19. Briggs
brIGGS
The Aces splash my face across the jumbotron midway through warm-ups. HOMETOWN KID, the graphic announces, looming over a shot of younger me wearing a draft-day suit that was three sizes too large.
I focus on the edge of my blade and keep my head down. This arena is a new addition to Vegas, finished long after I’d made my exit. It’s made of black glass with gold trim, essentially a casino with a sheet of ice in the center.
Down at the far end, parked right against the glass, my father is a lone streak of brick-red in a bowl full of Vegas gold. He’s wearing my jersey, MAXWELL stretched across his shoulders, while Danny sits beside him in a windbreaker.
Four tickets sat at will call. Two got picked up.
I knew this already. The box office confirms these things if you ask, which I did because I have a penchant for punishment. I glide past the barrier and rap my stick twice against the partition in front of my father.
He’s standing upright in the middle of nineteen thousand people with his cane hooked uselessly over his forearm.
Augie pulls up beside me at the stripe. “Good turnout for the hometown hero.”
“They came to see us lose,” I mutter.
“Naturally.” He jerks his chin toward the glass. “Your old man made the trip to watch you ruin their night. Let’s give him a performance worth the ticket.”
I spend the opening frame playing with a jagged edge, and the aggression works. Six minutes in, Augie secures a draw and feeds me the puck. I walk the boards, cycle toward the high slot, and put a heavy wrister through a screen that catches the twine before their goalie can blink.
The arena goes quiet except for one pocket of glass where a sixty-year-old man is hammering his fist against the boards with a purely delighted grin. I point at him on the loop back. He raises a fist.
For a while, I’m actually useful. My legs are there, and I’m winning the foot races. I finish every check like it’s a personal debt, because it is—every gold jersey represents the organization that signed that predator Jake Mercer, and I have a great deal to say about that with my shoulder.
We’re leading by one in the second when the noise in my head suddenly ratchets up.
I’m mid-shift, coasting toward the bench, when I catch a hit of Carolina blue eight rows back. Ophelia is sitting perfectly still in a crowd that’s on its feet, her strawberry blonde curls catching the overheads. She’s watching me over the glass.
Whatever’s been holding my focus together goes all at once.
The next shift, I leave the zone early, looking for a breakaway that isn’t coming, and their defenseman walks into the space I vacated and puts it past Duval. Tie game. Two shifts after that, I do it again, drifting high while the play dies in our corner without me.
Bellan catches me by the jersey at the bench. “You’re cherry-picking, Maxwell. Get below the puck, or get comfortable at the end of the bench.”
“Yeah, well—”
“I don’t want to hear it. Whatever is rattling around in your skull can wait until the final horn.”
It can’t, but I give him the nod anyway.
Then I go out and cross-check their winger in the numbers three seconds after the whistle, which is the kind of thing a kid in juniors does.
They score on the ensuing power play. It’s entirely my fault, but the guys on the bench are gracious enough to let the silence do the talking.
We escape with the win anyway. Fozzy manages to bury a pair in the final frame, and Augie salts it away with an empty-netter to make it 4–2. The locker room afterward is loose and loud. Fozzy is already relitigating both his goals, adding more detail with every telling.
I sit at my stall with a victory over the team I despise, in the valley that raised me, with my father in the building, and I feel like a ghost. The entire night is happening to someone else.
“Podium wants you,” a staffer says, leaning into the room.
I turn in six minutes of professional dialogue. Homecoming, emotional night, great to have family here. The performance deploys and holds. Nobody asks the hard questions, and I’m grateful for the mercy.
Afterward, showered and back in my suit, I take the back hallway toward the family room, where my dad and Danny are waiting to say goodbye before we bus to the terminal.
Ophelia is rooted in the center of the corridor.
She’s clutching a small purse in both hands, positioned directly in front of the door. The hallway is empty except for an arena kid in a gold polo coiling cable thirty feet down the line.
“You played well,” she says. “The first period especially.”
“Move, Ophelia.”
“Two minutes. That’s all I’m asking.” She stays put, arms crossed over her chest. “I saw your dad out there, and I thought—he looks good, Briggs. He looks strong. And I know you don’t want to hear it from me, but Zig would’ve lost his mind tonight. You, scoring in this building. He would’ve—”
“Stop.”
“—he would have loved it, and somebody should get to say that to you, because you won’t let anybody—”
“You don’t get to talk about him,” I rasp. “Not to me. Don’t say his name or what he would’ve loved. You don’t get to stand in a hallway and grieve my brother at me.”
Her chin lifts. “I cared about him, too.”
