Chapter 15
fifteen
ROWAN
I’m in the best mood I’ve been in since I got to Halden.
Sitting in the locker room, I’ve got a smile on my face, the way I have for most of the last four days since Sloane walked across fifty yards of open grass and kissed my cheek in front of everyone.
And nobody has let me forget it.
“Rowan Hale’s girlfriend,” Luca announced at dinner at Ironwood House on Monday, pulling out Sloane’s chair, “may I interest you in tonight’s special?”
“Is it pasta again?” Sloane had said, sitting down and tucking her hair behind her ear. “Has it improved?”
“No idea,” Luca admitted. “But hope is a beautiful thing named Theo, and it’s his first time cooking for everyone.”
Theo has taken to calling us campus royalty, which Sloane hates and I pretend to hate but don’t entirely mind. Seb has said only a few things at all, mostly positive, which from Seb is about as effusive as he gets.
And it’s not just the hockey guys.
Ivy has inserted herself into every interaction with the energy of a UN observer monitoring a fragile peace accord. She’s made every excuse to be around us at all times, right up until I drew a line at her sleeping on my couch.
I’m lacing my left skate, half-smiling at something Theo said about my hair looking different — “Is this a girlfriend haircut? Did she do this to you?” — when Gavin walks into the room.
That’s the first thing wrong.
Gavin hasn’t been early in months. He’s become the captain who slides in three minutes before the coach, usually with a coffee. But today he comes in fifteen minutes early and sets his bag down on the bench like it weighs more than it should.
His face is wrong. Not angry, not upset. Just… nothing.
I’m the first to notice. I’m watching Gavin, but he isn’t really watching anyone else. The others, slowly, figure it out. Luca looks up, then Theo — halfway into shin pads, hair in his eyes, freezing mid-motion — and then Niko.
Then Gavin clears his throat, which gets the others.
Seb, already dressed, lifts his head from his half-taped stick. Mason crosses his arms. The rest of the guys drop the practice prep and the shit-talking and lock in on whatever’s about to happen.
“I’m leaving,” he says.
It lands like a bomb.
“I’ve already talked to Coach,” he says. “I’ll catch you guys around.”
That’s it.
He looks at the room for a long second, not at any of us specifically — more at the laundry bin and the stick rack and the rafters, the sort of things he’ll try hard to remember — and then he picks his bag back up and walks out the door.
Nobody breathes.
“Was that a joke?” Luca says, already knowing it wasn’t.
Seb shakes his head once.
“What the fuck.” Theo stands up, then sits, then stands up again. “He’s just — gone?”
Park, a quiet senior two stalls down, pulls out his phone and starts scrolling to see whether the news is already out. Holloway, our freshman goalie, is looking between the room’s three oldest players with the specific expression of somebody who would like an adult to appear.
Eventually, every pair of eyes ends up on me.
Not all at once. Not in any coordinated way. It’s more like the panicking freshmen look to the seniors, the seniors look sideways at each other, and then everybody settles on me. Because Gavin has been wearing the letter, but he hasn’t been carrying the room for a while.
And everyone in here knows who has.
“Okay,” I say. “Everyone breathe.”
“Rowan—” Theo starts.
I hold up a hand to cut him off. “Breathe.”
He breathes.
I exhale slowly. “Put the phones away. Nobody posts, nobody texts, nobody calls anyone. We don’t know the full story, and the last thing we need right now is for the story to get out before the coaches have talked to us.”
Phones go down.
“We don’t have to know why right this second. He told us what he came to tell us, and we have practice in” — I check the clock — “eleven minutes, so we’re going to be on the ice ready to go, because that’s what we do.”
“Is it?” Niko says, his first words. He looks up with the dry expression he wears when he doesn’t plan to be talked out of his point. “This seems pretty fucking unusual.”
“It’s going to be fine.”
Niko studies me, then shrugs.
Seb’s voice carries across the room. “Listen to him.”
The room does, because while Seb doesn’t speak much, when he does, it has gravity. Theo nods, Luca nods, Mason doesn’t — but he doesn’t argue, either — and the rest of them fall into line.
I lean down, pull on my right skate, and lace it. My hands are steady, but something goes tight under my ribs. Because while I may have kept the lid on the panic for the next little while, I know how fragile locker-room morale can be.
As if to illustrate the point, Theo is at the whiteboard now, staring at the lines.
“Is this still PP1?” he says. “Who runs the point without Gavin?”
“Just leave it for now, Theo.” Luca clamps a hand on his shoulder.
Mason laughs once. “Going to be a long afternoon, Captain.”
“Don’t call me that,” I say.
He smiles, but says nothing else.
Eight minutes after Gavin walked out, Coach Franklin walks in.
It’s not dramatic. He comes through the doors like he’s walking into a meeting he was scheduled for, and he stops on the same spot Gavin stood. The coincidence probably isn’t intentional, but the room feels it anyway.
“Gavin has elected to leave the program.” He pauses, shifting his clipboard from his right hand to his left. “I’m not going to get into the details, because frankly they’re not your business. What is your business is how you handle the news and what happens next.”
He looks at me the same way he’s been looking at me all season.
