Chapter 15
fifteen
Luke
My phone was still dead when I woke up the next morning. We had taken a late flight back to New York after the game.
I hadn't managed to charge it since—by the time I got back home, I'd crashed hard. The only thing I'd managed to do was take off my shoes.
I dug through my bag in the gray early light, looking for the charger again. Found an old one instead, buried at the bottom under a spare jersey, the cord frayed at the connector, but still worked when I plugged it in.
The phone buzzed back to life slowly, like it was as tired as I was.
One bar. Then two.
Then the phone came fully back to life. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that the message had been delivered the night before. My relief was short-lived when I realized there were no new messages.
I told myself that it was fine. It was early. She could still be asleep, or getting Lily up, or a hundred other things that seemed like plausible reasons for her not to have returned my message yet.
I typed out a text anyway.
Sorry, my phone died on the bus last night. Found an old charger. Hope you’re good. Missed you.
I read it back. Deleted Missed you. Put it back. Left it.
Sent.
I stared at the screen another minute, willing three dots to appear. Nothing did. I set the phone on the nightstand and went to shower, telling myself she'd respond when she saw my messages.
The rest of the day ate me alive. We had a film session at the facility, breaking down every shift from the win, Coach freezing frames on the projector to point out the read I'd made on that third-period save.
"This is exactly the anticipation we need," he said, tapping the screen. "You saw it before it happened."
I nodded along, half listening. My mind kept drifting back to my phone, sitting face-up in my bag, still without a single new notification.
After the film session, my phone buzzed. I excitedly reached for it, but disappointment washed over me when I saw it wasn't Dani. It was my agent, Marcus. I answered on the third ring.
“Hey Marcus.”
"Luke, we need to talk. Two teams have already reached out about you. It's not official yet, but I wanted to give you a heads-up. This is the best window. We need a plan for after the Finals—contract-wise, exposure-wise, all of it."
"Can this wait?"
"It really can't. Not if we want to be ready to move the second the season ends."
He walked me through a conversation that should have thrilled me and instead just made my head hurt.
"I need an hour of your time today. Maybe two."
I gave him the hour. Then the second one, because the first hadn't been enough, and by the time I finally checked my phone again it was past noon and there was still nothing from Dani.
I told myself she was working.
I told myself the ER didn't care about my anxiety, and she'd already made that clear enough on the phone Tuesday night: I need you to be able to handle a few hours of silence without it turning into a crisis.
So I didn't send another text. I sat on my hands, metaphorically, and let the silence sit there, and tried to convince myself it wasn't a crisis. It was just a Thursday.
Minutes later, Coach pulled me into his office before team lunch.
"Sit," he said, and something in his tone made my stomach drop. I felt the dread immediately, but I managed to keep myself composed.
"What's going on?"
"Bryan came to see me this morning." Coach leaned back in his chair, studying me. "He told me about the concussion. The one from the party. Said you'd been symptomatic and played through it without reporting it to medical."
The floor tilted a little.
"Coach—"
"I want medical to pull you for evaluation after lunch. If you are cleared to play, I want that documented." He held up a hand before I could argue. "I am sure you are fine. Protocol is protocol. But I need you to understand what almost happened here."
"I wasn't trying to hide anything from the team."
"You hid it from medical staff during a Stanley Cup run. That's not a small thing, Luke, whatever the reason."
His voice wasn't angry. Not exactly. Tired, maybe. Or worse, disappointed.
"I get wanting to protect your shot. I do. But if something had gone wrong out there, if you'd taken another hit before that first concussion had fully healed?—"
"I know."
"Do you?" He studied me another second, then softened, just slightly.
"Bryan should not have been the one to bring this to me.
This appears to be a stunt of his, whatever his intentions are.
But I need you to be straight with me from here on out.
All of it. No more protecting yourself at the expense of the truth. "
"Understood, Coach."
He dismissed me, and I walked out of that office feeling like I'd been hollowed out.
I knew exactly what Bryan was doing by telling Coach. A last, ugly attempt to get his job back by making me look reckless. If medical found anything that afternoon, it would work in his favor. That’s all this was—him grabbing at anything to get his net back.
I found him near the equipment room an hour later, tape tiger in hand, not even looking up when I stopped in the doorway.
"You went to Coach," I said.
"I went to the medical staff. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
He finally looked at me, something like satisfaction flickering behind the practiced innocence.
"I have an obligation to report player safety concerns. That's not personal, Luke."
"It's completely personal and we both know it."
He shrugged and went back to his tape.
"Guess we'll find out who Coach trusts more."
