Epilogue
THREE YEARS LATER
“This is you.” Ryland gestured to a stall on the left-hand side of the Glen Hill College Mountaineers locker room.
“Whoa.” Wide-eyed, the rookie—Van Asten—took in the empty room, his jaw halfway to the floor.
Had Ryland been a college rookie, he would’ve been impressed by the newly renovated locker room too.
Black carpeting with the Mountaineers logo in the center.
Mahogany-finished stalls along three sides of the room, with black-on-green LED-lit nameplates and green-and-black jerseys hanging from each one.
Photos of successful Mountaineers alumni circling the stalls, showcasing the school’s success.
Green LED lighting along the perimeter of the floor.
Yeah. The Mountaineers Alumni Foundation had shelled out for this upgrade.
“Through here is the lounge.” Ryland led Van Asten down a short hallway connected to the locker room. “You’re free to use this as a study space or just to hang out.”
“Whoa,” repeated the rookie. “This is nice.” He sat in one of the green leather armchairs. “Fancy.”
Had Van Asten’s recruitment followed the normal process, he would’ve gotten a tour of the facilities when the athletics department and Mountaineers coaches had been trying to convince him to play for their team.
But Van Asten hadn’t gotten a tour for reasons Ryland hadn’t been privy too, and his excitement over every little thing was almost contagious.
“Do the players use this space often?” Van Asten asked.
Ryland shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’m as new to this team as you are.”
“Right. I read about that in the news.” Van Asten popped out of his chair, only to sink into its neighbor. “I can’t believe you retired so early. You’re only thirty-three.”
“It was time,” Ryland responded blandly.
“I’m going to play until I’m fifty.”
Ryland didn’t laugh. Let the kid dream. “You can try.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “What’s your major?”
“Sports management.”
“Let me guess—you want to be a sports agent someday.”
Van Asten grinned, showing off a slight gap between his front teeth. “Totally.”
Good for him, already knowing what he wanted to do when he was done with hockey. Ryland hadn’t had a clue what would come after he retired. Had been so focused on hockey for years that he hadn’t thought much about it.
But then Dabbs had stressed teamwork, and he’d met Roman Kinsey, and he’d begun implementing some team-bonding stuff with the Pilots, and voilà! He was a director of player engagement in training.
Unofficially.
Miles had once called him Roman Kinsey 2.0, and Ryland had been immensely delighted by that.
Because it had worked. Slowly, little by little, the team had come together.
Amid retiring and departing players and welcoming new acquisitions, it hadn’t been easy maintaining a team culture of trust, respect, communication, and unity.
With Kinsey acting as a mentor of sorts over the past three years, it had allowed Ryland to bounce ideas off him.
The Pilots had made it to the playoffs three seasons running.
That wasn’t all attributed to Ryland’s dogged efforts at dismantling the team’s cliquey culture, obviously, but it had played a part.
Coach Fahey took a job out west, and the new coaching staff stepped it up.
Add in a new emphasis on player development, and everything worked in tandem to make the playoffs happen.
The first two seasons, they’d been eliminated in round one. But this past season, they’d made it all the way to the conference finals before being eliminated in game seven.
By the goddamn Vermont Trailblazers.
Smiling to himself as he walked Van Asten through the rest of the athletics facility, Ryland twirled his wedding ring around on his finger.
Despite agreeing to keep work and their relationship separate, there’d been some bumps in their marriage during the two-week period in May that their teams had played against each other.
Tensions had run high on both sides, the pressure from sponsors, fans, and management eating them both up from the inside.
Ryland very much did not recommend playing against one’s husband in the playoffs less than a year after getting hitched.
Of course, they could laugh about it now, months later. But at the time, things had felt . . . wobbly. They hadn’t argued, exactly, but the air between them had been thick.
It wasn’t until Dabbs’ post-game interview after the Trailblazers had won game seven, cementing their spot in the Stanley Cup Finals, that the tension had cracked.
“You won against your husband tonight. How does it feel to win such an important game while playing on opposing teams?” an interviewer had asked.
Dabbs, normally so even-keeled, had narrowed that gray-eyed gaze and snapped, “How do you think it feels?”
