Denver was eight hundred miles from that kitchen table.
I picked up the phone again and scrolled to my mother’s contact. Her photo was from last Thanksgiving. She was laughing at something off-camera, her dark hair escaping from a clip, looking younger than fifty-seven had any right to look. I’d taken the photo myself. I remembered the exact moment, the way the kitchen light had caught her just right, and I’d thought: I need to remember this.
I put the phone back down without calling.
What was I supposed to say?Mom, I got traded because I was sleeping with Antoine Devereaux and then I started outscoring him and he decided I was more useful gone than here, so he told people things about me that weren’t true, and the team believed him because he’s Antoine Devereaux and I’m twenty-three and nobody?
She didn’t even know about Antoine. Nobody in my family did. That had been the first condition of whatever we were. Antoine had laid it out early, calmly, with the same measured authority he used on the ice.
I didn’t call my agent. I didn’t call my mother. I opened Antoine’s contact instead and stared at it for a long time—the photo I’d never changed, the one I’d taken of him laughing onthe balcony of his condo with the city lights behind him, his hair still wet from the shower we’d shared twenty minutes before.
My thumb hovered over the call button.
What would I even say?Did you do this? Was it you?
I already knew. I just wasn’t ready to make it real.
I deleted the contact, powered off my phone, and sat in that plastic airport chair until my flight to Denver started boarding.
Two months later, I still hadn’t played a single game.
I wanted that to sink in, because it still hadn’t fully sunk in for me.Two months.Sixty-some days of practices, team meetings, video sessions, travel days, hotel rooms, arena tunnels, and warm-ups—all of it leading to the same result every single night: my name absent from the lineup card that Coach Kincaid posted outside the locker room exactly ninety minutes before puck drop.
I was a healthy scratch. Every game. Without explanation.
The Dragons had brought me in during the final hours of the deadline, ostensibly because they needed scoring depth for a playoff push, and then they’d proceeded to treat me like I was radioactive. I practiced with the team. I traveled with the team. I wore the jersey with the dragon crest on the chest and the number forty-one on the back. But when the lights came on and the anthem played and twenty thousand people in the arenascreamed themselves hoarse, I sat in the press box in a suit and watched from behind glass like a kid with his nose pressed against a window.
Nobody told me why. That was the part that made me want to put my fist through drywall.
Kincaid was a wall. Not hostile—never hostile. Just impenetrable. He’d nod at me during practice, bark corrections at my positioning the same way he did with everyone else, and then post the lineup without my name on it as though the contradiction didn’t exist. I’d asked him twice in the first two weeks. Both times I got the same answer delivered in that low, gravelly voice of his: “When you’re ready, you’ll play.”
Ready for what?
It was clear someone had made sure my reputation arrived in Denver before I did.
I didn’t know exactly what Antoine had said, or who he’d said it to, or how far the poison had spread. What I knew was the shape of the lie, visible in the way certain front office staff avoided eye contact, in the careful distance my new teammates maintained, in the fact that a twenty-three-year-old with a forty-point rookie season was being treated like a liability instead of an asset.
Whatever story Antoine had constructed, it had followed me across state lines like a shadow I couldn’t outrun, and worse, it was affecting my game, making me second guess myself.
So I did the only thing I could do. I kept showing up. I arrived first and left last. I did every drill at full speed, finished every conditioning session, watched film until my eyes burned. It didn’t matter, and I was starting to wonder if it ever would. I’d even thought about leaving hockey. Maybe my worth had really all been in my head?
Then the Dragons clinched the third playoff spot on the second-to-last day of the regular season, and everything changed.
Chapter two
Face-off - The puck drop that starts play or restarts after a stoppage.
Dante
Present Day — Playoffs - Round One, Game One
The irony that the Dragons were playing my old team in round one wasn’t lost on me.
Seven possible games. First to four wins, and I’d have to sit through at least three of them in this building—mybuilding, the place where I’d spent two years learning what it meant to bean NHL player—watching from the press box while the guys I’d practiced beside for a season and a half skated on ice I knew by heart. I knew which corners were soft and which boards gave a half-second more than they should. I knew the way the crowd surged on a power play, that exact held-breath quality before it broke into noise. I knew the locker room on the other side of the arena, the one with the good coffee machine and the trainer who always had tape already cut.
I knew Antoine Devereaux’s number and where he liked to receive a pass and the exact angle he favored on a backhand shot from the left circle.
And he would know I was here. He’d have seen the playoff bracket the same moment everyone else did, and whatever he felt about it—satisfaction, amusement, the mild inconvenience of my continued existence—he’d have filed it away behind that practiced smile and moved on. That was Antoine. Nothing touched him unless he allowed it to.
