Chapter 2
Jamie
There were thirty-seven people in the room, and I could tell you every one of their comfort levels without looking twice.
The rookies were easy to spot—not because they looked young, but because they held their drinks with both hands and laughed a half-beat too late at every joke.
It was orientation night. The Storm ran these during the first week of pre-season, a casual night at one of the downtown restaurants the team liked.
I'd been organizing them for four years now—long enough that the hosting duties had shifted from assignment to assumption.
Nobody asked if I was running it. I just ran it.
I liked running it. That's what people got wrong about me sometimes.
Connecting with people wasn't a project.
I made rooms comfortable because it made them better.
I'd figured that out when I was twelve years old watching my older sister's birthday party fall apart because nobody thought to introduce the two friend groups to each other.
I'd walked over, said, "Katie, this is Dev.
She also does gymnastics," and the whole energy changed.
That was the first time I'd understood that some people could read the room and some people couldn't.
I could.
"Mikkola." I set a fresh beer on the table in front of the Finnish rookie who'd been nursing his first one for forty minutes. "Have you met Nico yet? Nico Varis, Finnish-American, forward. He went through Saginaw too. Different years, but he knows all the same people."
Mikkola's shoulders dropped a quarter inch. That was the whole job—a quarter inch of relaxation in a kid who'd been bracing against the unfamiliarity of a new city, a new team, and a new language of inside jokes he hadn't earned yet.
Nico appeared at my elbow like he'd been summoned—which, in a way, he had. I'd texted him twenty minutes ago. He started talking to Mikkola in Finnish, and I watched the kid's whole face change.
Connection established.
That was one less person eating alone at the facility cafeteria next week.
I worked my way around the room the way I always do. It's all pattern recognition—who's isolated, who's talking but not comfortable, who needs a bridge to a conversation they can't find the entrance to. It was like reading ice. You saw the open lane before it opened.
Theo found me by the bar and threw an arm around my shoulders. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The Jamie thing. Where you orbit the entire room and somehow every single person feels like they had a real conversation with you."
"It's called being friendly, Theo."
"It's called being a wizard." He leaned into me with the comfort of having been a teammate long enough to be family.
Theo's version of friendship was warm and all-in.
He'd been like that since he walked into the Storm's locker room as a rookie and hadn't had the good sense to be afraid of Luca Moretti. "You eat yet?"
"I'll eat later."
"You always say that and then you eat protein bars in your car at midnight." He flagged the bartender. "Two of whatever he was having, and can we get a menu?"
"I'm fine, Theo."
"You're also eating." He slid the menu across the bar. "Pick something or I'm ordering for you. And you know I'll pick the weirdest thing on the menu."
I ordered a burger. It was easier than arguing with Theo Callahan when he'd decided to take care of you. Besides, he was right. I hadn't eaten since Abbott had stolen my other protein bar at noon.
Abbott.
He wasn't here tonight. Backup goalies didn't attend rookie night unless they wanted to, and Abbott rarely wanted to be at large social events.
He attended the ones that mattered—team dinners, the Korean barbecue nights I organized, anything where the real bonding happened in smaller clusters.
He skipped the ones where the primary function was filling a room with noise.
I understood that about him—the same way I understood that he drank his coffee black but would accept cream if someone else was making it.
His silence wasn't absence, but attention.
I had a whole library of Abbott-specific knowledge that I'd accumulated.
It was like accumulating furniture in a house you've lived in for a long time—not all at once, not on purpose, just piece by piece until one day you looked around and realized your space had been shaped by someone who'd been there all along.
Across the room, Luca was talking to one of the rookie defensemen. Even in a casual setting, Luca carried the weight of a captain who'd come out on national television, won a Cup, and married the love of his life, all within a year.
It was the way Theo orbited him that I noticed, not hovering or dependent, but simply aware.
Theo could be on the far side of a room and if Luca shifted, Theo shifted.
It wasn't conscious. It was just what happened when you belonged to someone completely enough that their presence recalibrated your spatial awareness. I watched that for a moment.
Then I stopped myself.
The dinner wound down around ten. I made sure every rookie had at least one veteran's phone number, confirmed the next morning's skate time, and walked out into the Chicago night feeling the satisfaction of a room well-managed.
