33. Chapter Thirty-Three
Stanley
You sure about this, Cup? An opportunity like that — it doesn’t come around twice.
My dad’s voice has been running on a loop since he called this morning. Since I heard him go quiet in a way my dad never goes quiet, a long, careful pause down the line, and then he said that, and it’s been playing behind my eyes ever since on a loop I can’t find the switch for.
I’m taping my stick. That’s all I’m doing.
The room’s loud around me, the way it always is before a home game — Walsh has the music going this time, somebody’s chirping somebody about somebody’s sister, Rowan’s getting dressed beside me, and for the first time, I’m not anywhere in it.
Not running it. Not the loud one. I’m sitting in my stall taping my stick — the one Aspen swiped off me and made me beg for it back, like she does.
I have my head down, somewhere on the wrong side of a time zone and the wrong side of my own father’s silence.
The one thing holding me to the floor is that she’ll be in the family section tonight where the people who belong to us sit.
I keep coming back to it. She’ll be there.
I don’t look too hard at why that’s the thing steadying me — why a woman I’ve been carefully not-calling-anything has turned into the fixed point I’m using to find north. I just tape the stick.
The boys have been on me about the trip all day.
What was Halifax like? What’d they say? Are you signing?
What’s the deal? The room’s been picking at it since I got back, and I’ve handed them the version that’s true and boring.
Summit. Speakers. Suits and coffee and a building full of hockey men in lanyards.
All of it real. None of it the part that matters.
I have not told one single person in this room that Aspen was there.
It’s nobody’s business. The real reason is that I keep the things that matter safe by not putting them in the air where the room can get its hands on them. The boys know that’s been a fake thing. What they don’t know is how far it’s gone. So far that it’s not fake anymore.
My phone goes off in my stall, and the screen says Coach Linwood. I look at it twice to be sure. Because the man has his own game tonight. His own building, his own bench, puck drop in a couple of hours — and he’s calling me. Me. I step out into the hall to take it.
“Stanley.” That voice. Unfortunately, I know it. “One minute. That’s all I need.”
“For you, Coach, always.”
He keeps it short. He’s never wasted a sentence in his life. And the shape of what he says is the same shape my father made this morning, just blunter, because Bart Linwood has never once softened a thing he meant.
“I heard you turned it down. I’ll say this one time, and then I’ll leave it alone — a door like that doesn’t open twice, son, and loyalty is a beautiful thing right up until the day it costs you a career. Don’t let sentiment make this call for you. You’re too good to be sentimental.”
Then he tells me to play well, and he’s gone, off to coach his own game, and I’m standing in a cinderblock hallway holding a phone that’s gone dark. That’s both of them now. My father and the man who’s been the next thing to a father my whole life agree that I made a mistake.
I don’t go back in right away, but Benson walks out and stops in front of me without saying anything.
“Halifax offered me now,” I finally admit to him. “Sign and come down for their playoff push. I told them no.”
Benson looks at me for a second. He’s not a guy who reacts big.
“You said no to the NHL,” he says. “Right now. You turned it down.”
“I said next fall.”
“Stan.” Captain-flat, the realist coming up under the friend. “You don’t do that. Nobody does that. You sign that. I’d have signed it on the bench in the second period.” Then he pauses because he doesn’t know how to act when I’m not cracking a joke. “You good?”
And there it is. Three of them. My dad, Coach, and now my captain — everyone of them looking at the same play and watching me make the wrong read on it. And the only person on this earth who thinks I got it right is me, and my certainty is down to about sixty percent and falling.
So I do the thing. I put the grin back on — first time it’s been on all day — and I shove the rest of it down underneath it.
“Of course, I’m good. I’m a delight.” I clap him on the arm. “Now quit trying to get in my head before puck drop, Reeve, it’s transparent and it’s rude.”
He doesn’t buy a word of it. But he lets me have it, the way he always lets me have it, and knocks his fist against my chest and heads back in to finish getting ready.
And the doubt’s still in me, all three voices of it, but it’s not sitting cold anymore. It’s lit. I’m not going to argue with any of them. I’m going to go put it on the ice.
The game gives me somewhere to set it down, which is the one thing the game has always reliably done.
It’s chippy from the drop, and halfway through the second, Blue takes exception to a hit and drops his gloves right there against the glass, dead in front of the family section.
