Chapter 16
sixteen
ROWAN
Sloane is wearing my spare Ravens hoodie as we walk to The Den.
It’s three sizes too big and keeps slipping off her shoulder, and she keeps pulling it back up without breaking her sentence. If I’m being honest, my eyes are focused on her figure much more than my ears are focused on the story she’s telling about Ivy.
It’s something about Ivy and a boy from her art history seminar and an espresso, and I am laughing in the right places, I think, because she hasn’t stopped talking, which means I’m keeping up. But I’m not keeping up, because I’ve got a million things on my mind.
Three weeks with the letter on my chest, and the list only gets longer.
“—and then she walks back into the dining hall like nothing happened,” Sloane finishes.
“Sounds about right,” I say, but it’s a second too late.
She squeezes my hand, and I feel her eyes on me. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Mm.”
She knows it’s a lie. She’s letting me keep it anyway, like every time she’s asked these last few weeks, and somehow that’s worse than if she’d called it. Because the truth is, the captaincy has become all-consuming.
Before Gavin quit, I thought I was carrying a lot on my shoulders, but since getting the C, I’ve realized just how much bullshit goes along with the role. On the ice, the requirements are obvious. Off the ice, there are meetings and donor events and media and—
“Rowan.” Sloane nudges her elbow into my ribs. “Are you sure you’re good?”
“Yeah,” I say.
The arena lights come up ahead, and we go in through the players’ tunnel. At the split where the family stairs branch off, Sloane turns to face me. Her mouth opens, then closes, and it’s clear she’s debating saying something.
Instead, she reaches up, brushes her thumb along my jaw, and kisses me.
And then she’s gone, up the stairs without looking back. I watch her go for longer than I need to, knowing it’s going to be the best part of my night. Then I turn toward the locker room doors.
But I pull up short, because my mother is in the corridor, wearing a camel coat, her hair immaculate. She must not be having any headaches today, which is unusual. What is usual is my father on the phone, two steps behind her, not yet looking at me.
When she sees me, my mother’s face brightens, and in that moment I feel guilty about avoiding their calls the last few weeks. “Sweetheart! Look at you!”
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
She walks over, takes hold of my upper arms and squeezes, then kisses the air beside my cheek. “We are so excited about the captaincy. Your father has been impossible.”
I give her the real smile, because she’s earned it by being here rather than in bed with some pills. Sometimes, it’s enough for the people you love to drag themselves out of bed and do the best they can, and she never manages to get to many of my games.
My father is off his phone now, and he looks me over the way he always does: top to bottom and then back up to my face. Then he extends his hand, I take it, and we do the usual three-second, slightly too firm handshake.
“Glad you came,” I say.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he says.
He puts his hand on my elbow. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet after the game. Greg Mercer. He’s with Boston. I’ve arranged ten minutes after the press has cleared.”
He says it the way he says everything — like it’s already been decided and I’m being briefed, not asked. Six months ago, that sentence would have sent a surge of enthusiasm through me. Right now, it’s like drinking tea when you’ve been a coffee drinker all your life.
“Good game tonight,” he says, patting my elbow before letting go. “Make it count.”
“Yeah.”
I lean down, kiss the top of my mother’s head, and tell her thanks for coming, and she beams at me. At the same time, my father goes back to his phone, like he’s checked me off the to-do list and he’s already on to the next item.
Like father like son.
As they head for the stands, I walk to the locker room door, put the captain face on, and push inside. A bunch of the guys are already there, and something shifts when they notice me — conversations tightening, postures straightening.
It’s the room rearranging itself around the captain being in the room.
I nod at a few of the guys and try not to make it a big deal. Because while I’ve put on a Ravens jersey a few hundred times in this room, one letter seems to be all it takes to make a difference. It feels like I’m no longer one of the guys, or not in the same way, anyway.
“Captain,” Luca says, as I pass him on the way to my stall.
“Shut up.”
He grins. “Sure, Captain.”
Seb nods at me when I sit next to him.
