“You good?”
Two words. That’s it. Not about the photo. Not about Riley’s plan or the rival outlet or the comment nobody is making. Not about the parking lot or the kiss or any of it.
Just — you good.
Like I’m the thing he’s checking first.
“Yeah,” I say.
He nods once. Skates away. I stand at the boards. He asked if I was okay before anything else. Before the photo. Before the fallout. Before himself.
That’s what he does. And I don’t know what to do with that. I stand there for way too long with my recorder in my hand and nothing useful in my head.
The series clincher happens at nine forty-seven PM.
I’m looking at my watch when the horn sounds, so I know the exact time the arena comes apart. The noise doesn’t just hit my ears. It enters my chest. Physically. The building itself exhales, like everyone inside it has been holding the same breath for sixty minutes and finally lets it go all at once.
Round 1. Done. Cyclones advance.
The glass in front of me erupts. Players piling onto the ice, the bench clearing, Brody somewhere in the middle of it with both arms up screaming something nobody can hear over the crowd. Caleb is crying. Sebastian is pretending he isn’t crying and doing a terrible job of it.
I have my camera up. I am shooting everything.
I am also — and I notice this with the specific detachment of a person watching themselves from a short distance — genuinely moved. Not as a journalist. Not because it’s a good story, though it is. Because this building, this team, this ridiculous city that believed before anyone else did — they’ve gotten under my skin in a way I don’t know how to undo.
I look for him in the pile automatically. I don’t decide to. I just do.
He surfaces near the boards — teammates finding him, hands on his helmet, someone pulling him into a hug he accepts for exactly two seconds before he’s moving again. His eyes go to the family section first.
Aurora.
He finds her immediately. She’s on her feet, one hand pressed to her mouth, and he looks at her across the ice the way you look at the people who were there before any of it — before the number on the back, before the building, before the city that’s currently losing its mind around them.
She laughs. He doesn’t smile so much as something releases in his face. The careful goes somewhere and what’s underneath it is just — relief. Real and unmanaged and entirely his.
I shoot it without thinking. Then I pick up my personal notebook. Instead of opening it, I put it back in my bag.
Some things aren’t mine to keep.
I’m packing up alone in the press area. Recorder in the bag. Notebook closed. Almost done.
Katarina sits down next to me. Doesn’t ask. Just sits.
I keep packing.
“He doesn’t do things he doesn’t mean,” she says.
I look at her.
“Jax.” Like it’s obvious. “His whole career he’s done things he didn’t mean for other people. The team. The city. Anyone who needed something from him.”
She stands.
“He doesn’t do that for himself.”
She goes.
I sit there. My hands are still on the notebook. Not opening it.
