7. Briggs
brIGGS
The Harry Reid Airport refuses to let me forget where I am, even for a second.
Slot machines are chirping at eight in the morning. A bachelorette party in matching pink sashes is clustered around a gate four down, one of them already crying into a plastic cup.
I make it through security on autopilot, the professional version of me taking the wheel while the rest of me stays stuck in the dirt at the cemetery. I find a seat at the gate with my back to the wall and pull out my phone, seeking a distraction from the noise in my head.
Forty-one unread messages. The team chat has been going since six—something about Augie losing a bet and having to wear a kid’s My Little Pony backpack to morning skate. There’s a photo of him looking martyred and ridiculous. I send back a thumbs-up.
From Ted, there are three missed calls and a wall of green bubbles, all variations on call me when you land and we should talk about the optics. The man never stops, always three moves ahead, selling the version of me that earns a commission. How thoughtful.
I open the browser instead of replying, searching my own name and picking at it like a scab.
Maxwell expected back in Charlotte lineup Thursday following family tragedy.
My brother, reduced to a subordinate clause in a sports update. The comments are exactly what you’d expect—prayers up, hope he can still produce down the stretch, somebody arguing about my plus-minus under a photo of me at the funeral I didn’t know anyone took.
It’s a curated performance of grief for an audience I never asked for.
I close it, the screen going dark. Put my headphones in, put on my flying playlist—something loud enough to replace thinking.
Boarding starts. I find my window seat in first class and fold six feet and three inches of myself into the space they give you for it. The flight attendant offers me a drink before takeoff, her polite mask firmly in place.
“Jack and Coke, please.”
“Of course.”
There’s a flicker—the half second where her face does the thing, that ghost of recognition—but she lets it go without asking for a piece of me. I’m grateful for the mercy.
I get maybe four minutes of peace out of it.
“Oh my God.” A woman’s voice, two rows up, half turned in her seat. Mid-twenties, wearing an Aces hat. “You’re Briggs Maxwell. You are, right? My boyfriend’s going to lose his mind—he’s a huge fan. We went to the game last month, the one against Colorado—”
“That’s me.” The smile deploys due to years of muscle memory.
“Can I—is it weird to ask for a picture? He’ll never believe me.” She’s already got her phone out, already leaning into my space, and I’m already saying sure, of course, because that’s the deal. I angle my head toward her, and the smile holds, and—
“I’m so sorry, by the way,” she says gently. “I heard about your brother. I can’t imagine. He was so young.”
The bottom drops out of my world.
On the outside, the performance holds. I keep the grin fixed for one final beat.
“I appreciate that. It really does mean a lot.”
She retreats into her seat, satisfied with the interaction, and not a single soul in this pressurized tube suspects that something just snapped behind my ribs and started rattling around, wrecking me from the inside.
Twenty-four, I think. The number is a weight as I fly away, leaving a kitchen in Henderson where his Sharpie-labeled pill bottles are still littering the counters—
The plane begins its pushback. The overhead lights give a sharp flicker.
My heart is misfiring. It’s too frantic and far too high, hammering against my throat in a way that makes the air feel scarce. My hands have gone cold and tingling, that familiar jitter under the skin, and I can’t find a full breath.
It’s like a heavy hand is splayed across my sternum, pressing down until my lungs stop working.
Count it down. It’s the only trick I have. I shut my eyes and run the sequence—four in, hold, four out—the same mental grounding I use on the bench when the building is screaming and I need the shaking to stop before the puck drops.
But the technique fails me. The count slips away at three, and I have to reset, and when I lose the thread again, the engines spool up into that high-pitched whine. We’re moving now, committed to the ascent, and there’s no room for an exit.
I lean my forehead against the cold glass. Outside, Vegas tilts and falls away. The Strip in the flat morning light looks like a collection of toy boxes, the desert pressing in to reclaim the glitter. Somewhere down in that sprawl, my father sits at home.
