Epilogue
The afternoon sun hits the floorboards differently in May.
It doesn’t have that thin quality of winter light, the kind that barely warms the glass before dying at four.
This light is solid. It stretches across the scratched hardwood in thick, lazy gold bars, lighting up dust motes dancing over the tables.
I lean back against the well, drying a pint glass I probably didn’t need to wash.
The bar hums. It’s a steady, sustainable noise, the online reviews pouring in and bringing us tourists and locals who become regulars.
It’s the sound of a place that’s breathing on its own.
I spot a couple wearing SFU sweatshirts over jeans circle the wolf, play-shoving and daring each other to ride it.
The mechanical wolf survived the winter. So did I.
One of the guys touched up his fur during the repairs—three slightly different grays, close enough from across the room. Up close, he looks like he lost a fight with a hardware store. From the bar, he looks perfect.
I notice things like that now. The small repairs. The evidence of people showing up.
My forearm brushes the soft cotton of my faded black hoodie, sleeves shoved to the elbows. Crow’s head logo cracking at the edges.
Gabriel tried to buy me a new one last week—some limited-edition designer thing. I told him to return it. This one has holes in the cuffs and still smells faintly of cedar and whatever he washes his gear in.
I’m not giving it up.
“Two kegs of the lager, one IPA, and three cider restock,” a voice booms from the back delivery entrance.
I drop the towel onto the counter and start to move. The delivery drivers always try to short the cider order on Sundays because the truck is heavier at the end of the route.
Then I stop.
Delilah is already there.
She stands by the kitchen swing door, clipboard in hand, looking at the massive delivery guy. She isn’t stressed. She just taps the invoice with one manicured fingernail.
“Invoice says four cider,” she says, her voice cutting through the bar chatter like a knife through warm butter. “You can go back to the truck and find the fourth, or I can sign for three and you can explain to dispatch why you’re driving unbilled inventory back to Squamish. Again.”
The guy opens his mouth, closes it, and turns around to head back to the truck.
I pick up the towel again and watch her work.
She’s got it.
My grip on the towel loosens before I notice I’d been wringing it. For five years—hell, for seven—I’ve held this place so tight my knuckles turned white, certain that letting go for even a second would make the whole thing dissolve.
I let go. The roof stayed on.
Last month, I finally did the thing a good owner is supposed to do and never had the cash for: sat Delilah down, made her Assistant Manager, and gave her the raise she’d earned three times over.
Ran real reviews for Ulf and Birgitta too—actual numbers, not just a belated Christmas bonus and an apology.
A year ago I couldn’t have covered a dollar of it.
Seven months ago, I signed half my freedom to the Wolves just to keep the lights on—stamped Westfield’s logo on my own front door because the contract was the only rope anyone threw me, and that rope came with a collar.
There’s no contract now. No clause, no obligation, no name on the door but my dad’s. And the Wolves come anyway—the whole burgundy tide of them, most nights—because it turns out you can’t buy what this place is. You can only build it.
The front door swings open, letting in a gust of mild spring air and a burst of chaotic energy.
“Sorry! I know, I know, the shuttle was a nightmare!”
Valentina Castellano breezes in, tugging off a denim jacket as she weaves through the tables. She’s wearing the staff t-shirt tied at the waist, hair in a messy braid that looks artfully undone, and she’s smiling at three different tables before she even slides behind the bar.
She clocks in, breathless.
“Also, I stopped for coffee. I brought you one.” She plunks a Hidden Bean cup down in front of me. “It’s a bribe. Please don’t fire me.”
“You’re two minutes late, Val. Calm down,” I say, accepting the cappuccino.
She grins—a bright, easy expression that looks so much like her brother’s it sometimes catches me off guard. “Two minutes is a lifetime in hockey. Gabriel told me.”
“Gabriel is a dramatic forward who thinks the world stops when he isn’t on the ice.”
“Truer words,” a deep voice says from the other side of the wood. “Hey, Ivy.”
I look up. Brock Thompson stands there—he must’ve just arrived—leaning his hip against the bar rail. He’s looking at the girl tying an apron around her waist next to the till.
“Late start, Val?”
Valentina freezes mid-knot. A flush creeps up her neck.
“Brock. Hi. No. Yes. Tech issues.” She giggles, a little high. He grins at her and opens one arm, like you’d do for your teammate’s kid sister.
She steps into it. The top of her head barely clears his shoulder. “Big night?”
