Epilogue #4
It hits me harder than the check—a feeling I haven’t felt since I was ten years old, dragging a net onto a frozen pond while my breath made clouds in the dark.
Pure, stupid, electrified joy.
I wink at her.
Above centre ice, the jumbotron’s already replaying it—my face, mouth open mid-howl, forty feet tall for twenty thousand strangers to keep. That’s the version that leaves the building tonight. The one they’ll loop and cut and sell back to me by morning.
I keep my eyes on her and can’t fight the stupid grin.
I’ve got the only one that matters right here—cold plexi, her palm, the red horn going with the song “Raise a little hell.” The first thing in a long time that’s only mine.
Ivy · Sunday, May 2nd (Late night)
The horn’s been silent for over an hour and I can still feel it in my teeth.
I watched the goal go in from the glass, both palms flat against it, and for three seconds after it lit I forgot to be the owner of anything. I was just someone who knows the exact quiet that lives in your hands right before you release a shot like that.
The bar’s empty now. The watch-party crowd cleared out slow—first the families, then the diehards who stayed to argue the replay, then nobody—and what’s left is the debris of a good night. Damp coasters. A toque somebody’s going to miss tomorrow. A couple half-empty pitchers.
Ulf turned off the kitchen line twenty minutes ago and said goodnight in Swedish, which I’ve learned means he’s tired and emotional and proud of us all.
Birgitta pressed a foil-wrapped plate into my hands on her way out—you eat, you’re too thin for playoffs—and was gone before I could argue.
Valentina’s running the last of the glasses through.
Delilah’s at a booth with her clipboard and organized heaps, tallying the till.
Post-game scrum audio runs low on the TV above the bar.
The broadcast desk is doing its soft-landing routine, the arena ambient noise behind them like white noise.
I’m wiping the bar top, the arena lighting on screen blindingly blue-cold and industrial.
Half the overhead rig has already cut out, leaving the interview backdrop in that flat, fluorescent wash that makes everyone look vaguely exhausted.
I reach for the remote, about to turn it off.
Then Gabriel fills the frame.
Playoff suit, collar open, his skin still warm from both game and shower. He’s answering at an unhurried pace—the kind he used to have to fake for the cameras. Tonight it isn’t a performance.
And on his head, slightly crooked—black knit, white bar logo stitched above the cuff. The one we sell for thirty dollars, right next to our branded t-shirts.
“—just wanted to wear something that means something to me tonight,” he’s saying on screen, easy, unbothered, while a reporter nods furiously.
Delilah sees it at the same time I do. The sound she makes isn’t a scream so much as a frequency—high, victorious—and both her palms hit the bar hard enough to rock the nearest glass.
“National television!” She points at the screen like she’s identifying a perp.
“Do you know how many eyeballs are on that right now? Do you have any idea what that logo placement costs on a post-game scrum? Ivy. Ivy. That is free advertising on the biggest hockey camera night of the year and he is—” she stops, gesturing at the TV with a yipped laugh, “—absolutely breaking the clause.”
I grip the bar edge. The smile comes up before I can stop it. The full, stupid, private one that I usually only let out when nobody’s watching.
He isn’t supposed to look that good in our beanie. Rumpled, sheepish, a man who lost a bet—that’s the version Delilah wanted for the socials. Instead he looks like the kind of photo people frame.
Unfair, I think.
Then the joke drops away, because I notice what he isn’t doing.
He hasn’t touched the beanie once—hasn’t straightened it, hasn’t done the thing men do when they know a camera’s on them.
He’s mid-answer about the five-hole, hands sketching the angle in the air, and it’s just crooked. He isn’t thinking about the beanie.
He’s thinking about the game. About tonight. About getting through the scrum so he could—
I set the cloth down.
He wore it because he wanted to.
That’s the whole thing, isn’t it? That’s what it’s been, for months now. Not the big moments—not the Sin Bin speech, or the night at the bar, or when he showed up at my door with a duffel bag and a backup hotel room in case I kicked him out. The small ones. The ones nobody writes a contract about.
I breathe out slow through my nose.
Delilah looks at me. She doesn’t say anything clever for once, and I love her for it.
“You should go home,” I tell her, my voice hoarse. I clear it. “You’re opening for me in—” I check the clock and wince. “Nine hours. I’ve got the close.”
She doesn’t argue, which tells me how tired she is. She pulls me into a quick, fierce hug, grabs her coat, and points at the TV on her way out. “Frame that. I mean it.” Then the door, and the cold, and gone.
Valentina’s already got the last rack of glasses put away, apron off, an efficiency that would make her brother proud. She waves goodnight with both hands and follows Delilah into the dark.
The bar goes still.
I pick the damp cloth back up and do the last loop: mats stacked, stools up on the near side, the mechanical wolf standing silent in his repainted coat. I give his ear a small pat as I pass, which I will deny if anyone asks.
The TV murmurs on. I reach for the remote, but the front door opens.
Cold air arrives first—a clean, sharp gust that smells like spring snowmelt and night ice. Then him.
Gabriel walks in still in his playoff suit, jacket open, tie long gone.
He’s carrying the beanie in one hand, turning it by the brim.
His hair is dry now, pushed back, and there’s something on him that post-game always leaves—a looseness in his shoulders, a stillness in his face that isn’t exhaustion exactly.
He walked here. From the arena.
I can tell because the cold is still on him—clinging to his jacket shoulders, damp at his collar. He walked two blocks in the dark after the biggest goal of his season and came straight here.
I keep wiping the bar. My hands need something.
He crosses the floor without hurrying. No performance in it. No calculation. He leans against the wood on the customer side, like he belongs there, like this is just where he ends up at the end of the day.
Which, I realize, it kind of is.
“Saw the scrum,” I say.
He sets the beanie on the bar between us.
“Clause says I have to wear it.” His voice is rough-edged, the way it gets when he’s tired and not performing. “I wore it.”
“Clause says you can’t look attractive in it.”
“I don’t make the rules.”
“Delilah made the rules. They’re in writing. You initialed them.”
His mouth pulls at one corner. He looks at the beanie, then at me. His eyes search mine for a moment.
“I can see your neon sign,” he says, “from my condo.”
I go still.
He says it casually. A fact, offered up like the weather. But we both know it isn’t that.
“Decent view,” he adds.
“You moved,” I say.
Gabriel’s mouth tilts. “Yeah.”
Something clicks half a beat late. Valentina, this afternoon, breathless behind the bar: he helped me move every box into the penthouse last week and didn’t even complain. She said the penthouse. His.
“Valentina’s in your old place?”
“She needed somewhere to live. I didn’t need it anymore.” He shrugs it off like handing back floor-to-ceiling windows in the cliffs is nothing.
I look at him across the bar. This man who could’ve stayed in that penthouse the team set him up in—panoramic view overlooking the whole lit-up village, a sauna he showed me once.
I’ve been up there twice; he prefers coming to the pub or my Creekside apartment.
I did the math on what a place like that rents for, once.
It’s not far off what it cost to fix this bar.
“Why?”
He rolls the beanie slowly between his fingers against the wood, eyes on the knit like it’s safer than looking at me.
“Because I’m done living in something that feels like a favor.”
“So this condo—” I start.
“I bought it,” he says, and this time he does look at me. “Mine. My keys. My name on the paperwork.”
“And you picked the unit where you can see my sign,” I say.
His shoulders lift in the smallest shrug, like he’s trying to make it casual and failing.
“I like knowing where you are,” he says. Then, quieter: “I like being close enough to walk.”