Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A minute left and down two, Patrick threw everything he had left into it.
He won the puck along the wall, moved it to Kubara at the line, crashed the net for a rebound that never came.
For a few seconds, eighteen thousand people in his own building were on their feet and roaring, sure they were about to see a miracle.
Then the horn killed it, and the roar dropped out of the building all at once.
He stood at the far blue line and watched the other bench empty, gloves and sticks flung across the ice in front of it, the whole team collapsing into a pile as their goalie raced out from the net to meet them.
The series was over, four games to two. The Syndicate’s season ended quietly, a team that had played well enough to extend it but never well enough to advance.
Kubara tapped him on the shin pad, the captain’s skate-by.
Patrick followed the line of gray jerseys toward the bench.
His legs felt fine. His breathing was even.
The physical machinery was intact, which was the cruelest part of losing, the body insisting it could keep going while the scoreboard said otherwise.
The handshake line formed at center ice.
Patrick shook hands with each player, same pressure, same nod, including the center who’d beaten him clean on the series-winning goal in game six and the defenseman whose cross-checks had left a bruise chain along his ribs.
He didn’t linger on either. He got through the line with his spine straight because it was the only part of losing he could control.
Losing at home had its own cruelty. On the road, you got on a plane and let the flight do some of the work of ending it. Tonight, there was nowhere to go but their own tunnel and locker room, a roomful of men sinking into the stalls they’d dressed in all season with nothing left to do but feel it.
Nobody spoke at first. Patrick sat in his stall and began undressing.
Gloves, helmet, the slow work of unlacing skates with fingers that had been gripping a stick all game.
He’d played twenty-six minutes tonight, logged four blocked shots, kept his gap tight through three periods of Toronto’s forechecks.
What the numbers couldn’t show lived in the margins, the half-step he’d lost in the third period of game four, the positioning lapse in game five that Toronto exploited with a cross-seam pass he should have read two seconds earlier.
They were small failures, and they compounded over a series.
Pruitt broke the silence by throwing his helmet into his bag. “Bullshit,” he said.
Kubara looked up. He held Pruitt’s gaze until Pruitt exhaled, sat down, and started pulling tape from his socks.
Barlow came in a while later. He stood at the center of the room and delivered the end-of-season address. He thanked them for the year. He named specific moments: Kubara’s overtime winner in game three, Pruitt’s blocked shot in game one, Dev’s two-way play.
“You did your jobs,” Barlow said. “The result doesn’t change that.”
Patrick heard it at a distance. The words were kind, yet they meant nothing because the people who actually decided things didn’t sit in this room.
To them, a roster was a spreadsheet, and every man in here was a number that justified itself or didn’t.
A season like the one he’d just played bought him nothing he could count on keeping.
He’d learned that young, in junior hockey, when a coach shook his hand after cutting him and said, with complete sincerity, “You did nothing wrong.” Patrick had done nothing wrong plenty of times since, and it had never once been enough to keep him anywhere.
He showered fast, dressed in his suit, and sat back in his stall with his phone.
The team group chat had blown up. His mother had sent two texts, both in French, asking if he was okay and telling him she loved him in the same breath because Sylvie Fontaine did not separate inquiry from reassurance.
His father had sent one. Fier de toi, mon gars. Proud of you.
And Asher.
I’m sorry. That was a helluva series, and you were the best player on the ice tonight. I know that doesn’t help, but I’m saying it anyway.
Sent the moment the game ended. Asher had watched every game of the series.
They’d talked nearly every night too, late, after both their games, the two of them wrung out and easy on the phone in the dark.
It had become the part of the day Patrick pointed himself toward.
That night in Appleton, in Asher’s bed, they’d sworn they’d find the time for this, and they’d believed it, both of them, completely.
A whole series of stolen, half-awake phone calls had shown him what finding the time actually looked like.
From the wreckage of this room, Appleton already felt like another life.
He wanted to call him. He sat with his thumb over Asher’s name long enough to know that hearing that voice right now would take him apart, and he couldn’t come apart here, not in a room full of his teammates. So he typed instead.
Appreciate it. Long night. I’ll call you tomorrow.
He sent it before he could make it any colder than that.
He leaned back against the stall and closed his eyes. The room moved around him, the zip of bags, the low bass of Pruitt’s voice, the scratch of a pen on paper. A team packing up a season.
Marc called the next morning.
Patrick was standing at the kitchen counter with a coffee he’d made before dawn and hadn’t finished.
The game had ended late. He’d driven home, showered, managed a few hours of thin sleep.
Woke to the alarm he’d forgotten to disable and lay in the dark a while.
He’d been up since, moving through a morning that had no practice, no video session, no structure.
His phone rang. He picked up on the second ring.
“How are you feeling?” Marc said.
“Fine.”
“You lost a playoff series last night.”
“I’m aware.”
Marc paused. The pause carried a different weight than the pleasantries. “I need to talk to you about the protection list.”
Patrick set his coffee on the counter. The mug made no sound, centered on the tile.
“The Syndicate’s front office reached out yesterday,” Marc continued. “Before the game. I held it until this morning.”
