I sat on the bench in front of my stall in my compression gear, because we were soon in warm-ups, and warming up was the one thing nobody could take from me. Kincaid hadn’t posted the lineup yet. Ninety minutes. I had ninety minutes of possibility before the card went up and my name was or wasn’t on it, and I’d learned over the last two months to live inside those ninety minutes like they were the whole world before I put my suit back on and headed for the press box.
Around me, the room had the controlled electricity of a playoff locker room—louder than regular season, but focused differently, the energy pulled tighter and aimed at something specific. Renaud was at the whiteboard in the corner, with Kincaid’s assistant going over zone entries. Keegan Steel was in the corner doing the same pre-game breathing exercises I’d watched him do every single game for two months, slow and deliberate, his eyes half-closed. A few of the younger guys hadmusic in, but even that felt purposeful tonight, like everything in the room was calibrated toward one point on the horizon.
I sat with my elbows on my knees and looked at the floor.
Two months of this. Two months of being the ghost in the room, present enough to notice everything and absent enough that nobody had to account for me. I’d memorized these guys from the outside in—their habits, their rituals, the specific way Renaud’s voice dropped when he was actually serious versus when he was performing seriousness for the room. I knew things about my teammates that teammates knew, and I was still, somehow, on the outside of all of it.
The door opened and Kincaid came in.
The room didn’t go quiet exactly—it shifted. That adjustment that happened when a coach entered a locker room before a game, something involuntary and collective, like a school of fish changing direction without any individual fish deciding to move.
Kincaid walked the room the way he always did—unhurried, taking inventory. He had that quality some coaches had, the ones who’d played long enough to know what a locker room felt like when it was right and when it wasn’t, like he was reading temperature. His eyes moved from stall to stall, touching each player briefly, and when they landed on me, they held for exactly one second longer than everyone else.
I held his gaze. I always did.
He looked away first, which meant nothing. He always looked away first—not from discomfort, I’d decided, but from the deliberate economy of a man who didn’t spend attention he didn’t need to spend.
He went to the board, picked up a marker, and started walking through the defensive-zone coverage adjustments he’d been drilling into us for a week. I listened. I always listened, even when I had no reason to believe the information would be relevant to my night.
The lineup card was in his jacket pocket. I could see the folded edge of it.
Rees caught my eye from across the room. He did that sometimes—just a glance, quick and neutral, the kind that could mean anything or nothing. I’d spent a month trying to decode Rees and had eventually accepted that he was exactly what he appeared to be: a man who said what he meant and kept his own counsel about everything else. The look wasn’t sympathy. It wasn’t pity. It was something closer to acknowledgment, the way you’d look at someone standing in the rain without an umbrella—noting their situation without making it worse by talking about it.
I nodded back. He returned his attention to Kincaid.
“—and I don’t want to see anyone chasing hits tonight,” Kincaid was saying. “They want you emotional. Devereaux especially—” and there it was, my own chest tightening at the name, the physical reflex I still hadn’t managed to train out of myself— “he plays better when the other team is angry. Don’t give him the satisfaction. You play your game. Disciplined. Structured. You make them adjust to you.”
He capped the marker. Set it down. Reached into his jacket pocket.
The room held its breath. I held mine.
He unfolded the card and pinned it to the board.
I gave it three full seconds before I looked. That was the rule I’d made for myself sometime around game twelve of my scratching streak—never be the first one to look, never let anyone see you searching for your name like a kid checking a posted audition list. Three seconds of dignity, and then look.
I looked.
My name was on it.
Fourth line, left wing. Bottom of the card, the kind of ice time that said we’re trying you out more than we’re counting on you, but it was there. Dante Russo. Forty-one. In the lineup.
I didn’t react. I kept my face exactly where it was and looked back at the floor, and I breathed, slow and careful, the way you breathed when something you’d been holding very tightly for a very long time had just shifted weight.
Two months. Sixty-some days of showing up to something that kept not happening, and now it was happening, and it was happening here, in this building, against this team, with Antoine Devereaux’s number on the other side of the ice.
There was a certain cruelty to the timing that felt almost too precise to be accidental.
Around me the room had absorbed the lineup and moved on—the players whose names were on it settling into their final preparations, the ones who weren’t filing away disappointment. Nobody made a production of it. That was the locker room code, another thing I’d memorized from the outside: you didn’t celebrate the lineup card and you didn’t mourn it, you just got ready for the game that was actually happening.
Steel materialized beside me as I stood to pull on my jersey. He moved quietly for a guy his size.
“First game,” he said, low enough that it didn’t carry. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
He didn’t add anything to it. Didn’t congratulate me or offer advice or make it into a moment. He just nodded once, like he’d registered the information and considered it sufficient, and went back to his own stall.
I pulled the jersey over my head. The dragon crest settled against my chest—still unfamiliar, still slightly wrong in the way new things were wrong before they became yours. I smoothed it flat with one hand.
