37. Epilogue
Epilogue
Luke
Ten Months Later, February
T he arena smells like cold air and anticipation and something chemically European that I can’t identify. Twelve thousand seats, almost full. Flags I can name and flags I can’t. A drum line from the Finnish section that started forty minutes ago and shows no signs of mercy.
I’ve been sitting in 108, row three, for an hour.
Arrived early because I’m constitutionally incapable of being late to anything, a quality Emma finds both endearing and clinically concerning.
The seat is good. Sienna secured it two months ago, along with credentials, a parking pass, a family liaison, and what I suspect is a dossier on every IIHF official in the building.
She doesn’t do things halfway. Never has.
It’s why Grayson married her. It’s why athletes trust her with their careers.
It’s why I trusted her with the jeweler’s name two months ago, but that’s a different story. One that comes later.
Grayson drops into the seat beside me carrying two cups of something hot and wearing the same jersey I am.
Number four. COLE. We’ve matched for every game this tournament.
Fourteen days of red, blue and white in a country that prefers azzurro, and neither of us has felt ridiculous about it for a single second .
“Espresso,” he says, handing me one. “Guy at the stand looked at me like I was insane for ordering American sizes. I think I offended his heritage.”
“You did. You offend Italian coffee culture every morning.”
“Their cups are the size of a thimble, Luke. I’m six-three. I need volume.”
He settles in. His knee starts bouncing immediately, which is his pre-game tell and has been since college.
It used to drive Coach Marner insane during playoffs.
Now it drives Sienna insane, which she manages by placing her hand on his thigh with the firm pressure of a woman who’s been calming this man’s nervous system for five years.
She’s on his other side. Six months pregnant in a Team USA jersey that’s stretching around her belly, phone in her free hand, and still looking like she could broker a merger between contractions if the situation required it.
Behind us, Jeanette is next to Sky and Chase, already dabbing her eyes with a scarf that has an American flag on one side and a wolf on the other.
Custom. She had it made. Because Jeanette Cole does not attend her daughter’s Olympic games without craft-adjacent emotional support.
Zane’s on my left. Quiet in a way that isn’t like him.
He’s been quieter the whole trip, actually—still charming, still performing the easy confidence that makes him Zane Morgan, but with something running underneath that I’ve been tracking since our dinner in New York two weeks ago.
The one where we talked about how he was settling in as a Grizzly after his trade last month.
A New York Grizzly. Playing with Grayson. A trade he'd apparently requested.
“Big crowd,” he observes.
“Sold out.”
“Emma’s good?”
“Great.” I saw her just before coming here.
Stopped by the village because it’s become our ritual, built across fourteen days of stolen hours between her schedule and my inability to be in the same city without being near her.
Today, she was calm. Focused. Taping her stick in that meticulous pattern while Sloane argued with someone on the phone about whether a pregame playlist should include Swedish pop. “She’s locked in.”
“Good.” He’s scanning the arena, and I realize it’s for the woman who showed up to breakfast this morning. The VP of Operations for the Grizzlies, Alexis Westgate. The woman who called him out for wearing sweatpants instead of his usual designer attire.
“She’s not here?” I ask and Zane’s head snaps to mine.
“Who?”
“Don’t play dumb, Z. Westgate.”
He looks taken aback. “What makes you think I’m looking for her?”
I pretend to think on his question for all of two seconds. “Because I know the look. Wore it for years.”
His gaze returns to the ice. “Drop it, Anderson.”
“Wasn’t picking it up. Just noting.”
“Note quieter.”
The lights in the arena shift. Warmup is ending. Both teams start filtering toward their benches, and the crowd noise builds into a roar that makes conversation impossible.
Which is fine. Zane and I can finish that conversation another day. He’ll talk when he’s ready. Or he won’t, and I’ll watch him make the same mistakes I made and be there when he needs someone who understands what it costs to want the wrong person.
