“Come on,” Elena says. As usual, she has thought of everything. We go directly to my office and she helps me change into my dress. Miraculously, my skates are here as well.
Elena pins up my hair and removes my dress from the bag. "If you don't want this, we walk out and nobody says a word. "But if you're only scared because you're happy, that's a different problem,” she says.
"Help me with the zipper."
“Max is waiting on the ice,” she says. “With the team. And your father.”
I close my eyes for two seconds.
Then I open them.
“I need a moment,” I say.
“You have one,” Elena says. She takes my hand. Squeezes once. Releases. Then she leaves me alone with my thoughts. Time for me to pull myself together and gather my courage to go out in front of all these people.
The tunnel is the same from the first morning I ever walked through it in September, all authority and professionalism, twenty-three steps from my car and certain of exactly who I was. I needed to know the distance before I walked it.
Somewhere around November is when I stopped counting.
I keep walking.
At the tunnel’s mouth, I stop. In front of me is the ice. The lights are full and the music is playing, and twenty thousand people are in various stages of transitioning from the ceremony back to the pre-game normal when the arena does something different.
The lights dim. A shift. The game-day gold softening to amber. The music changes. I hear the crowd notice. I hear the team at the bench notice the distinct quality of silence thatfalls when professional athletes realize something unexpected is happening outside their predetermined script.
Piper is waiting at the tunnel entrance in a cream dress with her hair down and a bouquet of white peonies in her arms. Beside her, Elena, who is holding an identical bouquet and wearing the emerald dress from Max’s first road trip that she borrowed and never gave back, and I have never once asked for because it looks better on her than it does on me.
Behind them: Scarlett, Sophie, Harper. All dressed. All holding flowers. All wearing expressions of barely contained delight.
I stop walking. I look at them. “The flowers.”
“His idea,” Scarlett says. “He asked for your mother’s favorite flower. White peonies.”
My throat tightens. My father knew. He helped. The dinner at Elena’s. The Tuesday hotel meeting. All of it arranged the way he arranges everything. Private. Deliberate.I wanted you to have accurate information.
I step out of the tunnel and remove the guards from my skates. The silk of the dress catches the amber light, and I am aware, with the complete, particular awareness of a woman who has spent her entire adult life managing the impression she makes, that twenty thousand people are now looking at me.
I keep walking to the edge.
Center ice is a long way from the tunnel mouth. I know this. My mother's ring is around my neck, and I’m holding her favorite flowers. Piper even placed the third rubber neon bracelet on my wrist, and I am skating across NHL ice in mywedding dress toward Max, the arena is deafening now, and I don’t stop.
My father is suddenly at my side even though I scarcely register where he came from. Frank Amato materializes at my elbow, in his suit this time and not his stripes, and he offers his arm with the specific precision of a man who has been practicing this gesture and will not show that he’s been practicing it.
“Dad,” I say gently.
“Don’t cry,” he says. “You’ll blame me.”
“I never cry.”
“You look like your mother,” he says, for the second time in my adult life. “She would have liked him.”
My throat closes entirely. I take his arm. We skate to center ice. Max watches me come the whole way.
He doesn’t look at the crowd, or the cameras, or the Jumbotron that I absolutely know is filming this because Anthony Dudek is standing near the boards with his phone at an angle that suggests this has been planned. He watches me. Only me. The real smile. The one that has no audience and no performance and no weapon in it anywhere.
When we reach him, my father puts my hand in Max’s. A decision. The hand of a man choosing to trust the person his daughter has already chosen. He skates back.
Max and I stand at center ice with twenty thousand witnesses and the ice glowing and the arena alive, and his hand warm around mine.