Ryland had dragged him aside after that and hugged him to death, and he hadn’t let go for a very long time.
Would he have liked to make it to the finals during his last season before retirement?
Sure.
Would he have liked to win the cup?
Obviously.
But he wasn’t the only retired player without a Stanley Cup under his belt. He’d get over it.
Besides, now he had this sweet gig as the manager of player aesthetics, which was just a fancy term for player engagement, and his job was to do for the Glen Hill College Mountaineers what Roman Kinsey did for the Vermont Trailblazers.
In fact, the college had offered the position to Kinsey first, but the man would live and die a Trailblazer, and no money in the world would make him leave the organization.
So he’d given them Ryland’s number.
“And that’s it,” Ryland said, walking side by side with Van Asten back toward the athletics facility’s main entrance. “Any questions?”
“There’s even a pool in the building,” Van Asten said in awe. “Are we allowed to use it?”
Ryland nodded. “It’s the only community pool in Glen Hill, so it’s open to the general public, and sometimes it closes for private or small-group classes, but there’s a schedule on the website.”
“Are there any other players here yet?”
“Some. Classes don’t start for another week, so they’re still trickling in. In fact, here are a few now,” Ryland said, spotting a trio of juniors entering the building, gym bags over their shoulders. “Let me introduce you.”
If there was ever a time to test out his manager-of-player-aesthetics muscles, this was it.
* * *
Dabbs stood just inside the Glen Hill College athletics facility’s main entrance and watched Ryland laugh with four of his players.
Ryland didn’t know it, likely couldn’t see it, but he looked at ease and confident.
Like someone these kids could look up to.
Someone they could come to with problems or if they needed advice.
The role of manager of player aesthetics was a new one the Mountaineers had created, and Ryland had recently told Dabbs that he was determined to put his stamp on it and make it his own.
When Ryland had retired from hockey, Dabbs had worried that he’d be bitter and resentful about it. Who wouldn’t be when an injury forced them out?
But Ryland had seemed at peace with the decision from the moment he’d made it.
Three years ago, he’d had surgery on his shoulder during the off-season, and although he’d been injury-free for the following two seasons, the third had proved too much.
He’d dislocated his shoulder again shortly before Christmas—which the doctor had warned him could happen despite the surgery, seeing as he played a high-contact sport—and his shoulder had plagued him right until the end of the conference finals.
“I’m already going to be living with shoulder issues for the rest of my life,” he’d said back in February. “And they’ll only get worse if I keep playing. I’ll finish out the season, but then I’m done. I’m not sacrificing any more of my body for the game.”
It was a smart decision. A mature one. He wouldn’t have been the first player to sacrifice too much for the game, but the fact that he’d chosen himself over hockey?
Dabbs had been so fucking proud of him.
And when Glen Hill College—a Division I college in Glen Hill, Vermont, less than an hour from Burlington—had come calling shortly before the season had ended?
It had been fortuitous.
Ryland not only had a job lined up after he’d retired, but he got to come home.
The place the two of them had bought in a quiet neighborhood in Burlington was a two-story, four-bedroom, Cape Cod-style house with a massive yard for their three dogs—Castle, Cosmo, and Chance, the Samoyed they’d recently rescued from a nearby shelter.
The house’s white siding needed a coat of paint, and the kitchen had needed a renovation a decade ago—it was straight out of the 1990s with its beige linoleum flooring, white countertops, and yellow-painted cabinets.
But their shoes sat next to each other on the mat in the foyer and their clothes shared the same closet space and they’d chosen their everyday china together.
And there was always an ongoing Scrabble game on the coffee table in the living room.
Though Ryland wasn’t any better now than he’d been four years ago.
“Van Asten’s in the same major as you,” Ryland said to one of the players. “You can tell him which professors to avoid.”
“Oh my god, yes please,” said a shaggy-haired guy with a gap between his front teeth.
Together, all four players trooped down the hallway, which was when Ryland finally spotted him. He broke into a smile that was as bright as the wedding ring on his finger, and Dabbs’ heart did a long, slow roll in his chest.
