33. Briggs
brIGGS
Ischeduled an early session with Isabelle because I knew the alternative was dodging it, and I’ve reached my quota for avoidance this season.
Her face fills most of my screen because she sits too close to the camera, the same as always. Behind her, there’s a bookshelf and an enormous monstera. My laptop is propped against a stack of cookbooks on the counter.
“You look tired,” Isabelle says.
“It’s game day.”
“Mm. It’s a different tired than usual.” She takes a sip from a mug with a scotty dog on it. “Talk to me.”
“Tonight, we either make playoffs or the season ends. Depends on us and depends on Ottawa.”
She gives me a warm smile. “Is that what you’d like to talk about today?”
“Not really.” She waits, and I clear my throat. “I want Evie to come to the game tonight. As you know, I’ve been texting her for five weeks. She hasn’t answered once. Not a single word.”
“Does she want you to stop?”
“I asked her. She didn’t say yes.” I drag a hand over my jaw. “So I keep going. Every couple days. I tell her we won, or we lost, or some random bit of news. I send her a picture of something I think she might like. I try not to ask her for anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because I just want her to know I’m present,” I answer, searching for the right words.
“That’s where I failed so completely with Ophelia.
Whenever a crisis popped up, I’d grab whatever quick fix could wrap it up cleanly.
But now I know it wasn’t what she really needed.
I’m trying something else with Evie. I just want her to know where I stand and give her the space to decide what she wants to do with that. ”
“That’s a real change.” She tilts her head. “I want to ask you something, though. Is it possible you’ve turned the texting into the same thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve decided the healthy version of you sends a message every two days and asks for nothing in return. You’re following the rule to the letter. But she’s on the other end of it, not answering the texts, and you’re still sending them. At some point, the message stops being for her, right?”
I frown. “So I should stop?”
“I didn’t say that.” She sets the mug down. “I’m asking who the texts are for. If they’re for her, and she needs quiet, you’d have gone quiet a while ago. If they’re for you—so you can feel like you’re doing the right thing while she decides—that’s worth being honest about.”
I look at the plant. “I don’t know. I genuinely can’t tell if I’m doing the right thing or if I’m standing outside her window with a boombox and she just wants me to go away.”
That gets a smile out of her. “That’s more self-awareness than you had two months ago.”
“Two months ago, I was canceling on you.”
“You canceled a couple of appointments when your life was exploding in the press,” she says kindly. “You’ve shown up every week since. I’ve noticed. I want you to notice, too.”
I don’t have anything to say to that, so I let it sit.
“Can I tell you what I actually hear?” she says. “Underneath the texts.”
“Go ahead.”
“I hear a man who fixed everything he could get his hands on. You told your father the truth. You made things right with your friend. You told your GM you want to stay and gave up a pile of money to do it. You went to your brother’s grave.
That’s a lot of doors, Briggs, and you walked through all of them in about six weeks. ”
“And?”
“And you sound exactly as isolated as you did during our first session, back when you spent forty-five minutes hiding behind your shooting percentage because the truth felt too dangerous.”
“Yeah,” I say, the word catching in my throat. “You think so?”
“You’re doing the work. But the one thing you actually want isn’t a problem you can solve with a checkbook or a better backcheck. It depends entirely on another person’s choice. I know how agonizing it is for a man like you to sit in that kind of uncertainty.”
“I’m handling it,” I mutter.
“Even over a screen, I can tell your knee is going.”
I look down, and sure enough, my right leg is bouncing.
“I think I’m scared of the wrong things.” I scrub my temple. “Say she finally answers. Say she actually wants to make this work. I’m starting to wonder if that’s the right thing for her to do.”
“Tell me why you feel that way.”
“Because I’ve been trying to be good for five weeks.” I grimace. “Five weeks is nothing. I was good with Ophelia, too, for a while, and then I wasn’t. I didn’t even notice I’d stopped. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I just slowly went somewhere else and left her all alone.”
“You think you’ll do it again.”
“I think I don’t know how not to.” My voice cracks. “So if Evie lets me back in, all I’ve really done is line up somebody else to disappear on. And she deserves better than a guy on his best behavior, hoping it holds.”
She goes quiet. “That’s very honest.”
“It’s not a good thing to feel.”
“It’s a true thing, and the truth is where we start.
” She finally scribbles a few words on her notebook.
“So let me offer you something, and then you have a game to play. You’re treating this like a question about your character—whether you’re the kind of person who leaves.
That’s a trap, because it has no answer, and you’ll circle it forever. ”
“Then what’s the question?”
“Whether you’ll notice,” she says plainly.
“You didn’t disappear on Ophelia because you’re a monster.
You disappeared because you stopped paying attention, and nobody—including you—was watching for it.
So the work isn’t becoming a man who’d never do it again.
The work is building a life where somebody would catch it early.
Where you’d catch it. That’s a thing you can actually do. ”
I groan. “That sounds like a lot of talking about my feelings on an ongoing basis.”
“It’s the worst,” she agrees. “You’ll hate every minute. Same time next week?”
I snort. “I might be in the playoffs.”
“Then we’ll do it around your schedule.” She reaches to end the call and stops. “If she doesn’t come tonight, that’s not a verdict. And if she does—you don’t have to have it all figured out to be glad to see her. You’re allowed to just be glad.”
The screen goes black, and I’m looking at my own face in it, which is a hell of a way to end a therapy session. I sit there a minute longer than I need to.
Then I get up, find my keys, and go to work.
The whole arena is vibrating before the puck even hits the ice. Everybody in this bowl knows the math.
We have to win, and we need Ottawa to lose in regulation, or the season is finished right here. Which means for one night, I’m rooting hard for the New York Empire, an organization that’s been trying to remove my head from my body since February.
