20. Epilogue
Epilogue
Mara
Three Years Later
The ice is perfect this morning.
I'm the first one here, like always. I lace up in the quiet, that familiar cold settling into my lungs, before I step on.
I used to need this silence to feel safe. Now I just like it.
The rink smells the same, sharp and clean and metallic, but everything else has changed. My schedule is booked four months out. After Tessa won Nationals last spring, my phone didn't stop ringing for two weeks straight.
I'm not "Coach Ellison's daughter" anymore.
I'm Mara Kincaid.
Still getting used to that. In the best possible way.
Tessa skates out from the tunnel at 7, already warming up along the boards like the professional she's becoming. She's taller now. More settled in her body. Less desperate to be perfect, hungrier to be great. There's a difference, and she knows it.
"You're early," I say.
"You're always earlier." She throws me a look over her shoulder. "I learned from someone."
I laugh, and it echoes in the empty arena.
She's nineteen now. Confident. Still anxious sometimes — that doesn't just disappear — but she has tools.
She knows how to breathe through it. Her mother is still intense, still shows up to every practice with her clipboard and her opinions, but Julie has learned to sit in the stands instead of by the ice.
It took her some time to relax and totally trust me. But she finally has.
I hear the side door bang open, and I already know the footsteps.
Heavy. Unhurried. Taking up space without apology.
Dane walks in wearing his assistant coach gear, a travel mug in one hand, his jaw set in that tough guy that absolutely does not fool anyone anymore. Especially not me.
He spots me and the scowl softens. Just a fraction. That's his version of a smile before coffee.
"You were supposed to wake me up," he says.
"You were sleeping like someone unplugged you. I wasn't waking that up."
He stops beside me at the boards, close enough that his arm presses against mine. He looks out at the ice. Tessa launches into a spin sequence and he watches with that quiet attention he has — the same focus he used to pour into tape sessions, now redirected at everything he actually cares about.
"She's ready," he says.
"She is."
He nods once. Sips his coffee. Doesn't say anything else.
That's the thing about Dane that took me a while to understand. He's just there. Solid and still and present in a way that used to unsettle me because I didn't trust it.
I trust it now.
The Stanley Cup sits in a glass case at the Enterprise Center. I've walked past it a hundred times. I still stop every single time.
They won it two seasons ago, Dane's last season as a player. I watched from my usual spot, barely breathing, while he scored in overtime and the building absolutely lost its mind. He celebrated at center ice. Found the camera, and pointed.
At me.
Dad was to my left. He didn't say a word. But I saw him press his mouth together the way he does when he's holding something back, and his hand patted me on the back for just a second.
That was enough.
Bowman now realizes what a gem of a head coach he has.
My Dad and Dane are not best friends. They're not going to fish together on weekends. But they share a locker room and a playbook, and there's respect there now, real, earned, difficult respect. The kind that means something because it wasn't given.
Dane retired the week after they lifted the Cup. He sat in our kitchen that morning, still holding his phone, and I could see him deciding who he was without the game.
Turns out he's the same person. Still grumpy. Still takes up too much space in the refrigerator. Still shows up every single day without being asked.
He went back to St. Louis six months retirement. Assistant coach. Defense specialist. The players are scared of him, then they love him, then they'd run through a wall for him. My dad says it's the fastest he's ever seen a coaching relationship develop.
I told him Dane's always been better with people than he lets on.
Dad laughed. A real one.
We're getting there.
I'm finishing Tessa's cooldown notes when Dane reappears from the tunnel in his coaching jacket, whistle around his neck, looking entirely too good for eight in the morning.
He leans on the boards and watches me write.
"Dinner tonight?" he asks.
"You're making it or ordering it?"
"Ordering it."
"Then yes."
He reaches over and tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, and his wedding ring catches the overhead lights — simple, silver, exactly what he picked out for himself.
He said he didn't want anything flashy. I told him he was the least flashy person I'd ever met and he looked genuinely pleased about it.
"Hey." His voice drops low. "You good?"
"Yeah." I look up at him. "Really good."
He holds my gaze for a beat. Nods once.
Then he pushes off the boards and heads toward the tunnel, already calling out to Tessa about her landing rotation.
She rolls her eyes and fixes it immediately.
I watch them both, and something quiet settles in my chest.
I built this. Not because I followed every rule or stayed inside every line someone else drew. But because I finally decided my life was mine to claim.
The ice is perfect this morning.
So is everything else.
THE END