Chapter 4
Jamie
Luca Moretti's one-timer was a weapon, and playing on his wing was like standing next to a loaded gun with perfect aim.
We ran the cycle play six times in practice, and each time the puck landed on my tape at the half-wall.
I already knew where Luca would be—three years of playing together had turned coordination into instinct.
I didn't look for him. I felt where he was, the displacement of ice spray, the sound of his blades carving the lane, the rhythm of his stride that told me when before conscious thought could form.
The sixth rep, I fed him blind. No look, no telegraph. Just the knowledge that he'd be there. He was. The one-timer hit the back of the net.
"Beautiful." Eriksson tapped my shin pad as he skated past. "You two are reading minds out there."
We weren't reading minds. We were reading bodies.
Three years of shared ice time meant I knew Luca's skating the way I knew my own—his pace, where the pressure points were, and where the spaces opened up.
That was the best thing about hockey. The communion of it.
Two people moving at speed, independently, and arriving at the same point at the same time because they'd each understood what the other was about to do.
I loved this part of my job—the feel of tape on my stick and the sound a perfect pass made when it hit the blade flat. Hockey was the one place where reading a room was a measurable skill, where being good at people translated directly into being good at your job.
The rink smelled of cold and the metallic edge of fresh ice.
The boards were scarred from a decade of pucks and bodies.
The overhead lights were unforgiving. They showed every flaw in your technique and every hesitation in your stride.
I loved all of it. The sound of blades cutting ice in parallel, the crack of sticks against pucks, the deep thud of a body check that echoed off the glass.
We ran another cycle with the second unit, and I adjusted my positioning, cheating a half-step higher in the zone to create the passing lane.
It worked. Theo found me with a cross-ice feed and I one-timed it past Kieran, top shelf—a shot I could feel in my wrists for ten seconds after.
Kieran pointed at me with his blocker, the goalie's version of a head nod, acknowledgment without concession.
Coach Reeves blew his whistle and we reset. Luca pulled up beside me at the hash marks, both of us breathing hard. For a moment we just stood there in comfortable silence—two men who had been doing this long enough that words were redundant.
Then he said, "You good?"
Luca Moretti didn't waste words. He didn't ask as a social pleasantry that expected the automatic fine. He gave it his full attention, his dark eyes steady, waiting for the real answer.
"Yeah." I spun my stick in my hands. "Why?"
He looked at me for a beat. His eyes had their own form of communication. I noticed something and I'm giving you the chance to tell me what it is. I won't push if you don't, but I saw.
"Okay." He skated back to the drill. I watched him go.
Luca had spent years locked inside a closet built by his father's expectations and his own fear. Then he came out on national television. He won a Cup. He married Theo. Now he lived with a sense of calm after surviving the one thing he was most afraid of.
He recognized patterns. That was the other thing about Luca—he didn't just captain the team, he read it. The way I read rooms, he read people. Whatever he'd seen on my face or in my posture, he'd clocked it.
I didn't know what he'd seen. That was the unsettling part—because I wasn't unhappy.
I wasn't struggling. My life was good. I played hockey in Chicago with people I loved, and I had a role on this team that was irreplaceable even when my ice time didn't reflect it.
I had friendships that were the deepest and most sustaining relationships of my adult life.
I had Abbott—the car rides, the dinners, the quiet and the closeness, the feeling of being next to someone who didn't need you to be anyone other than yourself.
That was enough. It had been enough for years. You could love someone without it being a problem. You could love someone, love the friendship as it was, and choose the friendship every single day. Because the friendship was good and real and yours.
So what had Luca seen?
Practice shifted to shooting drills. Kieran took the starter's net as always, and the forwards lined up for rapid-fire sequences.
I went through the rotation and took my shots.
I hit the net twice and the crossbar once.
Good reps. Clean mechanics. It was the kind of practice that reminded me I was a first-line player even when the deployment sheet said otherwise.
The backup drill ran simultaneously on the far end. Abbott was in net.
I wasn't watching him. I was on the bench, toweling sweat from my face, and drinking water.
But there was a part of my brain—the same part that tracked room temperature and social dynamics and who hadn't been included in the conversation yet—that was always, at some low and persistent frequency, aware of where Clay Abbott was.
Volkov wound up from the right circle. It was a good release, high glove side, the kind of shot that beat starting goalies in playoff games. Abbott read it before Volkov finished his weight transfer. His glove came up. He plucked the puck from the air.
Then Bishop took a shot from the point. Screened, hard and low.
Abbott dropped into a butterfly, kicked out his right pad, and redirected the puck to the corner with a precision that shouldn't have been possible from a cold read through traffic.
His positioning was perfect. It was a save that could only happen when your brain processed the entire ice surface simultaneously and solved the angle before the shot left the stick.
I let out a sharp exhale, an involuntary Jesus that came out before I could compose myself. Abbott was up and resetting, already focused on the next shooter, already processing the next angle. He didn't even react. He just moved back into position.
Bishop sat down next to me and heard me exhale. He looked at me, then at Abbott, then back at me.
He didn't say anything.
Bishop was not generally a subtle man. He was loud and blunt.
His version of friendship involved headbutts and terrible jokes.
But there were moments when Bishop demonstrated a perceptiveness that caught you off guard, a quiet intelligence behind the enforcer's exterior that he didn't advertise.
This was one of those moments. He looked at me again, then he looked at Abbott.
I drank my water, staring straight ahead. The compressors hummed overhead. On the far end of the ice, Abbott stopped another shot—this one from Garrett, who had a release that gave starting goalies nightmares.
This was what Abbott was. He wasn't a backup because of a talent deficit.
He was a backup because Kieran Walsh existed.
Clay Abbott could be a starter where he played sixty games a season and made saves like that in front of crowds who would chant his name.
The fact that he'd spent his career sitting in the margins of someone else's spotlight was one of those injustices that hockey fans never thought about. I thought about it constantly.
"He's having a day," Bishop said casually.
"Yeah." My voice cracked. "He's having a day."
I changed in the locker room after practice.
There was the usual noise and routine around me.
Theo was telling a story about Luca trying to assemble IKEA furniture, and most of the room was laughing.
Morrison was quiet at his stall. I'd noticed his posture change over the past few months—the way he occupied less space than he used to.
Kieran was doing his post-practice stretches with ritualistic focus. The other guys gave him space. Nico sat near him—not touching, not talking, just a comfortable presence in his orbit. I looked at them for a second too long and felt something tighten in my throat.
Abbott was three stalls down. He'd stripped his pads and was pulling on a grey t-shirt. He caught me watching him.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing. Good practice."
"You already said that."
Had I? Maybe I had on the ice, one of those moments between drills when you talk without really registering the conversation.
"Well," I said, "it bears repeating."
The corner of his mouth moved in an almost smile. He pulled his bag from his stall and walked toward the tunnel without looking back. Bishop, supposedly focused on his own gear, watched me watch him go.
I looked away and finished dressing.
I walked out to the parking lot, alone for once, because Abbott had a separate appointment. I missed his shoulder beside mine.
I drove home and made dinner for one. I left Abbott's mug on the shelf where it always sat, handle facing out. I didn't want to think about Luca's question, or Bishop's silence, or the sound I'd made when Abbott caught that glove save. I didn't want to think about any of it.