For the next twenty minutes, the guys talk shit around me, loud and easy, and I let it go on without me. A little later, Coach Franklin’s speech is a variant of the one he often gives — same lines, same emphases, same closing reminders.
What’s different is what happens after the speech. He looks at me, then he takes a step back, and the room turns to me. I stand because that’s what they expect from the guy with the letter.
I’ve heard versions of this speech a hundred times from other captains at all levels of hockey, and now I’m saying what they said because it worked when they said it. It’s all I can manage right now.
“They’re going to try to make it physical early because that’s all they’ve got, and when they do, you don’t bite. You stay on your check, you win your board battles, and you trust the guy next to you to win his.”
I look at Theo, then at Luca, who is bouncing one knee and grinning at me like I’m about to say something worth remembering. I’m not. Because this isn’t Remember the Titans, and speeches in here don’t mean shit out there.
“Ravens on three,” I finish.
Twenty-something voices hit it together, sticks banging the floor, and this is the moment of the pregame that does matter. The sound fills the room, same as always, and it almost reaches whatever part of me has gone quiet.
Then we hit the ice, and the first period is ugly.
They’re bigger but not as skilled, and it’s clear they’ve decided our freshmen are the soft spot. They finish every check, grind the boards, and make it miserable hockey. They’re not skilled enough to scare me, but they’re physical enough to make it ugly.
Between shifts, I do the captain things — keeping the freshmen’s heads in it, relaying what Franklin calls down from behind us, watching the ice so I know what’s coming on my next shift. It’s a role I was already kind of doing with Gavin so absent, but now it hits home.
This is my team now, and there’s no one else coming to save my ass.
As the period goes on, their hits get increasingly dirty, and the refs are letting it go. A Ravens freshman D-man takes a late hit along the boards and the ref’s arm stays down. Next shift, their winger runs another freshman into the end boards after the whistle.
Seb doesn’t even hesitate — he cross-checks the guy onto his back before anyone else has moved. That’s when the ref’s arm goes up, and Seb skates to the box like he’s paying a bill he expected, because Seb always repays every debt as soon as possible, on and off the ice.
But two minutes is a long time when you’re killing a penalty, and they should have earned a few before Seb got his. So, as I take the ice for the penalty kill, I skate past the ref and keep my voice low enough that only he hears it.
“Get control of this, or he’s going to do your job for you all night,” I say.
The ref doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t need to. We kill the penalty, because even a man down, we can still skate rings around them, but it takes a physical toll I don’t want to pay this early.
By the time the clock lets Seb out of the box, my hand is gripping my stick so hard it’s starting to ache. As Seb drops onto the bench, I let go and flex my fingers behind my back where no one can see.
“Good job,” I tell him.
He nods.
The first period ends zero-zero, and while we outshot them we couldn’t finish. Coach is happy with that, but I’m not, because if we’re going to make the playoffs this is the exact sort of game we should be controlling early and coasting late.
Second period, Mason sets up the goal three minutes in.
He picks the puck off a turnover at the blue line, holds it for two full beats while their D-pair commits, and slides a pass through the space where a defender used to be. Niko one-times it past the goalie’s blocker. The bench erupts, and the crowd goes nuts.
When Mason comes off, I nod. “Hell of a pass.”
“Thanks, Cap,” he says, with the same flat pleasantness he’s had for weeks.
Mason isn’t doing anything wrong. That’s the problem. For weeks now — since the lawn and the verbal jab in the locker room — he’s been clean, disciplined, exactly what a captain would hope for. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it doesn’t come.
My own shifts tell a different story.
I play the kind of hockey that keeps a team in a game but never makes a highlight reel, and somewhere in the donor box, a scout is writing down Mason’s assist while I’m icing my forearm.
We get our next break when one of their D-men hooks Luca along the wall and, finally, the ref’s arm shoots up. Power play. Franklin sends the second unit out, keeping me on the bench, and Riley Watson hits it from the left circle — high, clean, top corner.
Two-zero.
