Page 162
They simply stood there.
Tomorrow, we had Game Seven, and every person in front of me had a hundred things they could have been doing instead of attending the funeral of a stranger. They’d come anyway because apparently somewhere along the way I’d stopped being the guy who survived everything alone and become part of something else.
A team.
Friends.
Family.
Max’s fingers closed more firmly around mine, and when I looked at him, there was no question in his expression and no uncertainty about where I belonged.
That was when I understood.
They hadn’t come for my father.
They’d come for me.
Chapter twenty-five
Overtime - Extra playing time used when the score is tied at the end of regulation; in the playoffs, play continues until one team scores.
Ash
There were twenty thousand people inside the arena, and judging by the noise reaching us through several feet of concrete, every single one of them had decided we were going to win.
I could feel the vibration through the floor beneath my skates while we waited in the tunnel, the roar rising and falling as the pregame introductions continued on the other side of the doors. Someone close to the entrance was pounding on the glass hard enough that the dull thud carried over the music, and every time our logo appeared on one of the screens, another wave of sound rolled through the building.
I bounced once on my skates and rolled my shoulders even though there wasn’t anything left to loosen. We’d warmed up, stretched, gone over the matchups one final time, and listened to Coach give what might have been the shortest Game Seven speech in the history of professional hockey.
He hadn’t talked about destiny, sacrifice, or leaving everything on the ice. He’d simply looked around the locker room at a group of men who had already played eighty-two regular-season games and thirteen playoff games to get here and said, “You know how to play hockey. Go play it.”
That was probably why I’d listened.
Max stood two places ahead of me with his helmet already on, his head lowered as he tightened one glove and then the other. I couldn’t see much of his face from where I stood, but over the last few months, I’d learned to read him without needing to. The angle of his shoulders and the stillness that settled over him before a game told me Captain Max had arrived, while the man who made my coffee, let me steal more than his fair share of the blankets, and had stood beside me yesterday while I buried a father I didn’t mourn had been temporarily put away.
That was probably for the best because I wasn’t sure I could have handled him turning around and asking whether I was okay.
The truth was that I was as close to okay as I knew how to be after the last forty-eight hours. My father’s death hadn’t broken my heart, and I refused to manufacture grief simply because biology said I ought to feel it, but his absence had left behind something I hadn’t expected. For eight years, fear had occupied a permanent corner of my mind, turning every unknown number, unexpected message, or strange look into the possibility that he had finally released the video and destroyed everything I’d built.
Now there wouldn’t be another demand.
There wouldn’t be another midnight deadline, another threat, or another reminder that one terrible moment when I was a kid could still reach forward and take everything from me.
Max glanced over his shoulder, and apparently Captain Max wasn’t entirely in residence after all.
“You good?”
I met his eyes. “Yeah.”
His gaze stayed on mine long enough for me to know he was considering whether to argue, but eventually, he gave a small nod.
“Bien.”
“That sounded threatening.”
“It was.”
I smiled despite myself. “What happens if I’m not good?”
