40. Rhett
RHETT
I watched my team win the championship from a tunnel.
That was the part nobody told you about.
The part that didn’t make it into the highlight reels or the trophy ceremony footage.
The part where you sat in a concrete corridor on a medical bench with ice packed against your shoulder and a doctor shining a light in your eyes every four minutes while the muffled roar of forty thousand people filtered through the walls around you like something happening in another dimension.
Brynn sat next to me.
She hadn’t said much. She didn’t need to. She just sat there with her elbows on her knees and her eyes on the floor and every time the crowd noise spiked she looked up at the ceiling like she was trying to read what it meant through the concrete.
“They’re still up,” I said after the third surge.
She looked at me sideways. “How do you know?”
“Different sound. When the other team scores it drops first and then builds. When we score it just—” I paused as another wave rolled through the walls. “Like that.”
She listened. Then she nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, I hear it.”
I shifted the ice pack on my shoulder and winced. The doctor looked at me sharply.
“Don’t,” he said.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re thinking about getting up.”
“I’m sitting completely still.”
“You’re thinking about it,” he said flatly, and went back to his chart.
Brynn snorted softly beside me. Then she pressed her lips together and looked at her hands. “She’s out there watching,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”
I hadn’t been wondering. I knew. The same way I always knew where Victoria was in a building, some internal compass that had been calibrated to her for three years and showed no signs of stopping.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
Brynn considered the question carefully, the way someone did who knew her mother very well.
“She’s Victoria,” she said finally. “So she’s standing completely still with her arms crossed looking like she’s running a board meeting.
But her hand is pressed against the boards.
” She paused. “She only does that when she’s scared. ”
I stared at the ceiling.
I thought about the photograph. The gray morning light and the iron gate and her face tilted up toward mine like gravity just decided.
I thought about her flipping her phone face down on the kitchen counter with that look in her eyes.
Together, she’d said. Like she was still deciding what the word meant.
I thought about three years of turned lefts instead of rights.
Three years of watching her clip-clop down hallways in those impossible heels of hers and knowing, with a certainty that had never once wavered about anything that mattered, that she was it for me.
Before she’d seen it herself. Before she was ready.
Before she had any idea that I was already completely and irreversibly gone.
Three years.
And she was out there at the boards with her hand pressed against them.
The crowd noise didn’t spike this time.
It exploded.
A sound so complete and total that it stopped being sound and became something physical, a pressure wave that moved through the concrete walls and the floor beneath my feet and up through the bench and into my bones.
The doctor’s pen rolled off his clipboard.
Brynn shot to her feet with both hands pressed to her mouth.
I already knew what it meant.
“They did it,” Brynn breathed. Her eyes went glassy immediately. “Oh my God, they actually—”
Her voice broke.
I stood up.
The doctor pointed at me. “Calloway—”
“We won the championship,” I said. “I’m going out there.”
He opened his mouth.
“I’m going out there,” I said again, pleasantly, in a tone that ended the conversation.
I grabbed my helmet off the bench, tucked it under my good arm, and walked down the tunnel toward the ice.
The scene that greeted me when I stepped out of the tunnel was something I knew I’d be trying to describe for the rest of my life and never quite getting right.
The ice was pure chaos. Beautiful, gold-and-black chaos.
The guys were everywhere. Jett had his stick raised above his head and was screaming something at the ceiling that I couldn’t make out over the noise.
Moose had his mask off and was bear-hugging Langley, which looked genuinely dangerous given the size difference.
Two of our defensemen were chest-bumping repeatedly like they’d forgotten how to stop.
Confetti was falling from somewhere above, thick gold and black streams of it drifting down through the arena lights and settling across the ice like the most expensive snowfall I’d ever seen.
The crowd was still screaming.
All of them. Both sides. Even the Canadian Dynamites fans had their phones out, recording, because some moments were too complete to let politics get in the way of them.
I stepped onto the ice.
Jett saw me first.
His face did something complicated for about half a second, relief and fury and joy all tangled up together, and then he was crossing the ice at full speed and I braced myself just before he crashed into me, his arms wrapping around my good shoulder as I caught him with my free arm.
