Chapter 19 #2
Traffic is finally moving, and I nearly peel out when I reach the exit. Thankfully, the arena is just off the interstate, and I turn into the first parking ramp I can find. I might have driven a little recklessly up to the fourth level before I found a spot.
“We’re down to thirty seconds left of Benson’s penalty, but I’ll tell you, if he can’t get his head in the game, I think we’re in for more of those tonight—”
I turn off the car and run.
The arena is loud, even in the parking-ramp stairwell, the bass of eighteen thousand people vibrating through the concrete under my boots.
I take the stairs two at a time, wishing I’d spent just one percent of my day on cardio every once in a while so I won’t feel like I’m gonna puke by the time I reach the top.
I scan my ticket at gate two, entering the fray of the main concourse.
It’s a wall of noise and blue jerseys and the smell of hot dogs, glimpses of action flashing through the stairs as I search for signs leading to the Blue Ox players’ family box. There—Suites.
I break into a run down the corridor that leads to the elevator, which leads to the place where my father has had a standing reservation for me since forever, one I’ve never once used until tonight.
I push through the door.
The box is warm and smells like hot chocolate and pretzels, and the first thing I see is the ice—vast and white and immediate through the glass wall. And I’m there in seconds, standing at the edge, as close as I can be.
My eyes search over the ice—is he still in the penalty box? No—
He’s not on the ice.
I glance at the bench. And there he is.
He finds my eyes at the same moment I find his.
And then he winks.
And right now, my body is sort of absorbing that, trying not to crumple.
“Oh,” says a voice to my left.
I become aware, suddenly, that there are three women in this box, and they are all looking at me.
“I think we figured out who our Blue Line’s been looking for all night.” The voice belongs to a woman already on her feet—warm eyes, dark hair, bright smile. “You must be Everly.”
I blink in surprise. “Um, yeah.”
“Don’t be too impressed,” another woman says, the one striking a familiar chord—petite, dark hair. “Penny here is an investigative journalist. But it doesn’t take a detective to recognize you from the coverage that’s been all over the news.” She extends a hand. “I’m Coco, Wyatt’s wife.”
“Oh, you ruin my fun,” Penny says, dropping into the open seat next to Coco. She smiles up at me with a troubling glint in her eye that tells me I’m going to like her. “And I’m with Conrad.”
“It’s nice to meet you both.”
Another woman leans forward, popping out from behind the other side of Coco. “Hey, Everly.”
“Chloe—good to see you again.” I shift to face her properly. “I heard a rumor you signed with Stratton Publishing—is that true?”
“Just last month.” Her smile turns wry. “I’m still waiting for someone to call and tell me it was a clerical error.”
“Welcome to the family.” I settle into the seat at the end of the row, leaning slightly toward the women. “For the record, that stunt you pulled with the jersey a few weeks back was pretty cute. Candy’s a lucky guy.”
Chloe opens her mouth to say something, but just then, the arena erupts as the goal horn carries over the crowd. One point for the Blue Ox.
Aw, I missed it!
The bench erupts—players spilling over the boards, sticks in the air. Vasquez is already halfway across the ice. And Beckett—Beckett swoops around behind the net, one fist raised, no showboating, just the clean controlled satisfaction of a man who made the play happen and knows it.
He skates back to the defensive zone, and I watch him the whole way. Anything that happened before—the hesitation, the distraction—is gone, replaced by Blue Line Beckett. And oh boy, he’s on fire.
“Watching him play never gets old,” I say. “He just sees the play before it even happens.” I watch him angle a winger off the puck before they’ve finished receiving it. Clean. No contact needed. All Beck.
“That’s what makes him exceptional,” Coco says simply.
The second period moves fast.
I grew up in hockey arenas. I know the sounds—the crack of a stick, the hard thud of a check that travels up through the glass and into your palms if you’re close enough, the roar that means something just happened that the crowd needed.
I know how to read the bench, the way Coach Jacobsen’s posture changes when the ice is going the right way versus when it isn’t.
Right now, it’s going the right way.
The Blue Ox are on a power play, and I watch Beckett work the point—skating the blue line, moving the puck across to Reyes, pulling the penalty killers wide, creating the angles.
When he finally shoots, it’s low and hard, and Conrad tips it from in front and the goal horn goes off again, and the building shakes.
2–0.
“Yes,” Chloe says, jumping to her feet.
“Let’s go!” Penny shouts.
Beckett takes a pass behind his own net—a defenseman’s play, a nothing-glamorous, collecting-the-puck-in-the-corner play—and their forwards are collapsing on him fast, two men coming hard, and for a second it looks like he’s trapped.
Except he’s not trapped.
He reads it so early it barely looks like a decision—one stride to his right, a short pass to Reyes breaking up the left side, and then he’s following the play out of his own zone at full stride, the whole sequence taking maybe four seconds, efficient and exact and completely inevitable in retrospect.
The kind of play that makes you feel stupid for worrying.
He’s the Blue Line.
Third period has us up by two, but the other team isn’t going down without a fight. They push their offense, winning puck battles, forcing turnovers—and for a few shifts, the ice tilts the wrong way and the box goes very quiet.
But Beckett is everywhere tonight.
“He’s not going to let them back in this game,” Penny says.
She’s right. You can feel it, can’t you?
With two minutes left, their goalie comes off for the extra attacker, and suddenly it’s six skaters against five, and the ice is chaos—bodies everywhere, pucks bouncing off sticks and boards, the kind of hockey that’s ugly and urgent and completely riveting.
I have both hands on the railing. I’m not sure when that happened.
A shot comes from the point. Beckett’s in the lane—he doesn’t move away from it, he moves into it, taking it on the shin, absorbing the hit and directing the puck into the corner. Effortless. Decisive. Deadly.
