Page 63 of Omega’s Forward

Yeah. I’m definitely not this year’s whizz kid.

JP, I owe in person. I text him to come by after practice, then drive home and pack.

Clothes. Passport. Phone charger. I stand in the garage for a minute in front of the moose painting, and I want it on the record that I do not take the moose painting to London. But I think about it, which tells you the state of me.

JP walks in at half past one.

“You missed practice.” He says it from the hallway, working off a shoe. “Sacco had a face on him all morning. You sick?”

“I’m going to London.”

He stops, one shoe in his hand. “Tonight?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Tuesday is the Marauders.”

“Yeah.”

He sets the shoe down and comes into the kitchen and looks at the bag standing by the door, then at me. And he waits. The man knows when to say nothing.

“Everett’s pregnant.”

“Fuck,” JP says, with feeling, and sits down hard on a stool. It’s the same thing he said in my front hall the morning he found out everything else. Maybe it’s the only word that fits Rourke news.

Then his face changes, and I stand there and watch the grin arrive, wide and delighted and impossible to be mad at. “You’re going to be a papa.”

“Yeah.”

“How far along?”

“Has to be seven months. Bit more.”

“A little Callahan.” He shakes his head slowly. “God help the league.”

“JP.” I lean on the counter across from him. “Tuesday. I’m sorry. I know what that game means, I know what the boys want from it, and I’m going to be an ocean away while Dorn takes his warmup laps grinning at our bench. If you want to be angry, you’ve earned it.”

JP looks at me for a while.

“Some things are more important than hockey,” he says. “Dorn isn’t even more important than lunch.”

“Sacco—”

“I’ll handle Sacco. Family emergency. It’s even true.” He takes an apple out of the bowl and points it at me. “The boys will handle Dorn. Might do them good to do it without you — Ozzy keeps saying he wants bigger minutes. Let him earn them.”

“That’s about what I figured you’d say.”

“That’s why you told me and not Sacco.” He bites the apple. “What’s the plan over there? You have an address? A hotel? A meeting?”

“I’ve got a city and a scent. And I know his coffee order.”

JP chews. Swallows. “That’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” he says. “Ninety-eight percent. You’ll find him.”

“The radio guys are going to lose their minds,” he adds, and he sounds delighted about it. “Captain skips the Dorn game. Let them chew. It’s good for ratings.”

“And if he tells me to get back on the plane?” I ask, because it lives right behind my teeth and JP is the only one allowed to hear it.

“Then you get a hotel and you wait,” JP says. “He can hate you from any distance he likes. Doesn’t mean you leave.”