Chapter 34 Theo #2
The team moves toward the door in a wave of noise and momentum, and I move with them because there is nothing else to do. I pull my helmet on. I grip my stick. I walk out of that locker room and down the tunnel toward the ice, and I put one foot in front of the other.
The crowd noise hits when we reach the ice.
Denver's crowd. They’re loud and hostile and completely indifferent to the fact that the world just rearranged itself inside my chest.
I step onto the ice.
I take one stride and then another and find no rhythm.
Find nothing clean. The familiar recalibration doesn't come — the body that always knows what it's here for has lost the signal completely.
I do a lap that feels like moving through water.
My edges feel wrong. My arm throbs, reminding me where it broke.
Everything that was sharp twenty minutes ago has gone distant and dull and unreachable.
Win this one for Cody?
I’d rather die.
The first period is a disaster.
Not visibly — not at first. We come out structured enough, the systems held by muscle memory alone, but the engine behind it is missing. I'm half a step slow in every decision. Not thinking ahead, not reading, just reacting — and reaction is always too late.
Hudson wins the first three face-offs, and I watch it happen like I'm viewing it from somewhere above the ice.
Silas is sharp, doing everything right, but he needs me to move first, and I'm not moving first. I'm waiting.
Running something else through my head on a loop while Denver builds pressure, we should be cutting off before it reaches our zone.
Evan scores on a transition play in the seventh minute.
Exactly the way I said he would.
I said watch his shoulders. I saw the shoulders. I was standing in the perfect position to cut the lane, but I didn't move in time because I was thinking about how much of a shame it would be not to win this one for Cody.
Beckett skates past me on the way back to center ice. He doesn't say anything, doesn't look at me. Just goes.
He knows me well.
Every time Coach wants to make a special dedication, I won’t be on my game.
Andrew comes after Beckett exactly the way I predicted — a hit behind our net, late and deliberate, designed to send a message.
Beckett takes it clean, keeps the puck and skates away, and that's the right play, the smart play.
I watch it happen from the wrong side of the ice because my positioning has been off since the first shift.
Caleb covers for me twice without making it obvious.
I notice. I don't thank him. I just try to find something — any thread of the game, any moment of clarity — that gets me back inside the play instead of watching it from somewhere slightly outside my own body.
It doesn't come.
Hudson scores on a power play midway through the second –– a clean shot, well-set-up, the kind of goal that happens when a defense isn't communicating. Caleb and I weren't communicating. I knew it in real time and couldn't fix it.
The score is 2-0 going into the third, and the Denver crowd is alive in a way that fills the arena and presses down on everything.
Silas scores in the third — a good goal, a Silas goal, pure will and positioning — and for approximately ninety seconds I think we might be able to claw something back.
Owen hits the post. Beckett draws a penalty that we don't convert because Miles reads it exactly the way I told Isaac he would, and I forgot to tell our shooters to adjust.
Denver adds one more on the empty net.
Final score: Denver 3, Washington 1.
The buzzer sounds, and I stand at center ice for a moment while both teams clear and the crowd celebrates around me, and I look at the ice — marked and scratched and rutted from sixty minutes of play — and I feel something that I don't usually let myself feel.
Responsible.
Not for losing a hockey game.
For all of it.
The locker room after the loss is the quiet kind.
Not the furious kind — nobody has the energy for fury. Just deflated. Guys pulling off gear with sighs.
Coach comes in and delivers his post-game with controlled disappointment, which I don’t give two fucks about. He talks about execution. About transition defense. About finishing chances. He doesn't mention Cody again.
I sit at my stall, listening and feeling each point land exactly where it should.
When he leaves, the room empties gradually. I don't rush. I sit with my helmet in my hands and look at nothing and let the noise drain out until it's just me and Beckett and the low hum of the ventilation system.
Silas pauses in the doorway on his way out. Looks between us. Leaves without a word.
The door swings shut.
Beckett peels the tape from his wrists slowly. He doesn't look at me. "You want to tell me where you were tonight?"
"I was on the ice."
He points to his head, then to his heart.
I glare at him and his pathetic gestures.
He finishes with the tape and drops it, finally looking at me. "Enjoy the game dedication?"
That earns a grin.
He shakes his head. “Don’t be obvious about it, man. Nothing you can do at this point.”
I don’t say anything. We sit with that for a moment. The specific weight of it. Cody Ravenshaw alive and well and recovering and the entire structure we built on top of his silence suddenly without its foundation.
"He's going to move," I say. "He's going to have time to think, and now he has his health back, and he's going to move."
"I know."
"Which means we need to be ahead of it."
Beckett looks at me steadily. "Yeah."
"Together." The word comes out simply. "Whatever I've made complicated between us — I need it uncomplicated. Right now. He is the problem. Always was. Not you."
Something releases in Beckett's expression –– a tension he's been carrying for a long time without putting it down.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," I say back.
The silence fills between us, but I can practically hear him thinking.
Then Beckett says, carefully, "Have you heard from her?"
I look at the floor. "What makes you say that?" I ask. The words cost more than they should. I hear it in my own voice, and I don't like what it sounds like.
Beckett is quiet. "She hasn't responded to me."
I nod once and say nothing.
"I could call her," Beckett says. Even. Neutral. A practical solution to a logistical problem.
I look at him.
He looks back with those steady eyes, and I understand immediately what he's doing. Not offering to help. Testing. Watching to see what my face does with it. Watching to see if I'll reach for it — if I'll hand him the task because I want to know and can't afford to be seen wanting to know.
Watching to see if she's made me soft.
I hold his gaze for a long moment.
"That's your call," I say. My voice gives him nothing. "You have history with her. Whether you reach out is between you and her." I pick up my bag and stand. "It has nothing to do with me."
Beckett looks at me for one long moment.
Then the corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. The almost-smile of someone who got exactly the answer they expected and respects it anyway.
"Right," he says.
He picks up his bag.
We walk out together into the corridor, and the rest of the team folds around us, and the conversation closes the way it needs to — not finished, not resolved, just set down carefully for now.
The book is in my carry-on on the bus back to the hotel.
I don't take it out this time.
I have the handwriting memorized.
And somewhere across two states, in a city I'm not in, Cody Ravenshaw is awake and well and already thinking about everything he's going to do next.
I stare out the bus window at the Denver skyline bleeding amber into the dark.
He should enjoy the head start.
It's the last one he's going to get.