I didn't have the energy to fight him on it. I walked away instead, back toward the locker room, my head too crowded to hold one more thing.
By the time I remembered to check my phone again, it was mid-afternoon.
One new message. From Dani. Sent an hour earlier.
Hope your day's going well.
That was it. Five words, no warmth in them that I could find, no matter how many times I read them over.
I started typing a response, then stopped.
She’d already asked for space, and I didn’t want to hound her just because the distance between us was getting to me. So I locked my phone and slipped it back into my pocket, telling myself she’d reach out when she was ready.
I just wasn’t sure staying silent was the right thing to do.
Team lunch came and went. I picked at my food, half listening to Wyatt and Eli talk through tomorrow's practice schedule, half aware of Roz watching me with something like concern he didn't voice out loud.
"You good?" Roz finally asked, low, just between us.
"Yeah. Just tired."
"You sure that's all it is?"
I wasn't sure of anything, honestly.
But I nodded anyway, because the alternative was trying to explain a feeling I didn't have words for yet—something cold settling low in my stomach, some sense that I'd let too much silence build up without meaning to.
The medical team evaluated me, and we went through the motions. I knew what they'd find—Dani had already done everything to a T days earlier. In the end, they cleared me and told me I was good to go.
That night, back in my apartment, I finally sat down and really looked at my phone.
Nothing more since that one flat message hours ago.
I thought about calling. Decided against it—too intrusive, maybe, given what she'd said Tuesday night about not wanting to manage my feelings on top of her own. I didn't want to be the guy who couldn't read a room. Couldn't read a person.
So I texted instead, careful this time. Slower. Trying to get it right.
I know today's been a lot on both ends. I'm sorry I went quiet last night—phone died, then it turned into one of those days where everything piled up at once. I should've found five minutes to actually check in properly instead of sending one-liners. That's on me.
I watched the message send. Watched the little checkmark appear, then nothing.
I set the phone down. Picked it back up two minutes later. Nothing.
I thought about Lily's crayon drawing. Thought about Monday night’s dinner, the way Dani had looked at me across that candlelit table, terrified and honest at the same time, telling me about a man who'd promised everything and vanished before Lily turned one.
I understood how easy it would be for her to look at me and see history repeating itself—to watch my life explode and assume the same story was unfolding all over again.
I understood her fear of my career getting bigger, of the attention pulling me in every direction. I wouldn’t let promises quietly erode under the weight of everything else. But I didn't know how else to convince her this wasn't the same.
I hadn't meant for any of it to look like that. But meaning well didn't change what it looked like from the outside.
My phone finally buzzed a little after ten.
Got caught up. Long shift, just got Lily to sleep. It's fine.
It's fine. Two words that clearly meant the opposite, the closed-door phrasing I recognized now from Dani specifically was her professional mask sliding down over whatever she actually felt.
Her response confirmed my suspicions. I typed out three different responses and deleted all of them. Finally landed on something simple.
It's not fine if you're upset. Can I call you?
The reply took a long time.
Not tonight. It's late and I have an early shift. We can talk when there's actually time to talk.
Alone in my room, I stared at her last message, felt my chest sink as I fought the urge to reply. But she’d asked for space, so I turned off my phone and gave her what she wanted.
I lay awake a long time that night, staring at the ceiling. All I felt was the hollow sensation that something good was starting to slip away, and I didn't know exactly how to stop it—or even whether stopping it was still in my hands.
I thought about what Finn had said at brunch, days ago now, though it felt like weeks. That's for the people who earn it. Not a camera. Not twenty thousand strangers. The two or three people who actually know you.
I wanted to give all of myself to Dani, but what could I do if she kept pushing me away?
I thought about Lily, probably asleep by now, maybe still asking when Mommy's hockey friend would come play again.
I thought about how that question would feel for Dani—not sweet, necessarily, but frightening.
Proof that her daughter's heart was already farther out on a limb than either of us had planned for.
I told myself that tomorrow I'd fix it. Tomorrow I'd find the time, make the calls, say the things that mattered instead of the ones that were easy.
But some quiet part of me, underneath the exhaustion, already understood that tomorrow might be one day too late—that Dani had spent five years building walls around exactly this kind of silence, and I'd just spent two days proving, however unintentionally, that the walls had been right to be there all along.
I fell asleep somewhere past midnight, phone dark on the nightstand, the city lights pressing faint gold lines against the ceiling.
And across town, in Dani’s room that I couldn't see, I hoped—without much conviction—that Dani was asleep too, and not lying awake the same way I was, turning the same silence over and over, looking for the exact moment it had started to mean something it was never supposed to mean.