31. Chapter Thirty-One
Stanley
I wake up before the alarm with Aspen Linwood asleep on my arm, and I lie there a long time not moving, because moving means the night will be over, and I’m not ready for it.
She didn’t bolt. That’s the first fact of the morning, the one I keep turning over like a coin.
She’s here. Hair everywhere, one hand loose in the sheet, breathing slow, and somewhere in the dark last night, I kept a promise I’d have cut my own hand off before breaking, and she stayed.
I keep waiting to feel like a guy who got away with something.
I don’t. I just feel full, which is a strange word for it and the only one that fits.
She wakes slowly. There’s a second where she surfaces and finds me watching her. I see the old reflex flicker, and then it lets go.
“I have a panel at nine.”
“I have a thing at ten,” I reply.
Neither of us says the rest of it. She dresses and gathers her bag, and at the door she stops, comes back, kisses me once, quick, like she’s proving to herself she’s allowed to, and then she’s gone down the hall to her own life.
And I get into my suit.
The room’s a glass box on the third floor with a long table, a tray of pastries nobody’s going to touch, and more coffee.
Marchetti’s already there, wearing the face he wears when there’s money in a room.
Then there’s the rest of them. There’s Halvorsen, the scout who put my name on a card three Junes ago and has acted like he owns a piece of me ever since.
A development guy named Russ with a lanyard and a tablet.
The assistant GM — Whitfield, calm, old-money, the one who sets the temperature of the room.
Good suits. Good coffee. Warmth coming off all of them, because this isn’t an audition — they’re not deciding whether they want me, they did that years ago. They want me to feel wanted. They want me to feel at home.
And I do. That’s the snag right there. I know how to be in this room, thanks to my father and the family legacy. This is home.
They start where I expect. Development, fit, the shape of the future — where they see me, how I’d slot in down the line, all of it warm and a year or two out, the way it’s supposed to be.
Finish strong at Camden, come to dev camp, we’re thrilled, see you down the road. I know the words to this song.
And then Whitfield sets his coffee down, and the key changes.
“I’ll be straight with you, Stanley, because Marchetti tells me you can take it straight.
” A smile. “We didn’t fly you in to say hello.
We’re banged up. You’ve seen the report.
We lost a top-six winger for the year, we’ve got another one week to week, and we’re trying to hold a wild-card spot a man short on the wing.
” He nods. “We think you could play in this league right now. Not next fall. Now. Down the stretch, into a run, if we get there.” He lets it sit.
“We’d like to talk about signing you and bringing you in for the rest of this season. ”
And beside me, Marchetti goes still, not looking at me so hard I can feel it, his take-home percentage is already going behind his eyes — start the deal now, pro reps in a playoff race, a full NHLer by next fall instead of a rookie blinking through training camp.
They’re offering something that doesn’t happen to most guys.
I know the chances of this are slim to none.
And I know I’m not sitting here because of my last name.
These guys know I’m good. Being seen and chosen like this is the one thing I always dreamed of.
My dad and I talked about this my entire life.
When an opportunity presents itself, especially a rare one like this, jump on it.
And hell, do I want to just jump at it. No thought about it, just nod.
I can’t pretend this isn’t a dream come true.
This is the dream walking in the door early.
The thing I was named for, offered now, no waiting, no senior year, no maybe.
The show wants me on the biggest stage there is, and it wants me now.
Saying anything but yes feels like the kind of thing a man tells the story of for the rest of his life as the dumbest call he ever made.
Kid gets handed an NHL playoff push at twenty-one and says, no thanks, I’d rather finish out college.
Who does that? Nobody does that. You don’t say no to an opportunity like this.
Now is the entire point. Now is what all of it was for.
I feel myself leaning at it. I feel the grin starting up — the yes-shaped one, the one that’s walked me through every door I ever wanted open.
And then the cost starts building itself, not as some noble flash of clarity, just as facts, landing one at a time like pucks off the wall.
Signing now means leaving Camden in February.
Mid-season. It means I clean out my stall at Camden and I’m gone, and the boys finish the run without me — Benson takes them in a man down, Blue out on the wing with nobody next to him, Rowan and Percy and the rest of them carrying it through the room I actually live in.
