Chapter thirty-three
Nova
HeputsthePost-iton the crate between us.
I look at it. Brick, drawn in three lines, looking exactly like Brick looks when he’s decided someone isn’t meeting expectations. The considering tilt. The half-closed eyes.Acceptableunderneath in my handwriting.
He carried this in his gear bag for three weeks without noticing. Through the whole postseason and every practice in between. Just — there. In his bag. My handwriting. My cat drawing. My word.
I pick it up.
“I keep building the wall up and then wondering why I can’t see anything,” I say.
He doesn’t soften it. Says I shut him out, and that it was real, and I don’t argue, because it was. But then he tells me he watched me choose him every time that mattered — that maybe he’d been measuring the wrong thing the whole time.
It lands somewhere I don’t have armor for.
“I’m not the same person who ran that piece,” I say.
“I know. You proved it. Every day since you got here.”
The tunnel goes quiet. The good kind — the kind that settles when two people stop arguing with something that’s already true.
“I don’t know how to stay,” I say. My voice goes thin the way it does when I’m trying not to turn it into a joke. “I’m scared it’ll get hard and I’ll handle it alone and shut you out, and you’ll be standing in a tunnel watching me disappear.”
“Nova.”
Just my name. Not sharp. Not soft. Steady.
I swallow.
“You don’t want to leave us,” he says.
I look at him. Like he just took the whole spiral out of my hands and set it down on the floor.
“You don’t get to decide that for me,” I whisper.
“I’m not deciding,” he says. “I’m hearing you.”
The tunnel goes quiet.
“I don’t want to leave us,” I say.
The words feel like stepping onto ice and not knowing if it’s going to hold.
He holds his hand out. Not a test. Not a demand. Just there.
I put mine in it.
The scarred one. The certain one — the one that’s been catching pucks for four seasons in this building, that retaped the blocker at every stoppage for two years managing something nobody named until I did. That hand is holding mine and it isn’t performing certainty. It just is.
That’s the difference. That has always been the difference.
I hold on.
There’s a Cup Final banner at the far end of the hall.
I don’t know when they put it up — sometime in the last week, the city decorating itself with belief before it had proof. Blue and white. The Cyclones logo. CUP FINAL in letters big enough to read from here.