Like I’m the solution to a problem he’s been solving in advance.
That’s how I know.
“This team needs stability. It needs someone the rest of you trust, who knows the system, and who the coaching staff trusts to take the team forward,” he says. “Hale, you’ll wear the C for the rest of the season, and we’ll talk about next year when we get to next year.”
“Yes, Coach,” I say, feeling every person’s stare.
Because what else am I supposed to say?
“Good,” he says. “This program has been here for ninety-one years. We’ve had captains break their legs in November and lead from the press box, and we’ve had captains get drafted and sent off to war. The letter doesn’t make the team, and you’re all expected to be leaders.”
There’s a chorus of “Yes, Coach.”
Franklin’s hand lands on my shoulder. “On the ice in three.”
And then he’s gone, and this is all mine.
Someone — Luca, I think — lets out a noise that’s somewhere between a whoop and a battle cry. Then there’s a lot of sound, the room surging forward, a locker room reaching for something good to feel.
Theo punches my arm harder than he probably means to. Luca starts a chant of HA-LE, HA-LE. I sit there for a moment, stunned, even though I should feel something cleaner. Pride, maybe. But what I feel is the weight of everyone needing me to be okay.
I stand up, and the room goes quiet much faster than I want it to. They’re not joking anymore, not really, even Luca. They’re looking at me the way a team looks at the guy who has all the answers.
“Schedule’s the same, system’s the same, and practice today is practice, not group therapy,” I say. “We’ve got a game Friday, and we’re going to be ready for it, because nothing about this team changed today except one piece of lettering on a jersey. That’s it.”
“That was the worst speech I’ve ever heard,” Luca says.
“Get on the ice, Luca.”
“Yes, Captain.”
I roll my eyes and think about texting my dad.
He’ll know within the hour anyway. Someone will text someone or the university will put out a statement, and my father will draft the email about What This Means. I can already hear it: Let’s discuss how to achieve maximum exposure and leverage.
So I don’t text him.
The room is already moving again around me — sticks in hands, helmets getting pulled on, Theo tripping over his own bag — and Luca is first to the tunnel, louder than he needs to be, pushing the mood up by force.
By the time the guys follow him onto the ice, only Mason is still around.
He’s half-turned into his locker, his helmet hanging from the hook above his head. Taped to the inside of the door at eye level is the photo I’ve seen since freshman year: his father, arm around a younger Mason, the two of them in worn Ravens jerseys.
Patrick Cross, class of ’88. The man who played here, who’s scouted for NHL teams in the decades since, and who still walks into the room at alumni events and fundraisers like he’s owed a chair.
Freshman year, after the Redstone loss, we were on the bus, and Mason was three swigs deep into a flask he wasn’t supposed to have. Then somebody asked him about his old man, because Mason had played badly and his old man had been in the building.
Mason laughed and told us, like it was a punchline, that when he was sixteen his father had put him through the drywall in the basement for a missed shift. He’d had to patch it himself the next morning.
He found the story funny, but none of us laughed.
Luca had looked at me across the aisle, but we hadn’t said anything. Mason had kept drinking, the bus had kept moving, and nobody — including Mason — had brought it up since. I don’t know whether the Mason I deal with every day is the real one or the one Patrick built.
Either way, he’s here.
He’s looking at the photo the way I’ve caught him looking at it before, when he thinks no one is watching. His fingers find the corner of the tape where it’s lifted from the door, and he smooths it with his thumb. Then he catches me watching, and the easy face comes back.
“You’ll be good at it, Hale,” he says. “Donor-friendly.”
“Sure,” I say, grabbing my stick.
“That was a compliment.”
“Was it?”
“Hand to God.”
He pushes off the locker, grabs his helmet and stick, and heads for the tunnel. Then he stops at the doorway and looks back at me, weighing for a few seconds whether to say whatever is on his mind.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I wouldn’t have wanted it.”
For once, I think he means it.
“Okay.” I shrug and give a small scoff.
Then he turns to go.
I sit back on the bench for longer than I should, because practice is starting. My pads are on, my skates are laced, and I’m supposed to be on the ice in ninety seconds with the rest of the team waiting for me.
But I’m not quite ready to give it to them.
The tape rolls have moved somehow, so I take a second to straighten them. When I look up, Seb is in the doorway. He’s leaning against the frame with his helmet under his arm and his stick beside him.
He’s been doing this since freshman year — showing up next to me when things break, keeping his mouth shut, taking up space in a way that means I don’t need him to perform comfort.
“Coming,” I say.
He doesn’t move.
I look at him. He looks back. He’s not going to say anything, but his eyes are very steady, and the quiet between us is comfortable. So I stand, grab my helmet, and cross the room toward the tunnel.
Seb doesn’t move out of the doorway until I’m beside him. Then he steps back, falling into stride with me down the tunnel, his shoulder almost level with mine because he stands an inch shorter than I do and a foot wider.
As we walk, he glances over. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I say.
He doesn’t push. He keeps walking beside me, and the tunnel is cold and concrete and smells like old rubber. The light at the far end is bright with the rink. I tap the raven crest on my way past, and we hit the ice.