Page 59 of Gave Proof Through the Night

He falls into step beside me, presses the recovered book back into my hands, and glances back once toward the museum doors like he’s cataloguing the building itself as a threat. Something about that, the fact that he’s still half-braced for a fight he already won, does something unhelpful to my pulse.

“Well,” Zoe says in my ear, apparently fully recovered from her signal-loss crisis and back to her regularly scheduled programming. “That was hot. Go get that gala invite. And a little somethin’ somethin’, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m turning you off now,” I mutter, and click the earpiece dead.

Jeremiah glances over. “What?”

“Uh. Seeing me like this. It must be such a turn-off.”

“Why would you say that?” He looks entirely too pleased with himself. “Damsel in distress? That’s basically catnip.”

He full-on smiles, and something about the shift, breezy and jovial after everything that just happened, does something complicated to my chest.

“I’ve got the women’s team’s Game One tonight, actually,” he says as we approach the ice cream cart. “I’m supposed to be there. You should come. As my guest.”

For one unguarded second I actually consider it, actually picture myself in the stands next to him, cheering for a team I have no personal stake in whatsoever, and it’s such a lovely picture that I have to shut it down fast before I get attached to it.

“Can’t tonight,” I say. “Girls’ trip stuff. You know how it is.”

Which is, again, technically true, in the sense that my girls and I do in fact have stuff planned for tonight.

“Ice cream, though,” I add. “I’m not turning down ice cream.”

“Ice cream it is.”

13

JEREMIAH

Chapter playlist:

La Bomba — Ricky Martin

The anthem’s last note hasn’t even finished dying before fifteen thousand people at National Arena try to out-scream each other, and my brain, running on a completely different schedule than the rest of me, picks that exact second to drift into thoughts of… her. To wonder if she’s okay.

I haven’t seen her in three days. Not since that guy and his badge and his comb-over planted himself in her personal space and said something to her that turned her face a color I never want to see on her again. Not since I felt her shaking against my ribs while she told me, straight-faced, that he was nobody.

Nobody doesn’t make a grown woman go that quiet.

Colt leans over during the anthem’s last bars, doesn’t even bother whispering. "You've had a faraway look all warmups. Is it a girl?"

I scoff. “It’s always a girl with you.”

“Because it’s always a girl, period.” He taps his stick against my skate and lines up. “Go win the thing. Therapy’s after.”

Houlihan wins the draw clean over Levi, and my night officially starts, because unlike Colt, the game does not care what I’m thinking about.

We came in confident. We should. Monday’s blowout over these guys had the whole team walking taller in the hallway all week, rookies doing a strut they think nobody’s noticed. I noticed. I did it too, a little. Apparently I’m still capable of a strut.

Jake takes the puck up the wing early, all elbows and purpose, and gets stuffed by their goalie, Davis, who I happen to know is playing tonight in a pair of lucky lime green socks under his gear because Bryce spent all of warmups trying to get a look.

We cycle back to the bench for a change, and Bryce is still going on about it two seats down.

“He’s not going to let anything in with those socks,” Bryce says, dead serious, like this is science.

“They’re socks, Bryce.”

“They’re lucky socks.”