Except they’re never the wrong person. That’s the thing I learned. They’re the right person at the wrong time, or in the wrong context, or on the wrong side of a rule you thought was more important than it turned out to be. And you either figure that out before it’s too late, or you don’t.
I figured it out.
I hope he does too.
The Finnish team takes the ice first. Blue and white. Organized, disciplined, the kind of program that produces players through system and patience. They’re good. Ranked second in the world for a reason.
Then the Americans.
I find her immediately. Have always been able to find her—in a crowded rink, across a parking lot, in a room full of people who don’t know what they’re looking at.
My eyes go to Emma the way my hand goes to her hip.
Involuntary. Hardwired. The product of eight years of watching this woman move through the world like it was built to be rearranged by her.
Number four. Skating beside Sloane, the two of them shoulder to shoulder, moving with the synchronized certainty of two players who’ve been building toward this specific moment since a September practice in eastern New York where neither of them knew what they were becoming.
She looks good. Not in the way I usually mean when I think that, though that’s also true and is a thought I’ll revisit at a more appropriate time. She looks good the way an athlete looks when every system is firing: fluid, powerful, calm. The stance is right. Weight centered. Knees bent.
The stance I spent a season correcting. The one she kept loading wrong because—
Well. Because she had her reasons. And they worked.
Grayson leans over. “She looks good.”
“Yeah.”
“Fast. Her first step’s gotten quicker since the exhibition in December.”
“New edge work. Whitmore-Kane’s doing, no doubt.”
He nods, watching with the eye of a professional who can read skating the way other people read text. “The Finnish defender is going to try to set the pace early. Physical. Get in Emma’s head.”
“She won’t get in Emma’s head.”
“No,” he agrees. “She won’t.”
We watch warmups in the comfortable silence of two men who speak hockey as a first language.
It’s easy between us now. Not the way it was before.
That version had a lie embedded in its foundation, a load-bearing wall made of omission.
This version is built on rubble, which sounds worse but isn’t.
Rubble means something stood here before.
Means someone cared enough to build it. Means the new thing rising from it knows what the ground can hold because it’s already tested the limits.
My best friend. My brother. Sitting beside me in a jersey that matches mine, watching the woman we both love prepare to do something neither of us can do for her.
“Hey Luke.”
“Yeah.”
“You remember that conversation sophomore year? The bench outside the rink?”
The promise. Look out for her. Protect her. From guys like me .
“I remember.”
He’s quiet for a moment. On the ice, Emma takes a practice shot that beats the goalie clean.
“You kept it,” Grayson says. “Not the way I meant. Not the way either of us expected.” He turns, looks at me directly. “But you kept it. Every scouting package, every phone call, every time you put her future ahead of your own. You kept the promise, Luke. Just took me a while to see it.”
I don’t trust my voice. Nod instead. He nods back. And that’s enough. For us, that’s always been enough.
The warmup ends. Teams retreat to their locker rooms for the final fifteen minutes before puck drop.
The ice is resurfaced. The jumbotron cycles through highlight reels and player profiles and graphics.
Emma’s face appears on the screen, an action shot.
She’s mid-stride with the expression she wears when she’s hunting.
Behind us, Jeanette makes a sound that’s somewhere between a sob and a battle cry.
“That’s my baby,” she announces to no one and everyone. Chase pats her arm. Sky hands her a tissue and I catch the diamond on her finger. The one I was present for when Chase asked her to be his forever person.
Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes until Emma Cole plays for Olympic gold.
I lean back in my seat. Close my eyes. Let the arena noise wash over me.
And think about the thing I haven’t let myself think about all day.
I was supposed to be on that ice.
Not this ice. Not this game. But ice like it.
An arena like this. A tournament that mattered.
I was twenty years old, a first-round projection, skating with the kind of certainty that comes from never having been broken.
I was going to play for my entire career.
That was the plan. The trajectory. The thing that felt as inevitable as gravity.
Then my knee happened. And gravity reversed.
