Epilogue #2
They don’t say the part I know—the fake account, the screenshots, some seventeen-year-old staring at her phone trying to work out if the story about her was real.
The broadcast doesn’t have that. I do. But I can hear the shape of it under the anchor’s careful voice, and the shape is this: somewhere, kids are being believed.
The fridge compressor kicks on behind me, filling the room where I don’t have the words yet.
“Good,” I say when I can. It’s the only word big enough and small enough at once.
Delilah’s phone buzzes against the bar. She glances at it, snorts once, and angles the screen toward me—the sea shanty edit again, looping in someone’s group chat, Braxton mid-sentence on a word he clearly regrets.
“Never gets old,” she says, pocketing it. She taps her pen against the bar, considering. “You hear anything about Westfield?”
“Agreement’s signed. Closes in June,” I say it the way you’d read the weather forecast. “Carlisle Sports Group. The review gave the league what it needed; the league gave him a choice—sell, or be removed and sell anyway. He took the first real offer. Two-something for the franchise, minus whatever the lawyers eat.”
“Walks away rich.” Delilah’s mouth twists. “Must be nice.”
“He walks away invisible.” I fold the towel in thirds, square the corners.
“Sarah Carlisle held the press conference at his podium, in his building, and thanked previous ownership exactly once. The guys don’t say his name.
The papers quit printing it. The Village stopped caring the day his decal came off my door.
” I hang the towel on its hook. “Money he always had. The room was the thing he bought all of us to get.”
Delilah’s pen taps twice against the bar. “And the room’s gone.”
“Someone else’s problem now,” I say, and this time it’s true.
“And on that triumphant note,” Delilah says, giving me a pointed look. “This bar is officially safe, code-compliant, and not your problem for the next four hours.” She pushes off the bar, shooing me with her hands. “Go. You’re going to be late for warmups.”
“I have time.”
“Ivy. Go.”
I laugh, grabbing my bag from under the counter. “I’m going, I’m going.”
Coming around the bar, I head for the exit, slowing down when I recognize the woman sitting with her daughter in the corner booth near the window.
Janet. The lady who accidentally gave me a lifeline to my past.
Her daughter, Hayden, is wearing a Wolves jersey three sizes too big, cheeks stuffed with nachos. My U11 girls’ team. Monday and Thursday practices. Wicked wrister, still fighting her edges.
I stop at the edge of their table. Janet looks up from her phone, a smile breaking wide. “Hey, Ivy. Place looks amazing today.”
“Thanks, Janet.” I return her smile. “You two watching tonight?”
Hayden’s whole face lights up before her mom can answer. “We’re going! Dad’s work gave him tickets but he’s stuck on some work call in Singapore, so me and Mom get to go instead.”
“To the actual arena,” Janet clarifies, like she still can’t quite believe it herself. “Her first live game.”
A real smile catches me before I can stop it. “No kidding.”
“I’m gonna scream so loud,” Hayden informs me, entirely serious, like she’s warning me out of courtesy.
“Good. That’s what the seats are for.” I tug her jersey collar straight where it’s bunched under her ponytail, more habit than thought. “Do me a favor tonight. Watch the guys’ knees when they’re battling in the corners. Really watch them. Then tell me about it Monday.”
She blinks, gears turning. “Like—bent? Low?”
“Exactly like that.” I tap my own knee once. “Center of gravity. You’ll see it better on a pro than you’ll ever see it from me yelling it at you from the bench.”
“Bend my knees,” she repeats, filing it away with the seriousness of a kid who takes homework personally.
“See you Monday.” I give Janet a wave and step back, already half out the door.
Hayden’s gone back to her nachos before I’ve cleared the first table, jersey swallowing her whole, completely unaware she just handed me something.
Bend your knees. I’ve said it to a dozen kids over the last few months; I brace for the old ache every single time. It didn’t show up today.
I told Gabriel once, in this bar with the power out, that Dad’s hands started shaking the same month the scouts stopped calling, and I never got to find out which loss would’ve hurt worse on its own because I only ever felt them both at once. It cost me something to say that out loud back then.
It doesn’t cost me anything now.
My dad built this place to hold people. To give them somewhere to be when the world was cold, or loud, or lonely. It’s still doing that. It’s doing it right now, without me standing guard over every coaster.
It doesn’t need me to bleed for it anymore—it just needs me to love it. And because of that, I’m finally free to walk out the door.
I push the front door open. It slowly swings shut behind me with a solid, heavy click.