“Biggest,” he says, letting go. His eyes are already scanning past us, restless, patting his own chest pocket. “Hey—Delilah around?”
Delilah materializes from the floor like she has sonar for the man. She holds out her flat palm. A loonie sits in the center of it, worn smooth, the loon half rubbed off.
“Looking for this?” she says. “It was in the nightstand. You’re lucky I checked before I loaded the float—another ten seconds and it’s some tourist’s change.”
Brock exhales like a man reprieved. “That’s why we dropped Game One. I skated the whole thing naked.”
“You dropped Game One because Edmonton scored more.”
“Same thing.” He plucks the coin off her palm and zips it into his chest pocket, then pulls her into a hug that lasts a beat longer than friendly. His hand presses flat between her shoulder blades; she ducks her head briefly against his chest.
“Play good,” Delilah says, quiet enough it’s almost private.
“Can’t lose now.” He pats the pocket. “Got my luck back.”
Delilah pulls back, smooths the front of his quarter-zip like she’s done it before—maybe she has—and turns back to the floor without making a thing of it. Just like that. Easy as breathing.
Valentina stands paralyzed, watching the space where Delilah was standing a second ago. Something crosses her face—quick, unguarded, gone before she schools it back into a smile.
Brock turns to her.
“Good luck tonight, Val.”
“Thanks,” she manages. “Yeah. You too. Score goals. Or—whatever the right thing to say is.”
“That’s the right thing to say.” He grins, and for a second he looks about nineteen years old. He turns to me and raises a brow. “Hayes. Walk with me?”
I glance at the bar. Inventory to put away. A float count I haven’t finished. Valentina, staring into the middle distance and probably needing a minute.
“Go on ahead,” I tell him. “I’ve got things to close out first.”
He studies me for a second, something knowing behind the easy grin—he’s one of maybe three people who know what it costs me to walk into that building tonight.
“See you in there, then.” He pushes off the bar rail, quarter-zip catching the breeze as the door swings open.
I watch him go. Delilah, two tables away, doesn’t look up from her order pad. But her pen has stopped moving.
Valentina watches him go, biting her lip, before shaking her head as if to physically clear the fog.
Exhaling hard, she then turns that energy on me like she’s been waiting to pop.
“Okay,” she says, hands fluttering at chest height. “I know I’m supposed to be all cool, like, I’m staff now, I belong here, but Brock Thompson is… ridiculous. He helped me move every box into the penthouse last week and didn’t even complain.”
“Ridiculous,” I repeat, deadpan, because it’s safer than smiling.
She’s still glowing about it, gear-checking with one hand while the other keeps finding her hair, when Delilah steps up beside her with the kind of expression that means she’s been doing manager math in her head for an hour.
“I need Ivy for thirty seconds,” Delilah says.
Valentina blinks, surfacing. “Oh. Yes. I will… go be employed.”
She pivots toward the till area, tying her apron tighter like she can cinch her feelings into place.
Delilah slides in beside me with that brisk, no-nonsense face she wears when she’s pretending she’s not also vibrating about playoff night.
“Two things before you go.” She slides a form across the bar. “City needs the owner’s signature to close out the electrical permit. I’d have forged it, but you have opinions.”
“Strong ones.” I sign it without reading—because I had read it at ten this morning, after the inspector left. “What’s two?”
“I went hunting for the plumbing invoice to settle up with Reza and it’s gone. Please tell me you didn’t—”
“Paid him this morning. All of them. Seventeen grand and change.”
Delilah’s pen stops mid-tap. “From seventy-five?”
“From seventy-five.” I take the pen out of her hand before she can gnaw it.
“O’Neill’s dad sourced the parts through his European suppliers—knocked the quote down by two-thirds.
And the guys gave Reza a day and a half of free demo, so we only paid for the licensed hours.
” I shrug, even though it’s not a shrug-sized thing.
“Turns out ‘free labor’ is my love language.”
“Don’t let Castellano hear you say that,” Delilah murmurs. “He’ll start carrying kegs as foreplay.”
“Hard pass.” I cap her pen for her. “We beat the deadline. No fines. Turns out it helped that the inspector who flagged us got quietly walked out by Ethics last month.”
Delilah nods, satisfied.
Above the taps, the pre-game panel drifts into around-the-league talk, and I catch it in pieces—a logo I know too well, the words Hicks Family Foundation under an anchor’s careful voice.
“—the third youth program to cut ties this spring, with more expected—”