The building wakes up, and for a few minutes it feels like the game we should have been playing from the start. Then Mason scores the third, picking a pocket at the blue line, cutting inside, and wristing it past the goalie’s glove like he’s the only person on the ice.
The bench is up and I’m on my feet with them, banging my stick and doing the right things, but my eyes are already in the stands. Sloane is on her feet seven rows up, clapping and watching the guy she used to date play the best hockey of his life.
I’m not the only one looking.
Mason coasts back toward the bench and lets his eyes climb the same seven rows — to her — and holds there a beat past anything I can call accidental. Then he finds me, and whatever was in his face smooths back into that flat, easy pleasantness, like I imagined it.
Seb drops beside me with a water bottle and says, “Mason’s playing well.”
I take a long pull before answering. “Yeah.”
Seb watches me a moment too long, then looks back at the ice.
In the third period, they come out like a different team. Their top line pulls a goal back on a cheap deflection, and four minutes later they score again on a broken play. Before we know it, it’s suddenly three-two, and the building that was roaring ten minutes ago is quiet.
Franklin’s voice comes from behind me. “Talk to your D. They’re cheating weak side.”
I lean down the bench and tell them, and they adjust.
The last five minutes, I’m on the ice for most of it, blocking shots, clearing pucks, grinding. With two minutes left, I make the mistake that should cost us the game. I’m a half-second late reading the play, and their forward breaks in alone on our goalie.
The building holds its breath, but Mason comes out of nowhere — backchecking from the far wing, full speed, angling him off the puck and into the boards with a clean hit that sends the building wild. He doesn’t celebrate, and just keeps skating like it was routine.
It wasn’t routine.
Relief comes first. The other thing comes a half-second behind — my jaw setting, my stick gone still in my hands while everyone around me bangs the boards. He just covered for me in front of a scout, my girl, and the whole building, and he made it look like nothing.
The buzzer sounds with us still ahead three-two.
Mason skates past me on the way to the handshake line. “Good game, Cap.”
“You too,” I say, and his face gives me nothing back.
After the handshake line, I find Sloane in the stands. She’s standing, clapping with both hands over her head. Ivy is next to her, and my parents are two rows behind them. When Sloane spots me, a wide grin crosses her face.
I try the smile I’ve worn for twenty years — for parents, coaches, teammates, and cameras — the one that says we won and I’m fine and isn’t this great. It sits wrong and stops short, like the muscles have forgotten how to operate it.
Her smile dims at the corners, and a crease forms between her brows.
I turn away and skate to the locker room. It’s already loud, music loud and Luca louder, his arms around two freshmen and celebrating like we just won a championship. In reality, we barely held on against a team we should have beaten by three or four.
I sit at my stall with my pads half off and sweat running down the back of my neck, making a few comments to the guys but mostly letting them celebrate. It occurs to me then that maybe this is how Gavin felt, day after day, game after game, wearing the C.
Tension, never relenting.
I come out of the dressing room twenty minutes later, and my father is in the corridor with Greg Mercer, the scout. Mercer shakes my hand and tells me he liked the penalty kill, which is the kind of thing you say when you can’t point to anything else.
And that’s really the highlight.
We talk for ten minutes, and he’s pleasant and professional, asking how the team’s looking and what I’m studying. They’re not the questions someone from the league asks when he’s interested. They’re the questions he asks when he’s doing a favor for someone.
When Mercer leaves, my father sighs. “That performance needs work, Ro.”
“I know,” I say. “I’ll sort it.”
“Good,” he says. “You’ve got more in you.”
He puts his hand on my elbow, squeezes once, and turns to go.
My mother touches my arm on her way past. “You were wonderful,” she says.
She means it without having watched closely enough to know whether it’s true. But I kiss her cheek and thank her, because saying or doing anything deeper would send her spiraling, and managing that is one of the things that’s always on my list.
Then Sloane arrives, her eyes level on mine, not buying it. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
It’s the same answer as before the game.
The same lie.