The third.
High glove side. My hand flinched. Barely. Enough.
The retaping between periods didn’t help. The ritual held, but the ghost was louder and I knew it was louder and I played through it anyway. It cost us.
I understand what happened. I can’t get back to neutral.
That’s new.
Or maybe not new. Just louder tonight because last night is sitting right underneath everything and I can’t separate them the way I usually separate things. The game and the rest of it. What happens on the ice and what happens off it.
I’ve kept those in different rooms for ten years. Last night made that harder.
Her hands finding the knot in my shoulder. Her in my lap at eleven PM, her weight settled against me like it belonged there. The way she looked when I put her down on that bed — not performing anything, not running her mouth, just looking at me with those green eyes and letting me look back and something in my chest going very quiet and very certain at the same time.
The sounds she made.
The way she said my name when she couldn’t say anything else.
She stayed.
I pulled her in and she didn’t create distance and her hand found my chest in the dark and stayed there and I lay there with that for a long time before I went under.
I put it away. Go back to the game. The third goal. The hand. The ghost. I run it again.
I hear her before I see her.
Her footsteps — I know them. I’ve mapped them in every building we’ve been in together. I haven’t examined what that says about me and I’m not going to start now.
She comes through the door.
No recorder. No notebook. Just Nova in her press credentials and her jacket and that camera bag she carries everywhere, and she looks at me sitting here in the empty locker room and doesn’t say anything right away.
She sits down next to me. Not across from me. Next to me. On the bench. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of her but not touching.
She puts her bag on the floor and looks at the opposite wall and doesn’t say a word.
I wait for the question. It doesn’t come.
A minute passes. Maybe two. The locker room settles around us. I run the third goal again in my head and she sits there and says nothing and I find something in that — the specific quality of a person who knows when silence is the right tool.
Then:
“That wasn’t the goal,” she says. “That was the ghost.”
I go completely still. Not the managed kind. The real kind.
She’s still looking at the wall.
“The hand,” she says. “Two seasons ago. I see you retape the blocker before every game. Between every stoppage tonight it got more deliberate.”
Long silence.
“I’ve been watching you for two months. Not as a journalist. Just as a fact.”
I look at her. Really look.
She put the camera down for this. She came to an empty locker room after a playoff loss with no recorder and no notebook and she sat down next to me and said the thing nobody else has ever said.
