Page 131 of Her Rival

I had a game to play. And I was going to play it like it was mine, win or lose her, because Stone was right about that part too. It had always been mine. I'd just spent my whole life too braced to stand still in it.

Seven o'clock.

All the way out in the open.

33

DANI

I had filed from the Caldwell Arena press box twice before. Both times I'd loved it for the exact reason I was now beginning to hate it. It was the highest, safest, most invisible seat in the building. You sit behind the glass at center ice, two levels up, above the noise, and you watch nineteen thousand people watch a thing, and not one of them watches you. It is the best seat in any room for a person who has spent her life arranging to be the one who sees and never the one who's seen. It is, I understood around the first intermission, a box. They had built me a box at the top of the building and handed me a credential to sit in it, and I'd said thank you.

My mother was in section 114, eight rows up, in a team sweater the color of his jersey that Victoria's assistant had couriered over. Hair done. Hands folded. Four months of sober in her spine. She'd texted me a photo of herself in the seat with the caption I am at a hockey game. I am awake for it. Both sentences true. Both sentences, from my mother, a kind of miracle.

I had his envelope in my bag. Every entity, every number, the whole hidden architecture of him, mine to print or not. I had not torn it up and I had not used it. I'd decided, somewhere around two in the morning, that I was going to keep it and do nothing with it. Which was its own kind of choice. The choice to hold the truest thing a person had ever handed me and let it stay his. On my own terms. My own hand on it, for once. He had given me that. He'd handed me the one thing that could end him and trusted me to be the one who decided what it was for. I was going to think about that for a long time.

The man on the ice.

I watched him the way I'd watched him at that first practice five weeks and a lifetime ago, from behind glass, with a notebook I wasn't writing in. Except this time I knew what I was looking at, and what I was looking at undid me one shift at a time.

He was playing like it was his.

I don't have the vocabulary, still, for what that looks like from above. The difference between a man skating to win and a man skating because the ice belongs to him and he belongs to it. But I'd learned to read him the way I read everything, by the holes and the shapes, and I could see it. The absence of the brace. The thing Stone had named and I had named and he had finally heard. He was loud out there. He was the point of the diamond. He chirped a linesman and got the whole bench laughing. He buried a rebound in the second period that brought nineteen thousand people up out of their seats in a wall of noise. He wheeled away from the net with his arms up and his whole face open. A hundred and ninety pounds of joy nobody had ever managed to take away from him. And the Jumbotron caught it. The grin. The real one. Filling a screen four stories tall over a building full of strangers. The most private man I'd ever known. The one who'd built five hundred million dollars to never be seen. Up on the big screen for everyone, on purpose, all the way out in the open.

And he did not look at the press box.

Not once. I watched for it. I am ashamed of how hard I watched for it, the whole first two periods. Waiting for the glance up. The gesture. The thing a man does when he's performing a reunion for a woman he knows is in the building. He'd told me he wouldn't. I'm not going to look for you in the stands. I'm not going to manage it. I had not believed him, because every man I'd ever known managed everything, because managing is what they do instead of trusting. And he didn't. Period after period, goal after goal, the most visible man in the building made himself completely available to be found and did not once reach up to do the finding himself. Because he'd finally understood the one thing it had taken him eight years and one wrecked night to learn. You cannot reach for a person and give them a free choice at the same time.

He was keeping his hands at his sides. From all the way across a hockey arena, in front of a city, he was keeping his hands at his sides and letting it be mine.

That was the thing that got me out of the box.

It was not a grand swell of forgiveness. I'd told him the truth on the terrace and the truth was still true. You don't get un-hidden in an afternoon. A man who runs once will have to prove for a long time that he's done running. None of that had changed by the third period of a hockey game. What changed was simpler and more mine. I was sitting in the highest, safest, most invisible seat in the building, watching the person I loved choose to be seen by an entire city, and I was hiding. In a box. With a credential. The way I always had. The way my mother had taught me, in a house, with the floor.

Are you going to let his hiding be the reason you go back to yours.

No, I decided, in the press box at Caldwell Arena with two minutes left in the third period. No, I was not.

I left the box.

I gathered my bag and my unwritten notebook and walked out of the best seat in the building. A beat writer named Sal who'd been kind to me said, "You'll miss the finish." I said, "No I won't," and I went down. Down the elevator, down through the concourse roar, down to the credentialed level where the media wait for the players to come off. The tunnel mouth. Ice level, where the cold comes up off the sheet and hits you in the face like the inside of a church. The horn went while I was still finding my place. They won. Of course they won. The building came down around my ears. I stood at the mouth of the tunnel, the one place in the whole arena where a man coming off the ice cannot help but see who is standing in it. And I did the bravest thing I've done in my adult life, which was nothing.

I just stood there. In the open. Findable. And let him find me.

The team came off in a loud wet pile of pads. The captain came last, the way he always did, except this time the captain stopped at the bench, because Stone is the actual captain. Jett came off a step behind him with his helmet in his hand and his hair soaked and his face still open from the win, and he came into the tunnel and he saw me.

He stopped.

He didn't say anything. The noise of the building was still falling down on top of us. A hundred things were happening in that tunnel, equipment guys and reporters and a kid with a camera. And he stood in the middle of all of it, soaked and breathing, looking at me standing where I had no business standing. Out of my box. Down at his level. In the light. Having come all the way down to find the most findable man in Nevada.

"You left the press box," he said.

"I left the box," I said.

I watched it land on him, the whole of it, the way everything landed on him, fast, all the way down. His eyes went wide and bright, every guard in him dropping at once. The Jumbotron, somewhere above us, was still playing the replay of his goal, his four-story grin, but the man in the tunnel wasn't grinning. The man in the tunnel looked like he'd taken a hit he wasn't braced for. The good kind. The kind that knocks something loose that needed to come loose.

"I'm not telling you it's fixed," I said. "It's not fixed. You ran once and you're going to spend a long time proving you're done, and I'm going to make you, because I'm not doing the version where I pretend I wasn't hurt so everyone can be comfortable. That's the old me. I'm retiring her."

"Okay," he said. The way he said it. The way he'd said it a hundred times on a hundred pages of a piece I was going to publish with both our names near it. "Okay, Hartley."