“Hey!” Ryland jogged over, checking his watch as he did so. “I thought I was supposed to pick you up at the airport.”
“My four-hour layover in Denver turned into forty-five minutes,” Dabbs said as Ryland crashed into him. He stuck his face in Ryland’s neck and inhaled his scent. “There was an earlier flight to Burlington with available seats, so they put me on it.”
Ryland gave him a hard, fast kiss. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve come to get you.”
“I didn’t want to take you away from work.” Pulling him forward by the T-shirt, Dabbs planted a second kiss on him. “You look good here, by the way. Authoritative yet approachable.”
“Do I? Because I’m flying by the seat of my pants.”
“I doubt that. You fit here.”
“Eh. I’m still finding my footing. Can you stay for a bit? Take a walk with me?”
“I came straight here from the airport. If you think I’m heading home before I get a chance to stretch my legs . . . ”
“Aw.” Ryland leaned into his space and tucked his hands into the back pockets of Dabbs’ jeans. “You missed me so much that you came straight here to see me instead of going home?”
Dabbs kissed him again. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late for that. Come on, let’s take a walk. I want to hear how the retreat went.”
Outside, the summer sun shone. The campus itself was barely half awake: with classes starting next week, students were only beginning to move into campus housing, making the place seem halfway to a ghost town.
It reminded Dabbs of how his teammates tended to trickle back into Burlington from wherever they’d spent their summers.
They circled around the athletics facility, aiming for the paths that zigzagged through the quad.
“So?” Ryland hopped ahead of him and turned to face him, walking backward. “How was the retreat?”
Dabbs flicked his sunglasses from the top of his head onto his nose. “It was good. Really good. I learned a lot, but more than that, being in a room filled with other middle-grade writers was awesome.”
The retreat had catered specifically to children’s book writers and illustrators. Dabbs had waffled for months about going, but he’d finally registered himself as an attending author after Ryland had admitted to being nervous about his new job.
“I’ve been a hockey player my entire life,” Ryland had said in July, the week before starting as manager of player aesthetics.
Of course, none of the college players had been on campus at the time, but he’d had meetings with coaches and strategy sessions with management.
“This is totally different. What if I suck at it?”
If he could start something new that scared him, Dabbs could fight past the impostor syndrome to attend a retreat.
The Hockey Diaries had sold better than he ever could’ve expected.
He supposed that was what happened when one was a hockey player with lots of hockey player friends who were willing to hock one’s shit to their massive followings.
He’d had such success with them that he’d expanded the series to nine books with three more on the way in the next year.
His team’s media relations people had gotten him onto podcasts and morning shows to promote his first book, and it was on one of those podcasts that he’d told the world about growing up with a verbally abusive parent.
He’d even told them about the seventeen-out-of-twenty math quiz.
And the world had continued to spin.
The best part about being published? The royalties he was able to donate to charity, the awareness he was bringing to mental health resources for youth, and the messages from parents who were thrilled to have stumbled on his books because they just knew they were going to help their kid through a sticky situation.
And that had been his entire reason for writing those books in the first place.
He and Ryland chatted as they strolled hand in hand through the quad, passing empty picnic tables and ducking under leafy low-hanging branches.
“Hey, I added to our Scrabble game while you were away,” Ryland said, stopping under the shade of a maple tree.
“Oh yeah? With what word? Not get again.”
Ryland’s gaze turned flinty. “Ha ha. No. Zombie.”
“No shit? I think that’s the first time you’ve managed to successfully use a z.”
“Just for that, you’re making dinner tonight.”
Laughing, Dabbs swept him into his arms and kissed him while the tree leaves rustled gently in the breeze.
Four years ago, Dabbs had tried to resist this man, thinking they were too different.
And they were different, but not where it counted.
Now, he couldn’t imagine life without him.
And as their smiling lips met again and again under the branches of the massive maple—a moment in time stolen just for them—the future spread out before them, full of pitfalls and challenges and celebrations and new opportunities.
Dabbs couldn’t wait to navigate them all with Ryland and discover more of those best parts of him.
* * *
THE END