tonight, we lose with nothing left in the tank. Not because we didn't show up. Questions?”
Silence.
“Good. Let's go.”
We file out of the locker room and down the tunnel. The Ottawa crowd is loud and hostile, and I barely register it. My legs feel heavy from the first stride.
My back is tight. I slept badly on the hotel bed last night, tossing and turning until three in the morning, running through game film in my head and coming up empty on answers for why we've fallen apart.