“You absolute asshole,” he said into my shoulder. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“I swear to God, Stone—”
“Jets.” I gripped the back of his neck the way I always did. “We won.”
He pulled back. His eyes were red. He pointed a finger at me. “We’re talking about this later.”
“Fine.”
“About how you scared ten years off my life.”
“Fine.”
“And about Miss C, because three years, Stone, three years and you never said a word—”
“Jett.”
“What?”
“Go celebrate.”
He stared at me for one more second. Then that grin split his face wide open, the biggest one I’d ever seen on him, and he turned back toward the chaos with his arms raised and his voice carrying over the top of everything.
Coach Mercer found me next. He didn’t say anything. He just put his hand on my good shoulder and squeezed once, hard, and nodded. That was the whole conversation. That was everything it needed to be.
I nodded back.
Then I looked up toward the boards.
She was still there.
Victoria stood exactly where Brynn said she’d be, at the boards, perfectly still, arms folded, face composed in that way she had that showed nothing to the world and everything to anyone who had been paying attention long enough to learn the difference.
Her glasses were slightly crooked. Her hair had come partially loose from whatever she’d put it in this morning.
She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life.
I skated toward her slowly. The chaos continued around me, the guys celebrating and confetti falling and the announcer’s voice booming something I couldn’t parse, and all of it went quiet the way it always went quiet when Victoria was the thing my eyes found in a room.
I stopped at the boards in front of her.
She looked at me for a long moment. Her gray eyes moved over my face the way they did when she was cataloguing damage. The cut on my chin. The way I held my left shoulder. The fact that I was upright and breathing and looking back at her.
“You walked off,” she said.
“I came back.”
“Your shoulder—”
“Is fine.”
“Rhett—”
“Victoria.” I leaned my forearms on the top of the boards between us, bringing my face level with hers. “We won.”
Something cracked open in her eyes. Fast and unguarded, the way things only showed when she forgot to hold them back. Her jaw worked. She pressed her lips together.
“I know,” she said quietly.
“Ryan’s team won the championship.”
That was the one that got her.
I watched her face crumple for exactly one second, just one, before she pulled it back together with the iron will of a woman who had been pulling herself back together for fourteen years. But her eyes stayed bright. Dangerously bright.
“Don’t you dare make me cry in this arena,” she said, her voice only slightly unsteady.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Miss C.”
She reached across the boards and straightened my collar with two fingers, a completely unnecessary gesture given that I was in full hockey gear, which I think we both understood, and then her hand stilled against my chest.
I covered it with mine.
“The whole world is watching,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
“Every camera in this building.”
“I know.”
“The PHL conduct committee is probably already drafting—”
“Victoria.”
She looked up at me.
“Do you trust me?” I asked.
She held my gaze for a long moment. Long enough that I felt the weight of everything it contained. Three years and a dead husband and a franchise she built from grief and a photograph in gray morning light and a phone flipped face down on a kitchen counter.
“Yes,” she said.
I leaned across the boards and kissed her.
Not a quiet kiss. Not a careful, controlled, scripted kiss designed for anyone’s approval or PR strategy.
A real one. The kind that had three years of patience behind it and no intention of apologizing for itself.
I felt her hand curl into my jersey. I felt her lean into it despite everything her brain was probably telling her.
The arena lost its mind.
I was fairly certain Jett’s voice was the loudest thing in the building.
When I pulled back Victoria’s eyes were still closed for half a second before she opened them.
Her glasses had gone crooked again. I reached up and straightened them with one finger the way I always did and she let out a breath that sounded like something being set down after a very long time of carrying it.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” I agreed.
“I suppose we’re doing this publicly then.”
“We are.”
She glanced sideways at the forty thousand people currently losing their collective minds around us. Then she looked back at me with those steel gray eyes and the corner of her mouth curved upward into something that wasn’t quite a smile yet but was getting there.
“You better make sure that shoulder is cleared by the press conference,” she said.
I grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And Rhett?”
“Yeah?”
She straightened the collar she’d already straightened. “Good game.”
I laughed then, full and loud and real, the sound swallowed up immediately by forty thousand people celebrating around us, and I reached across the boards and pulled her toward me one more time.
Behind us, Jett was chanting something.
I chose not to hear what it was.