Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Ryan
The apartment was quiet.
The sky was the flat undecided gray of a February Sunday. Griffin had taken the Silverado and driven her to the airport. It was his send-off to make, even if I wanted to be alone with her, to say some other kind of goodbye. To make some kind of arrangement to stay in touch. To talk more.
Griffin came in around nine.
“Flight was on time,” he said. “She texted from the gate.”
“Good.”
He looked at me. Not the goalie eyes—just Griffin. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. I meant it. “You?”
“Yeah.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Good weekend?”
“Good weekend,” I said.
He went back to bed in his own room and was out in fifteen minutes.
I ran the dishwasher and swept the kitchen floor and moved his gear bag from the hallway to his room, where it would reappear in the hallway by the next afternoon. These were the rhythms, and they continued without requiring anything from me, which was useful right now.
I went to the rink.
No practice on Sundays in February, but I had an arrangement with the building manager going back to freshman year. The nine-to-eleven slot was reliably empty.
The locker room smelled the way it always smelled, rubber and cold and the faint chemical bite of ice resurfacer, the combination that had meant hockey to me since I was six years old.
Everything I’d wanted. Everything I was still working toward.
I’d been in love with this smell longer than I’d been in love with anything.
I laced up in the quiet and stepped out.
The building was completely empty. Overhead lights at half power, throwing everything into a flat gray that made the ice look almost silver.
Boards clean, glass clear, the only sound the low hum of the refrigeration system under the surface.
No one watching. No position to hold. No one I was supposed to be for the next two hours.
I pushed off from the boards and felt it.
The first stride catching, the familiar give of good edges under my weight, my body finding the rhythm before my head did.
The cold came up off the surface and hit my face, and I breathed it in.
This was the version I loved best. Not games, though I loved games.
This—the empty building, the half-light, the ice doing what ice did when no one was asking it to perform.
I ran edge work until my legs warmed, then the offensive patterns I’d been drilling all season.
I put myself through situations. Puck deep in the corner, one man back, three seconds to make the call.
I ran each one until the decision arrived before the thought.
That was the standard. When the body knew before the brain, it was in.
After forty minutes I stopped running sets and just skated, laps, building speed, the cold air moving past my face. My mind went quiet the way it only did when I was on the ice. Not empty—just still. It was the stillness of having one thing to do and doing it.
I thought, once, about a plaid blanket and a dark pond and the warmth of a beautiful girl sitting close enough to feel through two layers of wool. The weight of her head on my shoulder on the drive home. The way she’d lifted it when I cut the engine, slow, like she’d been somewhere else.
I went back to my edges.
I skated until my legs were empty and the cold had worked all the way through me. Then I came off the ice and sat in the quiet locker room with my skates still on and my elbows on my knees, and I sat there for a while.
Nowhere to be but right there.
Then I got up and showered.
I came home to make lunch and sat at the table with my film notebooks.
Tuesday’s opponent. I opened the footage and watched.
A little while later I went looking for my Minnesota State sweatshirt.
I checked my gear bags. The closet. The back of the desk chair.
Nobody home but me.
I stood in the middle of my room.
I knew exactly where it was. I’d run through the gear bag and the closet and the laundry anyway, like maybe I’d find it there and not have to know what I knew, which was that I’d given it to Griffin’s sister at a bonfire on Saturday night and she’d taken it with her on the flight home and it was currently in Arizona.
I stood there for a moment in an apartment that felt different than it had three days ago.
It was a sweatshirt. I had other sweatshirts. The Minnesota State hockey department had given me a ton of them over four years. I was going to be fine.
I went back to the kitchen and thought about the contact in my phone.
Her name and ten digits, sitting there, exactly where Griffin had put it—and decided not to think about it, which was a decision I was going to have to make more than once today and was starting right now, with at least five more hours in this apartment before I could justify going to bed.
I went back to the film.
At seven o’clock I called my father.
Erik Lindqvist answered in English, which meant he was settled and in a good mood.
We talked about the season for the first twenty minutes—the last stretch of games, a defensive pair I’d been watching, a forward on Tuesday’s team whose backcheck timing I’d identified as exploitable.
My father had seen the same thing and had thoughts about the slot.
We compared notes and found two things I hadn’t caught yet.
This was the best version of our calls—both of us fully in the material, building on each other.
My father had played something like a dozen seasons in the Elitserien before Eden Prairie, before my mother, before me. The eyes didn’t go away.
At the end he asked, “How are you?”
Not how’s the season. Just how are you.
I looked at my film notebook. “Good,” I said. “Ready.”
“Ja.” There was a pause he used when he had something real to say and was deciding whether to say it.
I could picture him in the chair in the living room in Eden Prairie, the lamp on too early because my mother hated the dark.
I could hear his deep inhale. “The draft takes care of itself. Audrey takes care of you. You play your game, and you let the rest follow.”
“I know.”
“You know it. You’re not letting yourself know it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Fair.”
“Let it be done. Trust the work.” He let that land. “Du ?r redo.”
You’re ready.
“Thanks, Dad.”
We said goodbye. I set the phone down and sat in the kitchen for a while.
The film notebooks were open on the counter. The combine. Whatever came after.
I thought about Griffin asleep against the passenger window the whole drive home, head against the glass, snoring slightly.
I picked up my pen and went back to the film.
I was going to be fine. The work in front of me was real, and I knew how to do it.
I turned the page and kept working.
I was good at this. At putting things in a category or compartment and leaving them where they belonged. I didn’t carry what didn’t serve the next play. I’d always made the right call and lived with it cleanly.
She was Griffin’s sister. She was eighteen and at ASU, and I was going to be in some other city by summer, some other life, some other chapter where this weekend was a footnote I’d think about occasionally and then put away again.
That was the right progression. I’d made peace with harder things than this.
I turned another page.
The film wasn’t holding my attention the way it usually did. I kept losing the thread, going back, running the same thirty seconds of footage over and over because I’d been somewhere else.
I closed the notebook and sat in the kitchen with the light outside dimming in the late afternoon.
Somewhere in Scottsdale, she was unpacking her bag, getting back to her life, the internship, the program she’d known she wanted since she was twelve, the courtyard apartment with the good morning light. Getting back to herself.
She’d been completely herself all weekend.
She hadn’t modulated for the room or performed a version of herself or done any of the things people usually did in new situations.
She’d just been Maren Callahan, sharp and warm and funny and honest, in Griffin’s apartment and at Sal’s and at Jensen’s pond and on the tailgate of my truck in the dark.
It would have been easier if she’d been different in person than on paper.
Jag vet inte, I thought, for what felt like the hundredth time since last night. I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t know where to put it. I decided and the decision was right and I was still sitting here thinking about the way she’d gone completely still when I tucked her hair back.
In another life, maybe.
In a life where Griffin was a different person’s best friend, or where the draft wasn’t four months away, or where she was older and I was different, or where the timing was anything other than exactly wrong.
In another life, it would have been a very different weekend.
I got up and put the notebook away, did the dishes, and went to my room where I did not think about Maren Callahan.
Except I thought about her for the rest of the night. She was going to be a hard thought to put down.
She was off-limits.
I knew that before I ever touched her.
The knowing didn’t help as much as it should have.
The Phoenix Sidewinders series officially begins with Offside—where the lines get blurrier, the stakes get higher, and falling for the wrong person becomes impossible to avoid. See what happens when Ryan and Maren reconnect years later in the same town, working for the same team.
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Drop the gloves. Catch feelings.