She reaches me at center ice. Her father places her hand in mine, which says so much more than a simple gesture. The arena is at a volume I feel in the soles of my feet. She stops two feet away and looks up at me and the expression on her face is the one I have spent two years trying to earn — Antonia, not Toni, not the professional, not the cautious woman holding everything at arm's length. Just her, open and certain and here.
The dress is beautiful. Everybody is going to say that. They're going to talk about the lace and the silk and the way the arena lights catch in her hair.
They're going to be wrong. The most beautiful thing abouther is the complete absence of hesitation. No calculation. No wall. She crossed an entire sheet of ice to get here. For me.
She holds up her wrist. The superstar bracelet. On her wrist. I look at it. Then at her face. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. This has never happened to me. I have been in playoff overtime and penalty shootouts and a press conference where I forgot how to say the word productive and in every one of those situations language eventually returned. Right now, standing at center ice with my future wife in front of twenty thousand people, I have nothing.
She sees it. The real smile crosses her face that’s earned, when there's no performance in it anywhere. She reaches up and puts her palm flat against my chest, over my heart, the way she has done since the first time she crossed a hotel room toward me. "You said you didn't want secret anymore," she says.
Her voice carries in the way that things carry in arenas built for sound. I don't know who hears it. I don't care.
"So let's do this where everyone can see it."
Then I take Toni's face in both hands the way I have done since a hotel corridor in October when I was learning the grammar of her, and she reaches up and covers my hands with hers and tips her head back, and I kiss her at center ice in front of twenty thousand witnesses and four television cameras and the Gold Coast Guardians roster and her father and my sister and a three-year-old who is going to describe this moment with complete accuracy to anyone who will listen for approximately the next four years. When I pull back her eyes are bright.
"You okay?" I ask.
She laughs. The full one, the one that tips her head back, the one I heard in a hot tub in Rockford two years ago and spent twelve months trying to find again. "Yes," she says. "Obviously yes."
I pull her in, her forehead against my shoulder. The arena roars around us, enormous and ours.
“I had my doubts you would walk out here," I say into her hair. "In front of everyone. And if you decided not to we still had the courthouse as the alternative and I would have been fine with that.”
“I know you would,” she says, “You said that you didn't want an audience for me."
I remember. The sauna. The first honest thing I said to her that cost something.
"I changed my mind," she says. "I want the audience."
I stare at her. Because I know what she really means. The audience isn't the point. The point is that she isn't scared anymore. Or maybe she is. Maybe she's terrified.
But she came anyway.
I spent two years trying to find this woman and when she walked back into my life, I had to convince her she didn't have to face things alone. Standing at center ice, in a wedding dress, with her hand in mine and twenty thousand people screaming around us, I finally understand something.
She believes me.
My sister is crying. Frank Amato stands at the boards, his hands clasped behind his back, in the officiating posture. However, his jaw has moved twice, and he hasn’t lookedat the scoreboard once, which is the Frank version of completely falling apart. The team is already planning to make this impossible for us to live down. The arena announcer is attempting to regain control of an event that has very clearly escaped him.
And Toni is in my arms. The woman from Rockford and from the dock. The woman who ran and who came back.
My wife.
The ice is cold. The lights are gold. And for the first time in my life, there is nowhere else I want to be.
I am home.
Epilogue
Max and Toni
MAX
The city view from the thirty-second floor suite is expansive.
I know this hotel. I booked it six weeks ago. Elena said somewhere with a view. I said the same view as the rooftop. She said that's either extremely romantic or evidence of a fixation. I said both.
Toni sets her bouquet on the table near the window. White peonies. Her mother's flowers. She has been carrying them since the tunnel mouth and she sets them down now with the careful attention she brings to everything. My wife.