My phone buzzed as I reached my car.
Abbott: How'd rookie night go?
Me: Good. Mikkola connected with Nico. I think the Finnish thing will help.
Abbott: You matched them deliberately.
Me: Obviously.
Abbott: Social engineering.
Me: I prefer "being nice."
Abbott: You would.
I was smiling at my phone in a parking lot.
It was fine.
That was just how it was. Abbott's brand of humor, landing with quiet confidence because he knew exactly how funny he was, always got me. I'd laughed too loud at an Abbott comment once in the locker room and Bishop had given me a look.
It wasn't a thing. Abbott was funny. I appreciated funny people.
Abbott: Want a ride tomorrow? I'm passing your building anyway.
He was not, in fact, passing my building. His apartment was in the opposite direction. He'd been offering rides for two years and the "passing your building" claim had never been challenged by either of us.
Me: Sure. 7?
Abbott: 7.
I drove home and showered. I stood in the kitchen for a minute in the stillness that only came when I was alone and didn't have to be anything for anyone.
My apartment was warm and a little cluttered. It was lived-in the way I liked it. There were books on the coffee table and a blanket thrown over the couch from last weekend's movie night with Theo and Luca. The dishes were still in the drying rack.
The blue mug with the chipped handle was in its usual spot on the shelf.
Abbott's mug. I'd washed it two days ago even though he hadn't been over in a week.
I always washed it. I always put it back in the same spot, angled so the handle faced out, because Abbott picked things up with his right hand and it was easier for him if the handle was already oriented correctly.
Abbott picked me up at seven.
His car was clean. There were two cups of coffee in the center console. He handed me the one with cream and sugar without being asked.
"Thanks."
He pulled into traffic. The lake threw grey light across the skyline, the flat overcast of a September morning. We drove in comfortable silence.
In Abbott's car, I didn't need to fill the quiet. I sat with the coffee he'd made me and let myself relax.
There was no pretense with him. The heater hummed. The leather seat was warm from whatever Abbott did to pre-heat his car. He thought of things like that. Traffic on Lake Shore Drive was thick and slow, but neither of us cared.
"Hey," I said, somewhere around Michigan Avenue.
He glanced over. His profile against the grey lake light was so familiar. I knew exactly how his jaw looked at this angle, the line of his nose, the way his hands rested on the wheel at ten and two.
"You ever get tired of being good at something that doesn't actually get you what you want?"
He looked at me for a long second. The green traffic light turned yellow and he looked back at the road.
"What do you want?" I hadn't expected him to answer my question with his own.
I could have said a lot of things. I could have said more ice time, a permanent spot on the first line, a deeper playoff run.
I could have said I don't know.
I'd have meant it, in a way, because there was something I really wanted—but it was behind a door in the back of my mind that I'd closed so gently and so long ago there were days I forgot it was there.
"Better deployment," I said. "Coach has me rotating on the third line too much. I'm a first-line player on a second-line salary and if they'd just commit to the Moretti-Hayes pairing full-time, the numbers would speak for themselves."
Abbott was quiet for a beat. "That's not what you were asking."
My chest tightened. There was a hitch in the rhythm of my breathing that I covered by taking a sip of coffee. "Sure it was."
"Okay." He let it go. He always let things go—not because he believed me, but because he understood that I wasn't ready to talk about it.
We drove the rest of the way in silence. It should have been uncomfortable after I deflected his question. But it wasn't. That was the thing about Abbott. He held silence the way other people held conversations.
He pulled into the facility lot and parked. He turned off the engine and looked at me.
"Hayes."
"Yeah."
"For what it's worth…" He paused, selecting his next words carefully. "I think you're right about the first-line thing."
That wasn't what he'd planned to say. I knew that the way I knew his coffee order and his parking habits. He'd wanted to say something else.
"Thanks, Abbott."
The suggestion of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he got out of the car.
I sat there for a few more seconds, holding a coffee he'd made exactly the way I liked it, and tried to remember what I'd wanted to say when I'd opened my mouth on Michigan Avenue.
The door in the back of my mind stayed closed—but for the first time in a long time, I was aware of it being there.