“What changed?”
He heard it in Marc’s tone. The careful pacing, the fact that he’d opened with how are you feeling instead of leading with the information.
“Cap picture,” Marc said. “Tighter than they projected. Kovacs’s extension kicked in. The new goaltending contract eats more room than the old one. They can’t protect the whole roster, and on the blue line it comes down to one spot too few. Somebody’s left out.”
“And I’m the somebody.”
“You’re in the conversation. That’s different.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. They’ve got three weeks to submit the list. You’re one of four defensemen they’re evaluating.”
“Who are the other three?”
“I can’t—”
“Marc.”
Marc exhaled. “Pruitt’s protected. His contract and his role make him untouchable. The kid from the third pairing is an RFA. They can let him go and re-sign him after the draft if the Zia Suns don’t bite. That leaves you and Harmon.”
Brett Harmon. Twenty-four, left-handed, a second-round pick. Younger, cheaper, with a higher ceiling. Patrick kept this to himself. The numbers were the numbers.
“Your play this year was excellent,” Marc said. “Twenty-two minutes a night. Top pair in the playoffs. The coaching staff trusts you with the most important minutes of the game.”
“That has value to a team that already has me. To a team making a protection list, it has a number. What’s my cap hit versus Harmon’s?”
Silence. Then Marc said it. “Harmon’s at one-point-two. You’re at three-point-eight.”
“So they can protect Harmon and use the remaining cap space to protect another forward.”
“That’s one scenario.”
“That’s the scenario, Marc.”
Another pause. “The Syndicate values you. That’s not a line. The GM doesn’t want to lose you. But protection lists are about math, and the math doesn’t care about what anyone wants. You need to be prepared for the possibility that they leave you exposed and hope the Zia Suns take someone else.”
“And if they don’t take someone else?”
“Then we have a conversation about Santa Fe.”
The sentence sat on the counter beside the cold coffee.
Two thousand miles from Chicago. A team that wouldn’t play its first game until the fall, a roster the draft would cobble together out of everyone else’s castoffs, a desert city with no hockey history and no obvious reason to have a team at all.
“I don’t want to have that conversation,” Patrick said.
“I know. And we may not need to. Three weeks is a long time. The cap picture can change. I’m telling you now because you handle information better than uncertainty.”
He was right. Patrick had built his life around the principle that preparation diminished threat. But this was a front office running numbers on a spreadsheet, weighing his twenty-two minutes a night against Harmon’s cheaper contract and longer runway.
“Patrick?”
“I’m here.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Keep me informed. Don’t manage the information. If something changes, call.”
“I will. And, Patrick, take a few days. See someone. Don’t sit in that apartment turning it over by yourself.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be fine sitting in that apartment turning it over. That’s not the same thing.”
They hung up. Patrick set the phone on the counter and didn’t move for a while.
Three weeks until the protection list. Then the draft. Then a decision that would determine whether this apartment, this city, this life he’d assembled piece by piece, remained his.
He poured out the cold coffee. Made a fresh cup. Drank it standing in the same spot and felt the expansion draft settle into the space behind his ribs where he kept the things he couldn’t fix.
His phone buzzed.
Asher
Morning. You home?
Yep.
Then he made himself add the rest because honesty was a muscle he’d been building.
Talked to Marc. Expansion-draft stuff.
Three dots. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Good stuff or bad stuff?
The honest answer was he didn’t know yet. The protective answer was it’s fine. The answer that would mean letting someone all the way in was one he couldn’t type and wasn’t sure he could say aloud.
Complicated. I’ll tell you about it later.
Okay. I’m here when you’re ready.
He set the phone down. Asher’s running shoes were by the door where he’d left them on his way out the last time, scuffed and mud-stained, the laces still loose.
Patrick had walked past them for weeks without a second thought.
This morning, they felt like a reminder of everything that was on the line.
With Santa Fe two thousand miles out on the horizon, an old reflex he’d thought he was done with stirred at the back of his mind, quiet and cold, and counted up everything he suddenly had to lose.
He didn’t follow it. Not yet. But it had stirred, and he’d felt it.
That was new. He carried the small cold weight of it into the bedroom to unpack.
He folded his suits. Sorted his laundry.
Put his skates in the bag designated for off-ice storage and his sticks in the corner of the closet.
The equipment smelled like the series. He’d wash everything later.
For now, the ritual of organization was enough.
His phone buzzed again. His mother, a voice message in French.
Sylvie talked about the garden. The neighbor’s fence.
A recipe Patrick had declared inedible and she’d declared a success.
At the end, without transition, she said the rest. Tu as bien joué, mon c?ur.
On est fiers. You played well, sweetheart. We’re proud.
He saved the message.
The morning light moved across the floor. It was the first day since training camp with nothing in it.
His phone showed Asher’s message. I’m here when you’re ready.
He set it face-down on the counter. He wasn’t ready yet. But he left it there instead of clearing it, Asher’s words waiting for whenever he found the nerve to answer them, and for tonight, that was the most he had in him.