And I should have expected it. Because Beckett’s the kind of guy to put himself in front of the puck. Between the threat and the net.
Beckett passes off to Conrad—Penny surges to her feet. The clock enters final countdown, and I hold my breath.
Conrad circles the net, passes to Candy—and there goes Chloe—and he lines up the shot.
The puck buries itself in the net.
The buzzer sounds, and the arena comes apart at the seams.
This is the only honest description. I’m cheering—the full-body, unselfconscious kind I haven’t done since I was seven, before the divorce, in the family box at one of my dad’s games—and Chloe grabs my arm, both of us jumping, and I knock into Penny, who spills pop across her lap.
Coco lets out a short, sharp laugh that I understand instinctively is her version of a standing ovation.
“I’m sorry,” I manage when I recover enough to use words. “I don’t usually—I haven’t been to a game in years…I forgot that it—”
“Does that to you?” Chloe is beaming. “Yeah. It does. Welcome to the family, Coach Hart’s daughter.” She winks.
“You’re going to fit in here just fine,” Penny says.
It lands somewhere I wasn’t braced for.
I look at the ice. At the celebration—helmets off, sticks raised.
The handshake line forms. Both teams, the ritual of it—hand to hand, helmet to helmet, the acknowledgment that lasts about forty-five seconds and means everything.
I watch Beckett move through it, unhurried, making eye contact with each player
And then it’s done, and his teammates start moving toward the tunnel.
“Hmm,” Penny says. “That’s different.”
I follow her gaze to the ice, to Beckett making his way toward the far boards. Toward the small media setup that lives at ice level for postgame quick interviews—and the reporter with the handheld mic.
“What is he doing?” I say.
“I don’t know, but I think it’s gonna be good,” Penny says.
The jumbotron flickers.
The postgame graphic disappears, and the feed switches—live, rink-side, Beckett on skates with the reporter’s microphone extended toward him, the arena cameras finding him, the house lights still up. The crowd, still milling, still celebrating, starts to notice. Goes quiet.
The reporter’s voice comes through the arena speakers. “What an incredible game tonight, Beckett. You looked like a completely different player in that first period than the one we saw in the third. What happened?”
Beckett smiles. His dark hair, damp with sweat, is wild, his breath still catching up with him.
He looks up as he speaks into the mic, and something flutters in my chest. “Yeah—I was a little off my game at the start. I was a little…distracted.” He pulls in another breath. “I was waiting on someone.”
A ripple moves through the crowd. Or at least in our box. Through me, to be precise. Half confused, half delighted.
The reporter, to her credit, doesn’t flinch. “Is that someone here tonight?”
“She is.” He looks up. Finds the box. “And I owe her a public correction. Because the last time I had a microphone pointed at me, I lied.”
The traffic out of the arena slows, people turning to listen, and I hold my breath.
“Eleven days ago, I stood outside Sutton Arena and told the world that Everly Hart didn’t belong on the ice, that she was nothing to me, because I wanted to avoid a scandal that might risk my career.”
Go, something inside me says. But I don’t move yet. I can’t. I need to hear this.
“The truth is that she’s not nobody. She was never nobody.
Everly Hart is the most courageous, smart, compassionate woman I’ve ever met.
And if it risks my shot at a contract renewal to be honest about it—well, here goes…
” He looks into the camera, those blue eyes flecked with gold.
“Everly Hart—it’s later now. What do you say? Will you go on that date with me?”
“Go,” Chloe says.
I’m already gone.
I push through the box door and into the corridor, and I’m running—actually running—boots on concrete, the arena roaring somewhere behind me and above me and all around me, the sound of eighteen thousand people who just watched something happen and are apparently very much in favor of it.
Left corridor. Signs for ice level. The elevator is right there, and I take it, shifting my weight like that’ll make it move faster, watching the numbers change.
The doors open, and my dad is standing at the access gate. Clipboard. Reading glasses on his forehead. He smiles in that very Dad way. Quiet and slight. Warm and full.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hey, kid.” He holds the gate open. Doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to.
I go through.
The crowd sees me before he does.
The roar shifts—changes pitch, changes quality, eighteen thousand people redirecting their postgame celebration to something else. And I feel it in my sternum before I understand what it means.
I step through the gate, onto the ice, and I don’t stop.
Beckett turns.
He finds me across the full, white width of the ice, under the arena lights, with his skates and his gear and all six-feet-however-many inches of him, and the expression on his face is open and unguarded and completely, devastatingly real. Relief and hope.
He skates toward me, meeting me as I struggle not to fall all the way to center ice. In one motion, he wraps his arms around my waist and scoops me up—just a few inches off the floor—and spins me so my back is to the empty rink and his face is right there, breath warm.
I look up at him. The arena lights are behind him, and I have to squint a little.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.” The underneath smile. The real one. “So,” he says, his voice low, just for me, beneath the noise. “The whole world’s waiting on an answer. What’s it gonna be, Hart?”
He sets me down then, but hello, no, he’s not getting away. Not this time. I grab the front of his jersey and pull him down to me.
His mouth meets mine, and the crowd goes absolutely insane, but I am barely aware of it. Barely aware of anything except this—the feel of his hand curling around my waist, the other around my neck, holding me to him, his lips devouring me.
And mine, kissing him back.
My arms slide around his shoulders, and my fingers curl into his hair. And suddenly, my feet leave the ground again. He picks me up, lifting me until he can look up into my eyes, my hair falling around us, blocking out the world. Just me and the Blue Line.
I pull away, just enough that my breath whispers against his lips. “I’ll think about it,” I say.
He laughs—the real laugh, the unguarded one that’s been inside me since an elevator in the dark—and pulls me back in, and the ice is cold and the lights are very bright and later has finally, completely, deliciously arrived.
And I’ve definitely found my happy ending.
The End