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I think about Thursday night. About every night before it, back to Charleston, back to the beginning of all of it. I think about how little either of us knew, in the moment, what we might have been building without meaning to. How strange it is now, researching the safety of something we’ve been doing without a second thought for months. Like my body quietly changed the rules without updating either of us on the new terms.

I close the laptop.

I don’t have an OB. I don’t have a plan beyond after Nationals. It felt so reasonable three weeks ago. Tonight, sitting on my bed with my ankle still faintly aching and Theo’s heartbeat still echoing in my memory, it feels like the beginning of a much bigger risk than I let myself understand when I first decided it.

I think about calling my mother. I get as far as opening the contact, my thumb hovering over the call button. I close it again. Not tonight. Not with the specific fragility I’m carrying right now. Not until I’ve said the actual words to the actual person who needs to hear them first. Theo. Always Theo, before anyone else, which is its own kind of answer to a question I haven’t let myself ask directly: who is this really about protecting?

I used to tell myself it was about protecting him. His season. His draft. The specific fragile architecture of the future he’s spent his whole life building. That’s still true. But sitting here tonight, running my hand absently over my stomach in the dark, I understand there’s a second thing I’ve been protecting too, quieter and harder to name — the version of us that still gets to be simple. The Thursday nights. The falling into each other without a single complicated thing standing between us. Once I tell him, that version is gone. Replaced by something bigger and more permanent and entirely unknown. Some small, ashamed part of me has been holding onto the simple version a few days longer than I probably should have. Purely because I wasn’t ready to let it go.

Three weeks and two days. That’s what’s left before Nationals. That’s what’s left before I have to actually reckon with all of this instead of managing it one practice, one night, one almost-confession at a time.

I don’t know if I can hold it that long.

I’m starting to think I might have to.

Chapter 26

Theo

Ifall asleep with my boots still half-untied.

I don’t remember deciding to lie down. One minute I’m on the edge of my bed reviewing the next team’s power play setup on my laptop. The next minute Cash is knocking on my door telling me I slept through my alarm and practice starts in twenty minutes. I get up. I finish tying the boot I apparently gave up on somewhere around midnight. I go.

This is the texture of my life right now. Practice bleeds into film session. Film session bleeds into a Dan Reiss email I read standing in the hallway outside the locker room. Phone in one hand, gear bag in the other, trying to parse language about “informal contact parameters” while Cash yells something behind me about being late for the bus. That bleeds into a text from Coach about Frozen Four seeding I don’t have the bandwidth to fully process. Not until I’m lying in bed again, staring at the ceiling, running the same three power-play reads on a loop until I fall asleep mid-thought.

I’ve stopped being able to tell one day from the next by feel. Only by what’s due. One day means extra conditioning. Another means Coach wants film notes turned in. Another means whatever email Dan Reiss has sent that I have to read four times to actually absorb, because my brain’s running at maybe sixty percent capacity most hours now. The other forty percent is somewhere else entirely. Usually four minutes across town. Usually thinking about a girl who’s been carrying something I still haven’t figured out how to ask about without breaking a promise to myself.

I’m tired in the specific way that isn’t about sleep anymore. It’s deeper than that. The kind of tired where everything starts requiring the same amount of effort — brushing my teeth, running a defensive zone read, deciding what to eat — because there’s no reserve left to draw on. Just the base layer of function, keeping everything moving forward one obligation at a time.

Coach runs us harder every week, not easier, which is the right call and doesn’t make it feel any better in the moment. Extra film sessions. Extra conditioning. A whiteboard in his office slowly filling up with opponent tendencies for teams we haven’t even played yet. Teams we’ll only face if we keep winning. Its own kind of pressure — the pressure of good things happening fast enough that you don’t get time to actually feel them happen.

On top of it there’s the game.

Multiplayer RPG, group assignment, due at the end of the semester, and I’m the one on the team who volunteered for asset design, which sounded manageable back in January when the semester was still theoretical. It’s not manageable now. I’m building character models and environment textures on the Cintiq my dad shipped for my birthday, working in stolen twenty-minute windows between practice and film and whatever Dan Reiss needs answered that day, and the equipment is good — genuinely good, better than anything I’ve ever had access to — which is its own complicated thing to sit with at eleven at night when I’m the only one still awake in the house, drawing armor plating for a fantasy warrior nobody but four classmates and a professor is ever going to see.

I don’t let myself think too hard about where the equipment came from while I’m using it. Easier that way. The tablet doesn’t know whose money paid for it. It just does the job, and I use it, and some nights that’s the only genuinely peaceful hour I get — headphones on, stylus moving, no hockey, no draft, no dad, just the specific quiet satisfaction of building something with my hands that has nothing to do with anyone’s expectations except my own.

My teammates on the project keep asking if I’m going to make the deadline. I keep telling them yes. I’m not entirely sure I believe myself.

Beau’s back on the ice now. Brace off, testing the shoulder in low-contact drills. Even that adds something to the week — a new rotation to learn, a captain finding his legs again in real time, everyone recalibrating around a lineup that’s shifting under us at the exact moment we can least afford instability. He’s careful about it. Doesn’t push himself past what the trainers clear. But I can see what it costs him to hold back, the same specific discipline he’s been asking the rest of us for all season now turned back on himself.

My skates need new laces. I keep meaning to buy them and keep not getting to it, which has become a small, stupid metaphor I think about more than the actual problem deserves — a two-dollar fix I can’t find fifteen minutes for. Cash asks me twice in one week if I’m doing okay. Unusual enough from Cash that I actually register it both times. Both times I tell him I’m fine. Both times he lets it go, because he’s got his own version of this exact exhaustion running underneath his own schedule.

The text from my mom comes in on some day I genuinely couldn’t name if you asked me.

Mom

miss your face. you still alive over there?

I look at it for a long moment, standing outside the athletic complex with my bag over one shoulder, the cold still biting even though it’s supposed to be spring by now. Something in my chest does a specific, quiet thing. Not guilt, exactly, though there’s some of that in it. Just the recognition that I haven’t seen her in person since Charleston — since before any of this compressed into the version of my life I’m currently living inside.

alive. barely. miss you too

Mom

Come see me,

she sends back.