Epilogue
VICTORIA
The trophy looked good in the display case.
I stood in the corridor outside my office on a Tuesday morning in March with my coffee in one hand and my clipboard in the other and I looked at the championship trophy sitting behind its glass panel in the new display case we’d had installed three weeks after the win, and I thought about how long I’d been waiting to see something in that spot.
Seventeen years of empty glass.
Seventeen years of walking past that case every single day on my way to my office at Caldwell Arena. Seventeen years of knowing what it was built for and watching it sit there collecting the silence of something that was supposed to hold a thing it didn’t have yet.
Ryan had always said it was optimistic.
He was right about a lot of things.
He was right that this city needed something to believe in.
He was right that hockey was the thing, this particular loud and physical and unforgiving game that Las Vegas had never quite known what to do with until it did.
He was right that the arena was too big for what we had and that the right team would grow into it eventually, and he was right that the display case needed a trophy in it, and he was right, God he was right, that optimism was not the same thing as foolishness even when it looked exactly like it from the outside.
He was right about all of it.
He just didn’t get to see it.
That was the part I had spent fourteen years trying to make peace with and never quite managing.
Not the grief exactly, not anymore, grief had softened into something I could carry without it stopping me in my tracks.
But the specific unfairness of it. The fact that he had believed in all of this before there was any reason to and then wasn’t here for the part where it turned out he was right.
I stood in the corridor with my coffee and I looked at the trophy and I let myself feel it without flinching away from it, the way I’d been learning to do.
Not just the loss. All of it. The seventeen years and the franchise and the foundation and the gala every November where I sat across tables from senators and made them look at numbers until they couldn’t look away.
The four-poster bed in an estate I finally lived in.
The man currently sitting in my chair reading an investor packet at seven in the morning because he showed up before I did and let himself in with the key I gave him without making a thing of it.
Ryan would have liked all of it.
He would have liked it enormously, and he would have been completely insufferable about being right, and I would have thrown a throw pillow at him and he would have caught it, and that thought didn’t hurt the way it used to.
It just felt like him.
Like he was still here in all the small things, the way he always would be.
“You’re allowed to be happy, Vee.”
I picked up my coffee and went to find out what was in the Hargrove packet.
I had always said it was impatient.
We were both right, as it turned out.
I took a long sip of my coffee and studied the trophy in the early morning quiet of the arena.
The cleaning crew had been through already.
I could smell the polish they used on the floors, could hear the distant hum of the Zamboni running its morning circuit on the ice.
The arena wouldn’t fill for another six hours.
We had a home game tonight, our third of the new season, and the sold-out crowd had already made the scalpers outside miserable for two weeks running.
Funny what a championship did for ticket sales.
Funnier still what a very public kiss at the boards in front of forty thousand people did for them.
I turned away from the trophy and continued down the corridor toward my office, heels clicking against the polished floor in that rhythm I’d been told my entire adult life was too loud for an indoor space.
I’d been told a lot of things my entire adult life that I had chosen not to listen to.
This was simply the most persistent example.
My office door was open.
Which meant one of two things.
Either Brynn had gotten here before me, which happened occasionally now that she had a key and a standing Tuesday morning coffee ritual that she refused to give up despite the fact that she technically lived across the city with a certain head coach who I had gradually and grudgingly and with complete sincerity come to trust with my daughter’s heart.
Or Rhett had gotten here before me.
Which happened rather more frequently than occasionally.
I stepped through the doorway. The morning light was coming through the blinds the way it always did at this hour, falling across the mahogany desk in long stripes, catching the edge of the crystal award the PHL had sent over last month that I still hadn’t found a permanent place for because nothing in this office moved without my specific approval.
And Rhett was sitting in my chair.
Not the guest chairs in front of my desk.
My chair. The good one. The leather one behind the desk that I had picked out myself and that nobody sat in except me.
He had his feet up on the corner of my desk and a folder open in his lap and a cup of coffee from the good place two blocks over sitting on my desk next to his boots like he owned the entire building.
I stopped in the doorway.
“You’re in my chair,” I said.
He looked up. That slow grin of his started at one corner and worked its way across his face with absolutely no sense of urgency whatsoever. “Morning, Miss C.”
“That’s my chair, Rhett.”
“It is,” he agreed pleasantly, and didn’t move.
I crossed the room, set my clipboard on the desk, and held out my hand. He took it and stood in one motion, unfolding his considerable height in the small space behind my desk, and I slipped past him into my chair while he relocated to the edge of the desk beside me.
He handed me the folder.
“New investor packet from Hargrove’s group,” he said. “Seth sent it over last night. Terms are better than the last version.”
I opened it. Scanned the first page. Flipped to the terms section. “They dropped the operational oversight clause.”
“Completely.”
I looked up at him. “How.”
He picked up his coffee. He didn’t answer right away.
I watched his face. The way he was watching me back. The very small not-quite-smile at the corner of his mouth that said he was deciding which version of the answer to give me.
And it was at that moment that I remembered him crossing the ballroom at the Bellagio in March.
I had been talking to a Senator about a foundation grant.
I had been half-watching Rhett out of the corner of my eye the way I always half-watched Rhett, because three years of practice was hard to break.
I had seen him set down a champagne flute he hadn’t drunk from.
I had seen him walk across the room toward the silent auction tables.
I had not thought anything of it at the time.
He had been a man at a gala excusing himself to look at the auction items, presumably.
He had not been looking at the auction items.
“Rhett,” I said.
“You were busy with the Senator.”
“You had a conversation with my investor.”
“I had a conversation with a man at a party,” he said mildly.
“About hockey. And about what this franchise means to this city. And about the kind of ownership that built a championship team in three years from something nobody believed in.” He shrugged his good shoulder, the left one having been cleared fully six weeks after the championship, right on the doctor’s timeline. “He seemed interested.”
I looked at him for a long moment.
I thought about the rewrite of the term sheet.
The clean version Seth had dropped on my desk last night, sent over from Hargrove’s people without so much as a phone call to explain it.
Terms that would have taken three months of negotiation to drag out of a man like that under any other circumstances.
I thought about the months between that gala in March and this morning. Five. Almost six.
Five months that Rhett had walked in and out of my office with coffee from the good place.
Five months he’d straightened my glasses and tucked my hair behind my ear and read investor packets before I was awake.
Five months of casual easy presence, with not so much as a hint, not a flicker, not a single damn word about what he’d actually done.
He hadn’t told Coach. I could see that in the unbothered set of his shoulders every time the four of us were in a room.
He hadn’t told Brynn.
He hadn’t told Jett.
He hadn’t told a single soul who might have told me.
He’d just handled it. Quietly. The way he handled everything that actually mattered.
This man. This infuriating, enormous, soft-hearted, impossibly perceptive man who had spent three years making himself impossible to ignore and then spent the months since the championship making himself completely impossible to live without.
Who showed up at my office with coffee from the good place and sat in my chair just to make me tell him to move.
Who straightened my glasses with one finger and tucked my hair behind my ear and read investor packets before I woke up.
Who had stood at the boards of a championship arena in front of forty thousand people and kissed me like he had been waiting three years to do it in public.
Because he had.
“The PHL conduct committee closed their review,” I said.
He nodded. “I know. Seth called me too.”
“No findings. No sanctions.” I closed the folder. “Apparently an owner dating a player is only a conflict of interest if it can be demonstrated to compromise competitive integrity. And since we won the championship—”
“Hard to argue we weren’t competitive,” Rhett said.
“Extremely hard.” I set the folder on the desk. “Though the sports media tried for about six weeks.”
“They did.”
“And then Jett gave that interview.”
Rhett pressed his lips together. “He did.”