Chapter 17 #2
The past week has turned my life into a feeding frenzy.
Sharks in the water. They smell blood. Everyone’s out for a story.
Sponsors are clamoring for a deal. Rick’s using the whole thing as leverage in my contract renewal.
Cole’s situation is less tidy. Arrested the morning we walked out.
Fined. Suspended from the team indefinitely—the league’s still sorting out exactly how long.
His mom’s medical bills are still real. His mistake was real.
I don’t know yet how I feel about any of it.
Apparently, now that my name’s been cleared, all’s been forgotten.
Like it never even happened.
Another lap.
“The hero narrative plays great, Beckett. The organization loves it,” Rick said.
Great. That’s just fan-freakin’-tastic.
I should feel victorious. Instead, I’m hollow. Nothing but emptiness where the anger used to sit. Well…nothing except indecision.
Yesterday, I came to practice resigned to keep my head down, put the puck in the net, and stay away from any and all media until the whole ordeal blew over. By the time I stepped off the ice, my phone was seizing in my locker.
Puck’s in your zone, Batman.
The post is beyond viral. It’s got over two million likes. Forty thousand reposts. People tagging me with comments:
@romancediva95: Come on, @BlueLineBeck, call the girl.
@BlueOxFan: @BlueLineBeck, pick up the puck.
@hockeymama56: Some hero. Are we just going to pretend we didn’t hear him call her nobody?
The world is divided. Should he get the girl, or not?
I haven’t called her.
Six days. It’s not like I haven’t tried. I pick up the phone. Put it down. Type a message. Delete it. Type another. Delete that. The cycle has become its own kind of skating—repetitive, going nowhere. I’m such a coward.
What would I even say? I’m sorry, my career was on the line. So I sprayed ice in your face—metaphorically speaking. Because that’s what I do, apparently.
That one is accurate.
Head Coach Jace Jacobsen’s voice breaks up the rhythmic slice of my skates. “Benson. Coach Hart wants to see you in his office. Now.”
Coach Hart wants to see me. Six days after I called his daughter nobody on television.
I consider my options. Skate until the Zamboni driver decides to run me over. Retire from hockey and relocate to a remote island.
Doesn’t matter. Neither of those scenarios would stop Coach Hart from finding me.
I step off the ice.
The walk is ninety feet and takes approximately the rest of my natural life.
I knock.
“Come in.”
Coach’s office looks pretty much the same as the one back at Sutton Arena—sans the scorch marks and soggy carpet.
Functional, plays and rosters scattered over his desk, shelves of trophies and keepsakes lining the wall behind him.
The championship photo. A coffee mug that says World’s Greatest Coach, clearly purchased by a player as a joke and adopted without irony, because Duncan Hart does not do irony. He does direct.
And on the desk—a manuscript. Printed. Bound with a simple clip.
Ice Cold Heart, by Sutton Blake.
My heart relocates to my esophagus, choking me.
Coach’s look is not what I expect. Not fury. Sadder than fury. The look of a man about to have a conversation that’s been building longer than six days.
Oh no. I’m fourteen again and about to be sent to the showers. “Coach, I can explain—”
“Sit down, Beckett.”
I sit. The chair where I’ve sat for a hundred meetings. The chair where he said I believe you after the doping allegation and those three words were the only thing that kept me standing for six months.
“Tell me, Beckett. Did I make myself unclear?”
“Sir?”
“When I told you that you were never to make my daughter feel unwelcome on my ice again?”
“No, sir.”
“You want to tell me why your words this Saturday were meant to do exactly that?”
The coaching equivalent of a slap shot—minimum wind-up, maximum impact. He’s more than angry. He’s disappointed. And that’s worse.
I feel sick. “I don’t have an excuse, Coach. I…I’m sorry.” My voice is sandpaper in my throat. My fingers wrap around my knuckles, wringing, trying to find something to do. A purpose.
Coach watches me for a moment with that hard gaze.
And then he lets out a breath, a little of the steel subsiding.
“You know, I know what it’s like, feeling like the only thing that matters about you is the number on your jersey.
But it’s not true, Beckett. I didn’t pick you to mentor all those years ago because you were some great prodigy. Do you know why I picked you?”
It’s all I can do to shake my head.
