“Last cluster,” Kovac said. “The veteran stuff.” A pause. “I’d flagged this for our second session, but you’re warmed up, and I’d rather not waste it.”
“Go ahead.”
“Fifteen years. Most guys are done. What keeps a man in it this long—for real? What keeps you going on nights the body says no?”
It was a softball question.He was probably waiting for a vaguelove of the gameorthe guys in the room,and on any other day I’d have served it back without a thought. Instead, my thoughts snagged on a house with a man waiting for me.
“The room,” I said in an even voice. “You play for the next guy. That doesn’t get old.”
“It doesn’t,” Kovac agreed, and moved on.
I exhaled slowly and let my shoulders drop.
“Okay,” he said. “Truly, the last thing, and then I’ll let you make your bus.”
“Sure.”
“You’ve said in a few places over the years that you’re waiting on the personal-life side of things until after you’re done playing. Has that changed?”
“Hockey takes a lot,” I said. “I’ve got time for the rest later.”
The line came out clean.
“Sure,” Kovac said. “Sure. Anyone you’ve got in mind for after?”
It was the same question, the exact one he’d asked six years ago in Toronto.
“No,” I said.
The word was out before I’d considered it, and it was wrong in a way the rehearsed lines never are. I’d denied Luki, our house, and the past five years as if they’d never happened. I’d handed a reporter the cleanest lie of my life.
Kovac didn’t follow up. He didn’t do the thing reporters do: leaning in and letting the quiet pull more out of me. He said, “Right. Of course,” quick, like a man pulling his hand back off a burner he already knew was hot.
He shifted back to the ice smoothly and professionally. He asked a clean question about communication with Pratt.
Still, his turn had a hitch in it.
It was the width of a breath, a stutter where a confident man wouldn’t stutter. I read flinches on the ice for a living. This was one.
A reporter chasing something doesn’t shy away from it when he gets close. He leans in and waits for you to fill the silence. Kovac had asked, but then he stepped back fast. Did he know more than he was letting on?
I could fight a man trying to trap me. I’m good at that, but there’s nothing to push against in a decent man who’s somewhere that he’s sorry to be.
I wasn’t ashamed of the man I was when I met Kovac in that bar six years ago. I’d been thirty, lonely, and three drinks down. Varga wasn’t in the picture, but I already knew what someone in my life would feel like. I knew it would be a he.
Two hard knocks sounded on my door. “Fifteen minutes, gentlemen. Lobby.”
“That’s me,” I said.
“Go,” Kovac said. “Thanks, Mattias, really.”
I said thanks back and ended the call.
At the arena, I played one of my best games of the season yet.
It all came easily. I had a reason to stay entirely focused on the ice. Kovac remembered six years ago, and I’d denied Varga. It was a protective instinct, but I didn’t want to think about the situation.
I closed gaps before they opened. In the first period, their big winger came down my side a stride up on me and threw a shoulder.I kept my feet under me and watched the play die on his blade.
