"THERE THEY ARE!"
"CAPTAIN AND THE BOSS! CAPTAIN AND THE BOSS!"
Finn cups his hands around his mouth. "I KNEW IT SINCE THE ROAD TRIP, LADS! THE VAN WINDOWS DON'T FOG THEMSELVES!"
"Oh my God," I whisper.
"HR IS GOING TO HAVE A FIELD DAY," Sawyer bellows, delighted.
"Iambasically HR," I call back, and the room roars.
But when I look up to see his smile, Declan isn't laughing.
"Dec? Are you—"
I follow his eyes, and across the room, Beck sits alone in his stall. He's still half in his gear, arms crossed, watching the celebration like it's happening on the other side of glass.
He got the assist on the winning goal. He got the win.
And he looks like a man who got neither.
I watch Declan tense up, and the room feels it too.
The celebration unravels in stages. The chanting stumbles first, then the laughter. The bass still thumps from the speaker, but the boys go quiet anyway. Like even in the middle of all this sticky, sweaty, glorious chaos, they know their captain has spotted one of his own bleeding.
Declan releases a heavy sigh and closes his eyes for a moment. And then, instead of crossing to Beck like I expect him to, he reaches into his stall and pulls out his phone.
"Yo, turn the music down," Mason says quietly.
The room goes still as Declan puts the phone on the bench and we all stand listening to the dial tone on speaker. It rings twice, and then a voice fills the locker room—warm, smooth, slick.
It's the voice of a man who's been rehearsing for this moment his entire life.
"Declan! Son! Listen, I've been trying to reach you boys all week, there's been a lot of… a lot of noise. A lot of things being said, and I just want to make sure we're all on the same page before your mother—"
"Stop."
The whole room holds its breath, eyes looking anywhere but at Declan.
In the corner, Beck's head comes up.
"I'm not calling to get on your page, Dad. I'm calling to tell you something I should have told you a long time ago. So here's the deal. You're gonna listen, you're not going to interrupt me, and then… I'm done. We clear?"
The phone sits silent, before, "Y-yeah. I guess so."
Across the room, Mason crosses to stand beside Beck, slowly pressing a clean towel against the cut on his brother's eyebrow.
Beck's eyes stay locked on Declan's phone.
"I've carried this shit for seventeen years, Dad. I've known since I was twelve, and I saw you with another woman." Declan leans forward, elbows on his knees as he stares down at the floor, speaking to his father, but opening his deepest, darkest wound to the entire locker room. "I told Mom, and she didn't want to believe me. But she knew. She always knew." He shakes his head as I fight back a tear. "I spent years carrying it, and you know why, Dad?"
"Declan, son—"
"I carried it because I thought if I held it tight enough, if I held it together long enough to get my brothers out of that house… it couldn't hurt them anymore."
"Declan—son, that's not—there's context—"
"I told you tolisten." He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. "And there is no context. You want to know what it cost? Zoey raised your kids while you were 'working late.' She was a teenager making school lunches, not friends. Mason learned to cook because someone had to feed us, and now he's spent his whole life making sure everybody else was okay because nobody ever checked ifhewas. And Beck—"
