She’s not shooting. Camera down at her side, both hands still, just watching me the way you watch something you already understand. Everyone else in that building saw a goal. She saw the flinch.
She’s the only person here who knows exactly what just happened — and what it costs me that it happened tonight, on this stage, with everything finally real.
I don’t know yet whether that’s the best thing or the worst thing.
I go to the locker room and close the door.
And for the first time in four seasons, the quiet after a loss isn’t empty. It’s got her in it.
Chapter twenty-three
Nova
Iseeitonthethird goal.
Half an inch. The kind of flinch that doesn’t show on tape unless you’ve been watching the man for four months and know what his stillness looks like. The press box doesn’t catch it. The lead is already written for the morning — Cyclones drop opener, Mercer shaky in third — and none of those guys are in the building four hours before puck drop watching him retape his blocker like the tape job is a question he’s still answering.
A total occupational hazard.
I sat in a press box two seasons ago, watched the same flinch on a screen, and called it a liability.
Put a colder name on someone else’s pain and called it reporting.
Six hundred words on a goalie’s mechanical hesitation, written under a name that wasn’t mine, fed to me by a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
I was wrong then. I knew I was wrong. And if I sit up here now, I’m wrong again. I put the camera in my bag and go down without it. That gets my stomach first.
I leave it alone.
The tunnel is quiet.
He’s on the bench outside the locker room. Gear minus the helmet. Tape on his hands. Stick across his knees. The way he sits when a game is still sitting on him — not defeated, not finished, just doing the thing he does where his whole body keeps the score in the room until he’s ready to put it down.
I sit next to him.
Not across. Next to.
He doesn’t look up. I don’t say anything. We sit there long enough that the sounds from the locker room start coming through the wall — Brody’s voice, somebody laughing, the particular silence of a team that just lost.
“That wasn’t the goal,” I say.
“I know.”
“The third one. The hand.”
He turns his head a fraction.
“You retape the blocker before every game.” I keep my eyes forward because if I look at him I’ll lose the thread. “Every stoppage tonight you got more deliberate. I could see you recalibrating. Third period, every single one.”
He doesn’t move.
“That was the ghost.”
The tunnel goes very still.
He turns and looks at me. I look back. The recorder is in my bag. The bag is at my feet. He sees where it is. He sees what it means that it’s there and not in my hand.
“No recorder.”