You’re allowed to leak.
I haven’t allowed it. Not during the service, not at the headstone while the earth was still loose, not even when I was packing his history into cardboard boxes. I’ve been so goddamn proud of myself for it.
And now I’m failing at thirty thousand feet. The genuinely humiliating part is the ambiguity—I can’t tell if this is actual grief or just my body finally sending the invoice for a week spent pretending I was fine.
The flight attendant pauses by my row, crouching slightly to find my eyes, her voice dropped to a professional whisper. “Sir? Are you doing alright?”
“Fine,” I manage to rasp.
The word deploys on its own. I can still hear Ophelia’s voice in the back of my skull—being fine and being okay aren’t the same thing.
“I’m really fine,” I say, firmer this time. “Just—a bit of turbulence.”
She gives a small nod and places a fresh water on my tray. “I’ll check back in a few.” She leaves me with the dignity of the lie, and I’m grateful for that.
I drink the water. I count the breaths. Slowly—so damn slowly—the pressure on my chest eases up, a fraction of an inch at a time. The tingling recedes from my fingertips, and my heart eventually climbs back down to where it belongs.
By the time the plane levels off, I can breathe again. I can almost pretend the whole episode never happened.
I pull out my phone, my thumb shaking as I open a new thread.
Briggs
on the plane. he’s in your hands now. don’t let him talk his way out of the afternoon PT
I stare at the screen. I delete the last part. Type it again. Then I clear the whole thing.
thank you for yesterday. he really needed that laugh
I hit Send before I can overthink the sentiment. Then I set the phone face-down on the plastic tray, close my eyes, and let the engines drown out the rest.
Morning skate stretches into the afternoon because our coach, Jude Bellan, is in a foul mood. It’s not a radical departure from his baseline, but today, the air around him feels especially combustible.
Montréal is on the calendar for Thursday, and Bellan has decided the only remedy for our recent lack of effort is to run bag skates until the ice starts to melt. We’re doing blue-line-to-blue-line sprints in sets of five.
Kyo is currently hunched over the boards at the far end, looking like he might actually pass away before the whistle blows.
Augie glides past him, barely breathing hard. “Don’t go toward the light, rook. We need the cap space for the trade deadline.”
“I hope,” Kyo wheezes, his face a vivid shade of purple, “you all get traded to Ottawa.”
Augie grins, tapping the kid’s skates with his stick. “Hear that, Maxie? He’s finally developing some grit.”
I’m carving a slow circle in the neutral zone, barely registering the noise. It’s been less than a week since I flew back from the funeral, and I’ve seamlessly settled back into this version of myself.
Present enough to avoid a fine. Distant enough that nobody tries to start a real conversation.
The front office offered more bereavement leave, but the thought of sitting in my quiet condo with nothing but the static in my skull was worse than the sprints. More leave just means more paperwork and more of Ted fielding calls about my “mental readiness.”
It’s easier to just be a body in a jersey.
Out here, I’m not a man who just buried his baby brother. I’m just the winger who’s been soft on the backcheck since the second intermission.
Bellan blows the whistle, mercifully. “Flow drill, then you’re done. Try not to embarrass me.”
The rotation is simple—give and go, loop wide, find the twine. It’s the kind of mechanical sequence my body handles on autopilot while my mind drifts elsewhere. Augie hits me with a saucer pass that’s almost too pretty.
I roof it, and he immediately points his stick at me, an accusation in his grin. “There he is.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve been playing like a senior citizen all morning.” He says it lightly, but I can tell he’s watching me closely. “No offense. Most of them have a better backcheck than you.”
“None taken,” I mutter.
Down the bench, Ekman says something in Swedish that makes ?berg laugh so hard he nearly eats it on a crossover.
Duval, our goalie, who’s from a small town outside Trois-Rivières and has never once used a contraction in English, is loudly relitigating a blown call from a game two weeks ago that nobody else remembers.
