Chapter 34 Theo
She left the book on the table.
I found it an hour before we had to leave for the airport — the chair and table are empty of anything else except The Prince.
I stood there for a moment, looking at the chair. At the book with its dense annotated margins and the yellow sticky note still visible at the top of the page, she'd been on.
She was just here.
I picked up the book and walked out of the library without much thought. It's a library book. It doesn't belong to her.
It doesn't belong to me either.
I'm aware of it the entire drive to the airport. I don't travel with books. Extra weight I don’t need to carry.
I take it out when we're at the gate, before we board.
I sit slightly apart from the rest of the team, the way I always do.
Silas is across the row with his headphones already on.
Beckett is standing near the window, looking at the tarmac with the expression of someone who has been thinking about the same thing for too long and hasn't resolved it.
I open the book.
Her last note is still there. The yellow square, the forward-leaning handwriting, the two lines that have been running in the back of my skull since I first found them.
What if it's just the symptom?
Beneath it, my response in the margin. And beneath that — nothing. She hasn't responded yet. Which means either she hasn't seen it or she has and she's sitting with it.
I turn pages without reading them.
She must’ve left the library in a hurry, or she got pulled away, or she simply decided to go and left the book behind without thinking much about it. Any of those explanations is possible. None of them tells me where she went or whether she's coming back.
I have no way to reach her.
No number. No direct form of contact. Nothing except the library and the chair and the book in my hands that smells faintly like whatever she wears — something warm, something that has no business being detectable on the pages of a three-hundred-year-old political treatise.
I close the book.
Silas leans across the aisle and looks at the cover. "Are you reading?"
"No."
"Then what are you doing?"
"Thinking."
He puts his headphones back on.
I put the book away properly, zip the carry-on, and slide it under the seat in front of me when we board.
I think about hockey instead.
It almost works.
Thirty thousand feet over Oregon, and I have the book out again.
I don't remember taking it out.
I'm looking at the margins — my annotations, denser in some sections than others, the places where I argued with the text, and the places where I agreed, and the handful of places where I wrote something I'd forgotten I thought until I read it back. It’s years of thinking laid out in a dead man's book.
She found all of it.
She read every note. I can tell because her responses aren't localized — she didn't find one annotation, engage with it, and stop.
She moved through the whole book slowly, reading what I wrote, sitting with it, pushing back where she disagreed, and going quiet where she didn't. There's a passage near the middle — something about the nature of enemies, how the most dangerous ones present as allies — where she left no note at all. Just underlined it twice.
I look at that underline for a long time.
Outside the window, the clouds are flat, white, and endless. The team fills the rows around me — noise, headphones, someone's music bleeding through badly fitted earbuds, the specific dense restlessness of twenty athletes in a confined space with nowhere to put their energy.
I feel none of it.
I think about her in the library, the last time I actually saw her.
The way she didn't look up when she heard my footsteps.
The way she kept her eyes on her screen and her shoulders did that thing — the awareness moving through her before she acknowledged it — that told me she knew it was me before she could have known it was me.
She knows what I sound like approaching.
That's not nothing.
I close the book.
Put it in the seat pocket.
Take it back out.
Silas, without removing his headphones or opening his eyes: "Put the book away, Theo."
I put the book away.
I lean back, close my eyes, and build the game in my head instead — the Denver lineup, their defensive pairings, the left winger who telegraphs his shot with his shoulder, the gap in their penalty kill I identified while watching film from Tuesday.
The Pepsi Center smells like every arena — cold rubber and steel and the sharp clean of freshly resurfaced ice. I stand at the boards during warmups and let it move through me. A body that knows exactly what it's here for, even when the mind has been elsewhere.
On the ice, everything simplifies.
That's why I've always loved it.
I push off hard and find my stride within two laps, the rhythm coming back clean and automatic. My edges are sharp. My shoulder holds. I do a full lap at speed and feel the last of whatever has been sitting in my chest since the library loosen and drop away.
She wasn’t there.