It sounds like a heartbeat.
The afternoon sun is dipping lower now, turning the gold light to amber. The spring air is crisp, smelling of petrichor and pine. I zip my jacket up over Gabriel’s hoodie. The Village is busy, people moving toward the arena in streams of burgundy and gray. The energy is electric—playoff energy.
Two blocks down, the Sin Bin storefront sits dark. A FOR LEASE sign hangs crooked in the window, the gold S on the logo dulled gray behind a layer of nearby construction dust. Nobody slows down to look.
Neither do I.
I fall into step with the crowd, heading toward the arena where Gabriel is waiting, until Whistler Peak Arena rises at the end of the street like it’s the thing the whole walk was always pointed at. Maybe it was.
I’ve catered this building’s hospitality suite. Argued its parking. Watched its banners go up from the wrong side of the glass. I have never once walked through the front doors to watch a game.
The ticket’s been in my pocket all day. Behind the bench—his section, the one Gabriel handed me like it was nothing, like we both didn’t know exactly what it was.
The doors breathe out when they open. The smell hits before the noise does.
Popcorn and beer mixed with the flat mineral bite of refrigerated ice over concrete.
It’s the exact smell of every arena I ever laced up in, and my body answers like Pavlov’s dog.
My stride shortens. My shoulders square.
Something I packed away with my skates when I was a teenager rolls over under my sternum and opens my eyes.
Keep moving, and the past can’t get a grip.
The concourse is a river of jerseys with other people’s names on them. Beer, fryer grease, the sugar-stink of cotton candy laid over the cold. A kid drags his dad toward the merch wall. Nobody here knows my face. I’m a body in a borrowed hoodie, here to watch the game.
I come up the tunnel and the ice opens below me.
Oh.
It’s beautiful. Fresh sheet, blue-white under the lighting rig, lines crisp as a new cut, the wolf at center leering up at the rapidly filling seats.
From up here, it looks like a stage. From up here you’d never guess how cold it is down there, how hard, how loud the boards get when a body folds into them.
My legs remember—the pre-game buzz, the taste of the air before an anthem, the specific weight of a stick you taped yourself, balanced across two palms like a part of your own arm.
I sit down in a seat behind a bench I’m not allowed on, and I wait for the grief.
I’ve dodged this building for seven years for exactly this reason.
The coaching, the kids, bend your knees—those are tremors contained in the sports center where they practice.
This is the fault line. If the ache lives anywhere, it lives in places like this.
The goal, the dream, gone as fast as sprayed ice.
The horn blares. Both teams pour out for warmups, burgundy at the near end, blue at the far, and two dozen skates carving fresh ice send a sound up through the seats that lands square in my chest.
I brace.
It doesn’t come.
What comes up instead is so simple I nearly laugh at it. I love this. Player-love, not spectator-love. It was the only place the noise in my head ever went quiet—thirteen and furious and airborne, and for three periods, nothing hurt.
I loved it before it broke me, and love like that doesn’t die. It goes silent. It waits for a reason good enough to come looking.
Down on the ice, a burgundy jersey peels out of the warmup circle and sweeps the glass on reflex—a check for threats neither of us will ever unlearn.
I flatten both palms on the cold rail and lean in.
Come find me then.
Gabriel · Sunday, May 2nd (Evening)
The tunnel smells of sharpened steel and old rubber. Fresh ice breath rolls out from the opening, cold enough to sting my lungs, and the roar from the bowl hits the concrete like a living thing.
I stand on the painted line where the cameras can’t quite get the angle they want. Back of my jersey tucked into my pants. Stick blade tapping the floor once, twice. The routine lives in my wrists.
Burgundy wolf. Gold and black trim. Nothing else.
My thumb finds the collar seam—two taps, left over from juniors, when I still believed a touch for luck could fix a night that had already gone sideways.
Nobody added anything to this jersey this year.
No letter, no face of the franchise, none of the things a man once promised me for staying useful.
Nobody had to.
What I’ve got instead doesn’t fit on a chest. The boys stopped looking around me and started looking at me again. And Coach Wilson’s office, a month back—door shut, blinds half down, Ethan Holt leaning against the filing cabinet like he’d rather be anywhere else.
Coach didn’t waste words. “We need to know where your head’s at for the stretch run.”
I remember my own laugh, sharp and wrong in that tiny room. “Is this the part where you tell me you’re worried?”
Holt didn’t blink. Neither did Coach.