No Frozen Four with my brothers. No shot at the thing with the four guys who’ve seen me with the mask all the way off.
I’d be trading the team that knows me for the team that drafted me.
And it means leaving her. That’s the one I can’t look at straight.
The Hawthorne House rule against falling before the draft — turns out it was written for a reason, and turns out I broke it anyway, and that’s the thing snagging me in this chair.
Why the hell am I hesitating? If my dad were here, he’d be smacking me in the back of the head and putting the pen in my hand.
I’m not going to think about Aspen Linwood right now. Except my stomach’s already on the floor, so apparently I already have. I don’t follow the thought to the end. I won’t. But it’s in the room now, sitting under everything, and I can’t get it back out.
The more my brain stirs, the more I learn that the discomfort isn’t really about the team.
It isn’t even about her. It’s that I’m sitting, one more time, in a room full of people in good suits who have already decided my timing for me.
Sign now. Come now. We’ve worked out when you go.
And it’s the same feeling, the exact same one, just in better tailoring.
It’s the delivery room. It’s the name on the birth certificate before I’d opened my eyes.
It’s the whole long train I got put on the day I was born that not one person ever slowed down to ask me if I wanted to board.
They’re not asking me when I want to go. They’re telling me. Same as they’ve told me everything, my whole life — what I’d be, what I’d want, when I’d arrive. The machine, reaching in to set my when, because the machine has always set my when.
And here’s the thought I have never once had in a room like this, the one that comes up out of nowhere and won’t lie back down. I’m allowed to have my own.
She asked me what I wanted last night, and I didn’t have an answer, because nobody’d ever asked.
But the question’s in me now, lodged somewhere, and it wakes all the way up in this room, and the answer turns out to be small and clear and almost nothing to do with hockey.
I don’t want to be told when. I’ve been told when my entire life. I’m so tired of being told when.
“I’m honored.” I look at each of them. “I mean it — that you’d want me down the stretch, that lands harder than I can say in a conference room without getting weird about it.” I grin. “But I’m going to finish my season.”
Whitfield doesn’t move. Marchetti shifts in his chair.
“I’ve got a team,” I say. “I’m not walking out on them in February with a run in front of us.
That’s not a guy I can be, and it’s not a guy you actually want — the one who bails on his room the second something shinier opens a door.
I’ll sign. I want to sign, I want to be here, this isn’t me testing the water.
I’ll just do it in the spring, when my season’s done. The normal way.”
And I watch it land, and it lands better than fine because finishing your season is the normal thing, the respectable thing.
The now was an ask, not a line in the sand.
Halvorsen’s nodding before I’m done. Whitfield says something warm about character.
Loyalty plays well in this room, exactly like I knew it would.
Marchetti pushes the way agents push — good money to leave on the table, leverage, are we sure — and I tell him I’m sure. The Halifax men take it like gentlemen. We shake hands all around, and they tell me how glad they are, how they’ll see me in the spring, what a future this is going to be.
And the last thing Whitfield says, hand light on my shoulder, like it’s nothing at all, “Offer stands, by the way. Anything changes, you decide you want in sooner — you call us. Door’s open.”
Door’s open. That’s the most important catch of this. I didn’t close a door in there. I bought myself time.
I walk out into the hallway and loosen my tie and stand there a second, weirdly winded, like I played a period instead of sitting in a chair.
I chose something. I know that much. I chose my own season, my own when, and I held it against a room built on purpose to take that choice off me, and it mattered.
I take my phone out. Her name’s right there at the top.
I get as far as the empty box, thumb hovering, the whole message built in my head, and then I stop.
She’ll think I stayed for her. And I’m nowhere near ready to admit anything.
I scroll. The group chat is going off, firing questions at me.
My dad texted a few times. So did my mom.
I have a few unread from Marchetti this morning.
I don’t open any of it. I put the phone back in my pocket.
I walk around the summit and go find coffee.
And I try to work out what the hell I’m going to tell my parents about what I just did.
My dad’s going to think I lost my mind. Half the league would.
A kid hands the NHL back a season and says I’d rather finish college — nobody understands that.
But for once in my whole life, nobody picked when but me. I’m not giving that back.