“You were fucking him.” It lands flat and enormous in the empty hallway. “While you were with me. The two of you, back here, all those months I was in Charlotte. So no, Ophelia, you have no room to speak.”
She goes white. “Briggs—”
“I found out from his goddamn phone.” My hands have gone still at my sides. “Two years I’ve kept this to myself. My dad doesn’t know. I let him think Zig and I fell out over money, because the truth would’ve broken his damn heart.”
“I never wanted—”
“I don’t care what you wanted.” I’m tired, suddenly, all the fight draining out through the floor. “He died before I forgave him. I have to live with my half of that. You go live with yours somewhere I’m not.”
I make it a single step past her before she says, “He was going to tell you. He made me promise that I’d—”
I keep walking, and her voice dies out. Down the hall, the guy in the gold polo has stopped coiling cable, mouth ajar.
In the family room, my dad’s parked by the snack table with a soda. I cross over, hugging him hard enough that his hand comes up and pats my back twice.
“Who died?” he asks against my shoulder. Then, retreating an inch, “Ah, hell. Poor choice of words.”
I huff a laugh, even though it shouldn’t be funny.
“Good game, son.” He grips my forearm with his good hand, his fingers steady. “That first one was a masterpiece. The whole section behind us went dead quiet. I made sure every soul in that row knew exactly whose kid you are.”
“I’m sure they loved the commentary.”
He studies me, his gaze sharpening. “Are you eating? You look gray.”
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“Danny. Doesn’t he look gray to you?”
Danny wanders over with a plate of someone else’s cookies, looking unbothered. “He looks like a man who just played three hours of hockey. Leave him alone.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Hell of a night, buddy. Your old man actually cried during the anthem.”
“I did not cry,” my father snaps.
“He misted,” Danny corrects. “Misted heavily.”
“It was cold by the glass,” my dad says with wounded dignity. “I have a condition.”
“I’ll have him home by eleven,” Danny tells me. “Ten thirty if he keeps lying about his tear ducts.”
Neither of them mentions the woman they must have passed on their way in. I don’t know if that’s a mercy or if they genuinely didn’t register her presence, and I don’t bother asking for the details.
Either way, the silence is a relief.
They pull out of the lot at nine, and I stand there in the biting cold until the taillights vanish into the Vegas sprawl.
The team bus leaves at ten. I find Augie by the door and speak low. “Cover for me.”
He studies my face, the smirk fading. “You in trouble, Maxie?”
“No. Yes.” I scrub a hand through my damp hair. “There’s something I should’ve done back at Christmas.”
Augie’s eyebrows climb, and then his whole face splits into a delighted grin. “Flight’s at nine tomorrow. Wheels up with or without you, so don’t make me explain to Bellan why my top winger is still in the desert.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Hey.” Augie’s palm finds my arm as I’m passing. “Don’t choke now, Briggs. Go get her.”
The trek over to her side of the valley is a blurry rush of highway. I’ve committed her address to memory, mostly because it gives me a target while I rehearse a dozen different apologies, every one of them sounding wrong before I even reach the end of the sentence.
I pull onto her street just past ten. And there, tucked under the lot’s one functioning light, a silver Audi is sliding into the space directly beside her battered Corolla.
A guy rounds the hood to open her door. He’s tall, blond, and dressed in the kind of clothes that suggest he makes good money. Evie steps out in a leather jacket, her hair down and wild, and she’s laughing at some joke he’s made before her boots even find the pavement.
I pull to the curb half a block back, kill the lights, and immediately hate myself for it.
They walk to the base of her stairs. The conversation lasts a lifetime, or four minutes—the clock on the dash says four. She’s got her keys out, turning them over in her palm. He says something, and she laughs again, the real one, her head tipped back.
If he goes up those stairs, I’m driving straight to the hotel. I won’t look back again.
He doesn’t go up. He leans in, and she offers him her cheek. Then she’s climbing the stairs alone while he walks back to the Audi with his hands in his pockets, a good sport about the whole thing.
Her door closes. The light behind her curtains flickers on. His taillights pull out and swing left at the corner.
I sit in the dark with my heart beating frantically.
I’ve spent a long time believing that letting someone in will only lead to pain. That it’s better to hold myself back than go all the way in. I’ve got a scar on that theory shaped exactly like my brother.
But tonight, I finally said exactly what I was feeling out loud, and the ceiling didn’t collapse on my head. God didn’t smite me for speaking ill of the dead. I’m still breathing.
And Evie . . . she gave him her cheek.
I’m out of the car before his taillights have even cleared the corner.