I spent three years after the injury believing that hockey had been taken from me. That the universe identified the thing I loved most and removed it, leaving me alive but hollowed out, a player-shaped outline with nothing inside.
Emma filled it.
Not with hockey. With something I didn’t have a name for at the time.
A voice on the phone when I needed it most. A girl who said you’re not broken with such conviction that I started, slowly, to believe her.
A woman who got my number inked on her hip before I’d figured out what she already knew: that the worst thing that ever happened to me was the first step toward everything that mattered.
I’m not on that ice tonight. I’ll never be on ice like that again, not as a player.
And there are moments—quiet ones, usually late at night when Emma’s not there and I’m staring at the ceiling—when the grief of that still surfaces.
Not sharp anymore. Smooth, like sea glass.
Something that was jagged once but has been tumbled by time and love and a life I didn’t plan, into something I can hold without bleeding.
I hold it now. In this seat. In this arena. With my best friend beside me and his mother behind me, and a ring in my jacket pocket that I haven’t told anyone about except the jeweler who made it.
I open my eyes. The ice is fresh. The lights are shifting.
The teams take the ice for the gold medal game and the sound that follows is unlike anything I’ve experienced. Not louder than other arenas, just… different. Layered with the weight of what’s at stake, like the air itself has thickened to hold the moment.
Emma’s in the starting lineup. Left wing. Reese Whitmore-Kane at center, and something that’s lead to way too much drama given Sloane is on her right.
But not tonight.
Tonight they’re a team.
Emma settles into her stance. Shakes her arms loose. Adjusts her grip.
And looks up.
Into twelve thousand people. Into flags and noise and the blinding significance of the biggest moment of her athletic life.
She finds me.
She always finds me. The way I always find her. The way we’ve been finding each other since she was seventeen and I was twenty and neither of us understood yet that the person on the other end of the phone was the rest of our lives.
Or maybe she’s always known that. It just took me longer to accept it.
Her eyes meet mine. Steady. Clear. The fear is there—Emma’s too intelligent for fear to be absent—but it’s been converted into something else. Fuel. Purpose.
Strength and determination .
I nod at her. She nods back. Our whole language in a single gesture.
Grayson grabs my arm. Sienna takes his hand.
Jeanette grips my shoulder from behind, her fingers pressing hard enough that I can feel the years in them.
The years of early morning practices and borrowed equipment and a single mother raising two athletes on a nurse’s salary and never, not once, letting either of them believe they couldn’t have everything.
The ref skates to center ice.
I reach into my jacket. Not consciously. More like the way my hand finds Emma’s hip. Automatic. Certain. The body knowing what the mind hasn’t announced.
My fingers close around the ring box.
Small. Velvet. Containing a sapphire the color of everything that matters: Silver Pine blue. Grayson’s hair tie. A bridesmaid dress at an April wedding. The jersey I’m wearing right now.
I asked Grayson three weeks ago. Called him on a Tuesday night, the way I used to call Emma—late, serious, unable to wait for a better time because the truth doesn’t care about your schedule.
“ I want to marry your sister. ”
Silence. Long enough to be terrifying.
Then: “ Mom’s already added your name to the family Christmas card .”
Tonight. After the game.
The ref raises the puck.
The arena holds its breath.
I hold the ring.
And Emma Cole—the girl who called me when I was drowning, the woman who tattooed my number on her skin, the player who turned a first-year program into a championship and then turned herself into an Olympian—leans into her stance and waits for the puck to drop.
It drops.
She explodes forward.
And I let go of the box in my pocket. Sit back. Watch her fly.
She doesn’t know what’s coming tonight. Doesn’t know about the sapphire or the question I’ve been carrying across an ocean.
But I do. And for the first time in eight years, the waiting doesn’t hurt.
It feels like the beginning of something I’m finally ready for.
Want to find out what happens at the Olympic games?
Want to know who the woman is that might finally tame Zane Morgan?
Continue the Playing the Game Series with the 4th and final novel, Playing it Straight, expected to release in October of 2026