“Because, one, your dad was my best friend, and when he died, I made him a promise. But after that, it was all you, Beck. You were determined. You had a love for the game. I saw that in you long before I started coaching you. I remember watching you play with your dad before his practice started. You’d give him a run for his money, even at the age of six. ”
I frown. “I’m not sure—”
“Listen, Beck. People in life are going to give you lousy advice.” He levels me with a meaningful look. “Next time you’re told you have to knock someone else down a peg to get ahead, come talk to me.”
“Yes, Coach.”
Coach nods. Not forgiveness—acknowledgment.
“There are things you need to know.” He picks up the manuscript and sets it between us, his hand resting on the title page. “Everly dropped this at my house yesterday. She asked me to give it to you. Said you’d understand why.”
I nod. It’s that or tell him it’s because I’ve been secretly, unknowingly corresponding with his daughter for months and this manuscript is the result. I reach for it, but he hasn’t moved.
“This is my daughter’s heart on paper. Understood?”
I stare at the pages. The hollow deepens. Makes room for a new resident: shame.
“I will take care of it. You have my word.”
Coach levels me with a look. Holds on for a moment, letting me know without a shadow of a doubt that this is the last time I’ll be welcome in his office if Everly is hurt again.
Understood.
He leans back, his expression shifting again. “You know, you’re just like him.”
I pause. “Who?”
Coach frowns as though the answer were obvious. “Your dad.”
The air changes. My father’s name is a weather event. It changes the conditions of whatever space it occupies.
“You know we played together in the minors for two seasons before I left for the NHL.” His voice drops—not coaching, remembering.
“He was something. Played every game, heart full out.” He shakes his head.
“When he was on the red line, he terrified me. I was a defenseman. He was a forward who hit like a freight train.”
I’m very still. He hasn’t really talked about my dad, ever.
“You know what I remember most? It wasn’t the hitting. Wasn’t the skating.” He leans forward. “After games. Win or lose. Didn’t matter if we’d just gone seven rounds and I had his elbow print on my ribs.”
“What did he do?”
“He found the pay phone.” Coach’s steadiness is costing him. “In the corridor outside the locker room. Before cell phones. Metal phone on the wall. And after every game—every single game—your father would find that phone. And call home.”
“He called Mom.”
“And you. I’d walk past him in the hallway, sometimes icing something he’d broken earlier that evening.
” The complicated smile. “And I’d hear him say the same thing.
Same words. Win or lose. This voice that was completely different from the ice voice.
The ice voice was intimidation. The phone voice was—” He stops.
Swallows. “The softest thing I’ve ever heard from a man who hit that hard. ”
I can’t speak.
“He’d say, ‘I’m coming home,’” Coach says. Almost a whisper. “‘Tell Beck I love him.’”
I can’t breathe.
Tell Beck I love him.
Words I’ve never heard. Sitting in Coach Hart’s memory for thirty years, waiting for the moment his player needed them.
“He said that?” My voice is broken. My dad didn’t use that word, really. He showed it in showing up to practice. Teaching me puck handling skills. But this…what?
“Every game. Win or lose. Those exact words.”
“I didn’t know he did that.”
“I should have told you sooner. I thought you knew.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
“Because hockey was what your father did. It wasn’t who he was.” The specific, deliberate emphasis of a man who has been waiting for this conversation. “The man on the phone saying ‘Tell Beck I love him’—that was the real man. His real job. Everything else was a side hustle.”
And I’m trying to hear that through the layers I’ve built. Your father died for hockey, so hockey is sacred, and choosing anything over it dishonors the sacrifice.
That’s been my operating system for twenty-three years.
“He had both, Beckett. Hockey and love. And faith—oh, he had that in spades. And he lived them all out, trusting God.”
“But he died playing.”
“He died in a terrible accident. A freak play. He died during hockey. Not for hockey. There’s a difference. He was a man who made a living on the ice and died because the ice is dangerous, and sometimes dangerous things take the people we love.”
I don’t know what to say.
“And your mom loved you enough to sacrifice so you could have options.”
What’s going on? Can he read my mind now?
“The only thing you owe her is to love what you do and to do it to the best of your ability.”
I nod. “I’m trying.”
He stands.
He holds out the manuscript.
“Take it home. Read it. All of it. And when you’ve finished—when you’ve read what that woman wrote about the man in those letters—come back and tell me she was exploiting you.” His eyes hold mine. “Tell me she’s nobody.”
It feels like a dare.
Game on, Coach.