Cardone kept me at the deadline—a show of faith I’m not sure I earned—but tonight is the only invoice that matters.
Warm-ups, second lap, I let my eyes sweep up to the family section behind the glass, hunting for the two seats I’ve left under her name for three straight home games. I keep doing it because stopping would feel like a finality I’m not ready for.
They’re empty.
I put my head down and find the edge of my blade until the ice is the only thing I can feel.
Bellan doesn’t bother with a speech. He stands in the center of the dressing room in his charcoal suit, looking at us until the room goes still, and says, “You know what tonight is. Go take it.” From Bellan, that’s practically a sermon, and the room comes up off the benches in a roar.
Augie bumps his helmet into mine in the tunnel, a sharp clack of plastic. “Good?”
“I’m ready.”
“Then keep up,” he says, his smirk visible even through the cage. “I’ve been carrying your heavy ass all season.”
“Just win the draw, Aug.”
The first period is a goddamn knife fight.
Washington is already out of the dance, and they’re playing like they resent anyone who still has a chance to stay. They clog the neutral zone and dump the puck into the corners, leaning on us until the glass shudders. For twenty minutes, nobody scores because the space to do it doesn’t exist.
I take two shifts against their top line and spend most of them below the hash marks, doing the ugly, grinding work Bellan asked for.
Duval bails us out twice. The second one is a desperate scramble at the top of the crease with three bodies buried on him, and it gets the whole building screaming. I feel the roar in the back of my teeth.
We go into the first intermission scoreless. The update on the board says New York is up by one. So far, the math is holding.
Fozzy is the one who finally breaks the seal in the second.
He has no business being in that tight, but the puck squirts loose off a mess of sticks, and he’s the only one who reads the bounce. He jams it under the pad before the goalie can seal the post, and our bench empties over the boards. One to nothing.
Washington answers before the period ends.
Ottawa ties it up in New York, which means they’ve already got a point banked whatever happens next.
The math evaporates in real time, and now it’s two games happening at once—ours and one five hundred miles away—and nobody in this building has enough eyes to watch both.
The third period takes a decade.
Neither team wants to be the one who blinks, so the game stays tight and mean. I chase pucks into corners I shouldn’t be in because that’s the only version of me worth the ice time tonight. My legs are gone by the ten-minute mark, but I keep moving. Bellan double-shifts me, and I don’t say a word.
With six minutes left, Washington gets a rush the other way—a two-on-one with our defenseman caught pinching. I come across from the far side, and I get my stick down flat in the lane before the trailer can one-time it into the open side. The puck skids harmlessly into the corner.
Our whole bench is standing. Sam raps his stick against my pads on his way past, once, hard enough to sting, which from him is a parade.
I skate to the bench with my lungs on fire.
Regulation ends in a tie. New York and Ottawa are headed to overtime, too.
We go to three-on-three.
Overtime is pure chaos once the safety rails are removed. All that open ice means the first team to make a mistake loses everything. Bellan taps me and Augie for the opening shift. We’re gassed, but the whole season is sitting in the next few minutes, so being tired doesn’t matter.
Fifty seconds in, I strip a puck at our own blue line, and suddenly, it’s a two-on-one going the other way—me and Augie and one defenseman trying to play the middle.
If I shoot and miss, that’s the mistake that ends a season.
I look at the tender’s eyes and see him cheating toward me, squaring up for the shot he thinks I’m taking, and I slide the puck across the grain instead. Augie doesn’t even have to break stride. He buries it into a wide-open net, the horn wails, and the building comes apart at the seams.
Then everyone is on the ice.
I get two seconds of Augie crushing the air out of my lungs before the rest of the bench arrives, a storm of gloves and sticks. Somebody knocks my helmet off. Duval skates the length of the ice with his mask up and his arms already in the air.
It takes a minute for anyone to actually look at the scoreboard.
When we finally do, the jumbotron cuts to the final from New York, and it shows Ottawa lost in the shootout.
It’s one point instead of two, and one point isn’t enough.
The noise in here doubles. We’re in. The ice is a mess of grown men who’ve been grinding since October and just got the one thing they were promised.
The handshake line forms and dissolves in a blur of sweaty gloves. The Washington guys are as gracious as they can be about the exit. I tap palms down the line without registering a single face.
Then my gaze drifts back toward the glass in the family section.
The vacant seats have been filled.
I find Evie’s face in the crowd. She’s here, leaning hard against the railing at the top of the boards with both hands fisted on it, looking right at me. It takes me a second to understand what I’m seeing, which is why I nearly miss the man standing next to her.
My father is on his feet.
He’s standing upright in the middle of nineteen thousand people, his cane hooked uselessly over his forearm, his knuckles white as he grips the rail to hold himself steady.
He couldn’t have made this trip alone. He couldn’t have made it at all without someone planning the logistics down to the hour, mapping out his meds and wheeling him through that shitty terminal.
Evie did all of that. For me. For my dad.
And he’s not even trying to hold it together, crying openly up there behind the glass. He has one fist raised at me like I’m nine years old again and just scored my first goal in a desert rink.
Something goes through me hard enough to take my legs half out from under me. I put a glove on the glass to steady myself, and I don’t know which of them I’m looking at anymore.
Evie lifts her free hand, palm out, so I know she sees me seeing them both.
“Maxwell!” A TV guy has me by the elbow, dragging me back to the world. “Thirty seconds, they want you first—”
Bellan is yelling something over the noise. Augie is trying to dump a water bottle over my head. The building is still shaking under my skates.
I hold their faces across nineteen thousand people for one more second—my father on his feet, and the woman who got him there.
Then I let them turn me toward the microphone.