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OFFICIAL SPORTS BAR OF THE TAMPA BAY LIGHTNING.

We all gaped. Nobody said a word. I read it three times, and I felt the room go strange around me. It was beautiful. It was real. It was an official thing made by official people, and it made no sense whatsoever.

We were closing.

In three weeks, there’d be brown paper over the windows and a demolition permit taped to the door. Who makes a sign like that for a bar that’s about to be a hole in the ground?

I watched it land wrong all around the room, watched the confusion move from face to face. Benji’s smile faltered. Finn went still. The kindness of it, whatever it was meant to be, hit the grief at the wrong angle and just crumpled.

Then Murph—God love him—said, “Pretty awesome, right?” He rocked back on his heels, delighted with himself, delighted with the sign, oblivious as a brick. “Real professional. Guy did a great job.” He looked around at all our faces and misread every single one. “Good timing, too, huh? Right when you’re closing.” He nodded, pleased. “Real useful.”

I couldn’t decide whether to hug him or punch him.

The room broke a little. Somebody exhaled like they’d been hit. Benji made a small, wounded sound.

They just didn’t get it. These sweet, enormous idiots had made us a gorgeous, pointless thing for a bar that wouldn’t exist, and it was so kind and so wrong that it was almost worse than saying nothing.

I couldn’t stand to watch them stand there, proud of what they’d done, so I stepped forward to say, “Stop it,” to say, “Guys, it’s beautiful. Thank you, but we’re—”

“Pull heads out of asses,” Erik boomed. He said it pleasantly enough, flat and mild, in his Swedish way, a man remarking that it might rain later. The whole room turned to stare at him, because Erik rarely raised his voice. “All night, so much crying.” He gestured one big hand, taking in the whole wrecked room. “Dance was beautiful. You think we not watch. We saw through window. I also cried. Is fine. Is good to cry.” He put his boot up on the seat of a chair, leaned on his knee, and looked around at all of us. Something was building under that flat face, something with a grin sneaking up behind it. “But you cry about wrong thing, and is time to stop.”

“Erik.” Finn sounded exhausted and gutted and in no mood. Three months of heart-wrenching torture emptied out of him. “Just don’t. The building’s been sold. That’s the whole . . . that’s why everyone’s . . . there’s nothing—”

“The hall still stands,” Erik said, a declaration far greater than any statement.

“The hall’s been sold, Erik—”

“No, Finnigan, not sold.” Erik shook his massive head slowly. He was enjoying this, whatever this was. The bastard was enjoying this so much. “Sold again, you mean.”

The bar went dead quiet.

Finn stammered, “What are you—”

Erik reached into the inside of his jacket, slow and ceremonial. He came out with a set of keys. He held them up over his head where the whole room could see them catch the light, and he jingled them, once, with conviction. Then he squinted at them, frowned, and turned them over in his huge fingers.

“These are not real keys,” he admitted. “Real keys are with lawyer, in envelope. Is very boring. These I brought from kitchen drawer.” He shrugged magnificently. “For the drama.”

He tossed them underhand to Tyler, who caught them.

And then Erik spread both hands wide, and his Viking grin, his big, toothy grin, broke all the way across his face, and when he spoke again, there was something underneath the flatness I had never once heard in him, something enormous and shaking and barely contained.

“We bought building, Finnigan,” Erik said, flat as ever, as though he was reading a grocery list and not detonating a bomb. “Every unit, corner too, the one vultures sat on two years. Is one building now, one owner—well, four owners. Owners are fools who love you. Meridian is gone, back to whatever block they eat next. The hall stands. It does not fall again.”

I didn’t understand.

I’ve heard people describe moments like this, and they always understand right away, a lightning bolt of knowledge or comprehension or “suddenly getting it.”

I didn’t.

Erik’s words went into me and hit nothing. There was no shape left in me to catch them. I’d spent three months building myself around the losing of this place, brick by brick, until the loss was the only thing holding me up. Now Erik was standing there trying to hand me back my whole world, and I couldn’t make my mind take hold of it.

We bought building. Is ours.

I looked at the sign.

Official Sports Bar of the Tampa Bay Lightning.

I looked at Erik, grinning and shaking. I looked at Finn, who understood money, who’d done the grim arithmetic with me for three months in a locked office. Finn had gone gray-white and was staring at Erik with his mouth open and his whole body doing the math and somehow, magically, finding it true, finding it real. I felt Finn start to say, “That’s millions of dollars. That’s not a thing you just, the four of you—” but no words came out. No one else heard.