The bench is up. I’m over the boards before I’ve decided to be, into the scrum to drag him out of it before he gets himself tossed for the night, and somebody’s fist catches the side of my face, and my helmet goes spinning off across the ice.
I bend down to get it, right under the family section, ears ringing, smirking, because a punch from a guy that size is the most awake I’ve felt all day. Then I look up.
And there she is. Second row, right behind the glass. Aspen.
So I wink at her with a grin. The whole I’m fine, this is fun, watch what I do next.
I get nothing back. No eye-roll, no reluctant almost-smile, not one of the things I’ve spent the last month collecting off that face. She just stares at me. White. Still. Like she’s looking at something a long way behind my head.
And then I see her phone, low against her knee, and her eyes drop to it and come back up, and whatever’s on that screen has done something to her that has nothing to do with the fight on the ice.
Her dad. That’s where I go, fast, skating backward to the bench with my helmet in my hand.
Her father is in the middle of his own game right now, but Coach Linwood called me before puck drop to tell me I blew it, and if he’s spending his pregame on my decision, God only knows what he’s saying to his daughter about it.
I want to stop thinking about the disappointment I’ve caused, but it stays with me the rest of the game.
Blue’s in the box five for fighting, and we’re down a winger, so I go the extra mile.
The doubt, the two fathers, the wink that died on the glass, her white face, and her phone — I take the whole load of it, and I burn it for fuel, the same way I burned Gavin’s name out of my chest the day after Thanksgiving.
There’s no version of this earth where I play a bad game.
Whatever’s going on outside the rink, I’m always present in here.
I cover Blue’s wing and my own. I’m furious and clean.
It’s the most settled I’ve felt since I stepped off the plane.
We win, I’ve got a hand in most of it, and when the horn goes, the building comes up off its seats and for sixty straight seconds, everything in my life is simple again.
The room after is the best place on earth. It’s loud, and it reeks, and there’s gear flung everywhere. The boys are wild with it, and Benson stands up in the middle of it and points at me.
“Guys see Stanley tonight?” He’s got the room. “Golding goes and gets himself five for defending his girlfriend’s honor against a guy who made a comment—”
“He made a stupid fucking comment—” from Blue, somewhere, not a shred of remorse in it.
“—and Stanley plays the entire kill on a line by himself and wins us the game with our best winger in the sin bin. So.” Benson lifts a water bottle like it’s a cup. “To Sterm. Apparently, he does his best work when Golding’s getting himself in a fight.”
And the room comes down on me — chirps and love in the same breath, the way only this room does it, somebody’s tape ball bouncing off the side of my head, Percy giving me the slow silent nod, Rowan informing me there’s pie at the house, and I’ve earned myself a corner piece.
And I’m up on the bench doing the thing I do, batting all of it away — it was nothing, I was barely out there, somebody had to cover Blue’s job while he sat in time-out — deflecting the praise the way I deflect everything.
This. This loud, filthy room full of these idiots I would lie down in traffic for.
This is what was sitting on the far side of that conference table in Halifax — the thing I couldn’t have said to Whitfield without getting weird about it, I’m not leaving this.
You can’t make me leave this. This is my whole heart, and it lives in this room.
Two fathers can think I’m sentimental. They can be right that I’m sentimental.
I look around this room, and I can’t make myself sorry about a single thing.
And under all of it, the whole time, I’m thinking about a pale face in the second row. I get my phone out. I text her.
Me: You still here?
Me: Coming to find you.
I’m watching the screen for the dots when I feel the room catch it.
“Who’s he texting?” Blue, delighted, scenting blood. “Look at his face. Sterm. Who are you texting?”
“My mother.”
“That is not your mother face—”
“None of you would know it, you were raised by wolves and—”
And they’re laughing, and somebody says, “Must be the girl.”
I give them nothing. Grin, shrug, redirect. Because that one’s mine. That one stays mine. The powder stays dry.
But the dots never come up on my phone. She hasn’t answered.
I find her in the hallway off the family entrance. And I take one look at her face and the whole warm, easy night goes out of me like a match in the wind.
I stand there in the hallway with my hair still wet, and I don’t know what’s wrong.
“Linwood,” I say.
And she looks at me like I’m the last person she wants to see.