I know these men. That’s the nature of a team—enough shared miles and locker-room hours that the mystery evaporates. Somewhere in the middle of all those flights and bag skates, a few of them became the closest thing I have to a family.
There are no surprises here. After the last two weeks, I could kiss every one of them for the consistency.
We file off the ice in a noisy cluster, the sound bouncing off the tiled walls. Kyo is already flat on his back in the center of the room, still half-armored, staring at the fluorescent lights.
“I think my soul is still at the blue line,” he announces to the ceiling.
“First one’s always free, rook,” Augie says, stepping over him. “Get up. You’re blocking traffic.”
Kyo groans. “This is my permanent residence now.”
I drop onto my bench and begin the tedious process of unlacing. Augie occupies the next stall, bracing his elbows on his knees as he leans in, his voice dropping an octave.
“You good?”
“Yeah, bud. Perfect.”
“Don’t give me that. I’m actually asking.”
“I know you are.” I work a knot out of my shoulder. “I’m good, Augie. Honestly, being here is better than being left to my own thoughts.”
“Okay,” he says, letting it go. It’s a rare show of restraint for a guy who usually has to be physically de-escalated from a conversation. “Then you’re coming to dinner. Hartwell’s place. Low-key dinner.”
Sam Hartwell is our captain, a veteran defenseman with a massive spread in Myers Park and a permanent open-door policy after games. He’s a decent guy and a fun time, and I still just want to go home and power down in the dark.
“Augie, I really don’t think—”
“It’s a mandatory session. I’ve decided.” He stands, stretching, and peels his jersey over his head. “You don’t have to put one on. You don’t have to be charming. You can sit in a corner and be an asshole, I genuinely don’t care. But you’re having a beer with the boys.”
I look up at him, defeated. “Fuck. Fine.”
Across the room, Charlie Foster is attempting to convince Kyo that he once scored a between-the-legs beauty in a shootout. Fozzy arrived at the deadline last year—hands like a magician, social instincts of a goldfish.
Kyo isn’t buying the story. “Tape exists,” he says. “Provide the evidence.”
“It was juniors,” Fozzy insists. “Before iPhones.”
“Phones existed in juniors. You’re twenty-three, not fifty.”
“It was a rural area! Terrible reception!”
“He’s lying,” Augie yells over, not even looking. “He told me it was a backhand flip last week.”
“It was a backhand between the legs,” Fozzy says with wounded dignity. “It was both. It was a masterpiece, and the goalie actually wept.”
The room erupts.
I find myself smiling despite myself. It’s a small, vapid warmth in my chest that catches me off guard. Four days ago, I was having a panic attack on a plane. Now I’m watching a kid lie about a shootout goal and feeling almost human again.
Maybe there’s hope for me yet.
My phone buzzes in my stall. When I grab it, there are two messages from my agent, an email from the league, and a single text from Evie. I ignore the noise and go straight to hers.
Evie
your dad finished the full afternoon set without a single threat from me. record it for posterity
also, he’s convinced your mustache is a “formal cry for help.” care to elaborate?
I huff a laugh through my nose. Augie clocks the shift instantly.
“Who’s that?” he asks.
I shove the phone into my bag. “Nobody.”
He cranes his neck, eyes wide. “Aw, Maxie. Is it a girl?”
I shake my head. “It’s just the woman taking care of my father.”
“Uh-huh.” He says it slowly, savoring the moment. “Sure. And she’s got you grinning at your lap like a teenager.”
“She’s doing an exceptional job at the thing I hired her for. Sue me for being relieved.”
I shove him off my stall and type a quick reply.
Briggs
the mustache is permanent. it’s the only stable thing in my life right now
Evie
tragic. but I admire the commitment to the bit
I pocket the phone before Augie can manage a second look. But the grin holds on, stubborn and unearned, and I don’t manage to kill it. Two texts from a gravedigger, and I’ve finally stopped bracing for the worst.