Just — clear.
I choose Rhys.
So I watch Rhys go to the box.
Defeated. His eyes down. His whole body carrying the weight of a person who just had the worst thing that ever happened to him whispered directly into his ear in front of everyone and had to absorb it alone.
Again.
Alone.
Again.
I stand on the ice and I watch the door of the penalty box close behind him and Marcus skates back to his bench and something inside me empties.
Not the bad empty.
Not my father's — the controlled composed silence of a man deciding how to manage damage. Not the empty that meansstand still and give them nothing.
The other kind. The kind that comes at the end of a very long argument with yourself when you finally stop pretending there are two sides. Because there’s no other choice here. It’s the freeing kind.
I look at the scoreboard.
Down one. Second period. Eight minutes left.
I look at the bench. At Fitch with his arms folded watching the ice. At the guys on the boards doing their jobs. At the game that is happening the way games happen, the world turning on its axis, twenty-one years of my life aimed at this exact ice on this exact night.
The scholarship.
The draft.
The career.
My father's voice:this is the whole of it. This is the only thing. Don't be soft. Don't let anything in that doesn't belong there. You do not get to be this.
I look at Rhys in the penalty box. Sitting with his elbows on hisknees and his head slightly forward and his eyes on the floor. Not the ice he plays on. The floor of the box. The look of someone who has retreated so far inside himself he can't find the way out.
And Marcus is out there right now skating free because I have been standing still my whole life and I stood still at the bar and I stood still every time moving felt like too much and Rhys has been paying that for me every single time.
I think about my father.
He's dead.
He never made it to a world where any of this was worth surviving for. He drank himself quietly to death and I carried him everywhere I went afterward like I owed him.
I don't owe him this.
I don't owe him Rhys.
I don't owe him one more second of standing still.
I gave him too much of myself already.
I’m not lost anymore.
The penalty box door opens and Rhys steps back onto the ice.
And I think — with a clarity that feels like the first clear thing I've thought in months — that I would rather lose everything I've ever built than watch Rhys finish this game alone while Marcus Hale gets to stand on the same ice as him and feel nothing.
