32. Empty Net
Chapter thirty-two
Empty Net
Luke
T he ice machine hums its low, mechanical prayer.
Same sound it made the night Emma showed up at midnight and I challenged her to one-on-one like a man without a functioning brain.
Same sound it made when I sat in this office after the Ridgemont loss and realized I was coaching with my gut instead of my clipboard.
Same sound it’s made every night I’ve spent in this building since August, which is most of them, because I don’t have hobbies.
I have hockey and a woman I’m not currently allowed to speak to.
Had hockey .
The rink is dark except for the after-hours glow.
No players. No drills. No clipboard, because the clipboard is in my office, which I cleaned out in eleven minutes because I’m pathologically organized and don’t keep personal items at work.
I’m sitting in the stands. Row twelve, center ice. The spot where scouts sit when they’re evaluating. Where Walsh sat three weeks ago and watched Emma play the kind of hockey that makes you rethink what’s possible.
Just like she played tonight.
My phone is in my hand. Not calling anyone. Not texting. Just scrolling .
Our thread. Mine and Emma’s. Five months of messages I should probably delete for legal reasons and will absolutely never delete. Because I’ve never deleted anything about Emma Cole. Not even when I was ignoring her.
I scroll past the practice notes with hidden messages in the first letters.
Past the midnight photo she sent from Iowa with Sloane’s dogs asleep on her lap, captioned “they like me better than you do.” Past the New Year’s text that started with “Resolution #1: you. Repeatedly.” Past the strawberry chapstick text from October that I’m fairly certain shortened my lifespan.
All the way back to the beginning. March . Before Silver Pine had even announced they were building a woman’s hockey team.
The message she’d sent after I didn’t respond to her happy birthday text.
You’re really just gonna ghost me, Anderson? Cool. Cool cool cool.
An entire summer of telling myself distance was protection. Turns out distance was just practice for the real thing.
Administrative leave. Standard institutional review. The language of a system processing a human situation it wasn’t designed to hold.
She won the championship tonight. Four goals.
In a game I coached from behind a wall of conditions that reduced me to a spectator on my own bench.
Couldn’t speak to her. To any of them. Couldn’t call the timeout I wanted when Westmore pressured in the second period.
Couldn’t say the six words that have become our shorthand for everything.
Play your game. Not theirs. Yours.
She didn’t need me to say them. That’s the thing.
That’s what Calloway and the board and the anonymous post and Drew fucking Markham don’t understand.
Emma Cole didn’t become a championship-winning, Olympic-caliber player because her coach was sleeping with her.
She became that because she’s been that since before I ever touched her.
Before I ever kissed her. Before I ever admitted what I felt.
I just had the privilege of watching it happen from five feet away.
“You know, for a guy who just won a conference title, you look like absolute shit.”
Zane Morgan drops into the seat beside me like he was invited. He was not invited. He’s also holding two beers, which suggests premeditation .
“Shouldn’t you be back in LA?” I ask without looking up from my phone. “Or at least at some overpriced club in the city? Isn’t that what LA’s golden boy does on night’s off?”
“Normally, yes. Bottle service, models, the whole thing. Very glamorous.” He extends a beer. “But I caught the game earlier instead. Figured you’d be here.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to watch Silver Pine—”
“Not why you came to the game, why’d you come here? Now?”
“To bring you beer.” He tilts it back and forth. “Doesn’t give answers, but neither does staring at an empty rink.”
I take the bottle. Open it. Drink in silence.
“She was incredible tonight,” Zane eventually comments. Not asking. Stating. The way you state that the sky is blue or that Sloane Kowalski has no volume control.
“Yeah.”
“Four goals. Against the team that beat you guys earlier this season.” He takes a long swig. “That’s not coaching, Luke. That’s not favoritism. That’s a generational talent playing out of her mind because she’s that good.”
“She is.”
“Then why are you’re sitting here in the dark looking like you tanked her career when what actually happened is that you built the program that gave her a stage?”
I don’t respond. Let the ice machine fill the silence instead.
“The lying was bad,” Zane adds, quieter now. “Gray’s got a right to be pissed. You know that.”
“I do.”
“But he’ll come around. You know that too.”
I’m less sure about that. But I don’t say it, because Zane didn’t show up at midnight with two beers to hear me spiral.
He showed up because that’s what brothers do.
The ones who aren’t bound by blood but by something just as permanent—years of shared ice, shared losses, shared understanding that the people who show up in the dark are the ones who matter.
“Walsh calls tomorrow,” I tell him. “The Olympic committee.”
“And?”
“And I’m not her coach anymore. At least for now. Whatever Walsh decides, it won’t be because of me. ”
“Bullshit. It’ll be because of everything you did for months before this mess.
” Zane finishes his beer. Sets it under the seat like we’re still twenty and trashing the student section after a win.
“She’s going to make that team, Luke. And we’re all going to be there when they play for gold in Milan next February.
So stop staring at ice and start figuring out how to fix the parts that are actually broken. ”
“Which parts?”
“Call your best friend. Not tonight. But soon. Before he decides the story he’s telling himself is the only version.
” Zane stands. Stretches. Looks down at me with an expression I haven’t seen from him often—no charm, no polish, just the steady presence of someone who gives a damn.
“You’re not alone in this, Anderson. Even if it feels like it right now. ”
Then he walks up the stairs and out of the arena, leaving me in the blue-white glow with an empty beer and a phone full of messages I can’t reply to and the quiet, stubborn certainty that the woman who scored four goals tonight would tell me the same thing Zane just did.
Stop staring at ice. Start fixing what’s broken.
I pocket my phone. Stand. My knee clicks on the way up—the familiar, permanent reminder that I’ve rebuilt a life from wreckage before.
I can do it again.