Cody woke up, and the tables have turned.
Beckett skates up beside me on the third lap. We run a passing drill without talking, the puck moving between us in easy rhythm. Back and forth. The kind of repetition that doesn't require thought.
After the fourth exchange, I say, "We need to talk. After."
He catches the pass and sends it back. "We do."
That's all. We separate into the warmup, and I don't look at him again until we're in the locker room.
I look around at everyone’s faces.
Silas is tapping his stick. Owen is quieter than usual, jaw set.
Beckett is on the right, standing with his arms crossed and his eyes down.
Caleb has his helmet in his lap and is staring at the floor.
Isaac is in full gear already, blocker resting on his knee, doing that slow breathing thing he does before every game.
The first years are easy to identify — the ones whose hands aren't quite still, who keep checking their laces, who laugh a half-second too late at something someone says because their nervous system is running slightly ahead of the room.
The veterans don't do any of that.
Beckett, across the room, looks at me.
I nod once.
He nods back.
Whatever the last several weeks have made complicated between us, we are still this. Two people who know how to communicate across a room without words. That doesn't disappear because the wrong girl walked onto campus and shifted everything.
Coach finishes, so I stand.
"Denver's fast," I say. The room goes quiet immediately.
"Hudson's been running their transition all season— he reads the neutral zone early, and he's going to want to push the pace from the drop.
" I look at Silas. "You're on him all night.
Don't let him get comfortable at center. Make him work for every inch."
Silas nods once. Still tapping his stick.
"Evan on the left wing telegraphs," I continue. "Watch his shoulders before he cuts. He'll tell you where he's going every single time if you're paying attention." I find Owen. "That's yours."
Owen's jaw tightens. Good.
"Andrew, on the right, is physical. He's going to come after you early to set a tone." I look at Beckett. "Let him. And then make him regret it. Their two-man — Tanner specifically — is soft on the backcheck. You'll see the lane open by the second shift. When it opens, go. Don't wait."
Beckett holds my gaze. "Got it."
"Luke plays the left side like he owns it because nobody's challenged him on it yet this season." I look at Caleb. "Tonight somebody does."
Caleb looks up from the floor. Nods.
"Miles has a five-hole tendency under pressure. He knows it and he compensates left." I find Isaac across the room. "Their shooters are going to go to his strong side first. Expect it."
Isaac's slow breathing doesn't change. He blinks once.
I look around the room one final time.
"We control the pace. We make them play our game. We don't give Hudson transition, we don't give Evan space, and we don't give this city anything to cheer about after the first period." A beat. "We don't lose in Denver. We don't lose anywhere."
The room responds.
Coach Crick steps back in, clipboard under his arm, something different in his expression.
"One more thing before we go out there," he says. He looks around the room, making sure he has everyone. "Got word this afternoon that Cody Ravenshaw woke up. He's alive. He's well. Doctors say he's going to make a full recovery."
The room erupts.
Genuine. Loud. The release of people who have been carrying something heavy and just had it lifted without warning.
Guys are on their feet, helmets raised, someone in the back whooping loud enough to echo off the concrete walls.
First years who never even played a game with Cody are clapping because the veterans are clapping, and the energy is real and completely unbearable.
Coach lets it run for a moment, grinning. Then he raises a hand.
"Let's win this one for him, boys."
The room roars.
I don't move.
I stand still. I look at the floor, and I am very careful not to look at Beckett, because if I look at Beckett right now, something on my face is going to do something I can't take back in a room full of people.
Cody Ravenshaw woke up.
He's alive.
He's well.
He's going to make a full recovery.
The confirmation moves through me, and I think about everything I built on the assumption that he wouldn't wake up. Every calculation. Every contingency. Every careful architecture of what comes next. All of it was built on a foundation that just got pulled out from under me.
My mind was focused on other things, but now this reminder in my face…it’s disappointing to say the least.
I feel Beckett's eyes on the side of my face, but I don't look at him.
"Let's go," Coach says, clapping once.