Chapter 18
eighteen
Luke
My pulse hadn't slowed since puck drop.
I could feel it in my throat, in my fingertips, the particular electric awareness that came with moments of great struggle. The clock read fourteen minutes into the third period, and I was still turning that awareness into something useful instead of something that could beat me.
The defense had been sharp most of the night.
A communication letdown at the end of the first had cost us—a rebound sneaking under my stick that I still replayed in my head between whistles—but since then I'd been a fortress.
Two power kills already snuffed out clean.
Saves stacking on saves, the kind of run where your body starts moving before your mind finishes the thought.
We needed something special now. Down one goal with the clock bleeding away, needing an answer.
Halfway through the period, something started to take shape with Wyatt sending a message.
He caught their star forward along the boards with a check so clean and so violent the whole building felt it, relieving him of the puck before the guy even registered what had happened.
Wyatt kicked it free with his skate, swung it to Finn on the left side, and Finn sent it flying down the boards to Eli, who was already moving, already three strides into the play before Finn had even released the puck.
Eli bodied the defender out of the lane and drove the puck to the center, flicking it to Finn.
Finn came blasting through to meet it, but the defense collapsed fast, forcing him to circle wide around the net to protect possession.
He faked coming out the far side, pump-faking a pass toward Eli that never came—doubled back instead, found Roz crashing hard at the near post, and slid it across.
Roz slammed it home.
Tied.
The building detonated. I stood in my crease, chest heaving, watching my team pile onto each other at center ice, and felt something close to awe at the way they kept finding a way to play for each other, even when everything was on the line.
Wyatt skated past on his way back to the bench and gave me a fist bump through the air, grinning ear to ear, still riding the high of the hit that had started the whole sequence.
I held the rest of regulation. Barely tested in the final minutes, but tested enough—a wraparound attempt I smothered clean, a point shot I gloved with more instinct than sight.
Overtime. Sudden death. Whoever scored first, won it all.
The arena felt suffocating. Every seat full, every voice raw from over two hours of screaming, the air thick with a kind of desperate hope that pressed down on everyone in the building.
I found myself drifting, for one dangerous second, into my own head.
Thinking about Dani. About the text I'd sent before the game, possibly still unanswered, sitting somewhere in my locker with my phone.
About whether I'm not going to stop showing up was enough, or whether some things, once bent, just stayed bent no matter how many times you tried to press them back straight.
I caught it before it went any further. Snapped myself back into the crease, into my body, into the only thing that mattered right now.
Both teams threw everything they had at the deadlock.
I made a save midway through the first overtime that kept us alive—a slap shot from distance, hit so hard I never got a clean read on it, could only get enough of my body in the way to keep it from going clean through.
I knew the rebound was coming before it landed.
Dropped low, did the splits to smother it against pressure, and heard the whistle blow with my heart hammering somewhere up in my throat.
“That's it, Bennett!” Bryan yelled from the bench, pure encouragement, no edge left in it at all.
Neither team could break through. The horn sounded on the first overtime, and we skated to our benches for the fifteen-minute break before the next one started.
The second overtime opened even more desperate than the first, both teams playing like the ice itself had turned dangerous, every rush a five-alarm scramble.
I stopped a breakaway clean, stick and pad, no rebound to chase.
Wyatt blocked two shots in a row without flinching, dropping to a knee each time like his body had stopped registering pain hours ago.
Seven minutes in, the Wolves' top line came at us on a long change, tired legs against tired legs, and I felt the shift in momentum before I could name it—too much open ice, too much room in the neutral zone.
I set myself deep, tracked the puck through three separate passes, and got enough of my pad on a one-timer from the slot to send it wide.
The rebound skittered to the corner. Roz beat two players to it, chipped it up the boards, and Eli was already moving.
He carried it the length of the ice alone—one defender back, the other caught flat-footed on the change—and I watched from a hundred and fifty feet away as he read the goalie's angle, opened his hips at the last second, and roofed it far side.
The horn. The light.
The building came apart at the seams.
I don't remember skating the length of the ice.
Don't remember my teammates reaching me first, or the exact order of the pile that formed on top of Eli somewhere near center.
I remember gloves flying, helmets coming off, somebody screaming my name so close to my ear I couldn't hear anything else for a full ten seconds.
The Leopards had won the Stanley Cup.
Somebody pressed a championship jersey into my hands while the Cup gleamed under the lights a few feet away, guys crowding in around me, Coach Greaves fighting through the scrum with tears he wasn't bothering to hide, Wyatt and Eli, Finn and Roz, and Bryan—Bryan, arms wide, no hesitation in it at all—all of it a blur of noise and joy and the particular euphoria that comes from finishing something you've worked your whole life toward. "
I lifted the Cup when it came to me. Felt the weight of it, real and cold and heavier than I expected, camera flashes popping in every direction.
And in the middle of all of it, still holding the Cup over my head, I looked out into the crowd.
Searching.
I told myself she'd be there. Told myself Maya would have brought her, would have found seats close enough to see, and Lily would be there too, probably asking someone what dragon they'd finally beaten. Told myself the text I'd sent before the game had mattered, had landed the way I meant it to.
I scanned the section where Dani had sat before. Empty.
I scanned further, past the section, up into the higher rows, hoping somehow I'd just misjudged where she'd be sitting.
Nothing.
The Cup passed to Wyatt beside me, and I stood there in the middle of the biggest moment of my career, teammates shouting, confetti starting to fall from somewhere above the rafters, and felt a strange, hollow quiet settle in underneath all the noise.
She wasn't there.
I thought about my mother's voice on the phone that morning. You keep showing up anyway, and you let the decision be hers to change, not yours to argue her out of. I'd meant every word of that text. I still meant it now, Cup over my head, confetti catching in my hair.
But meaning it and having it be enough were two different things, and standing here in the loudest room I'd ever been in, I had no way yet of knowing which one this was going to turn out to be.
I held onto the moment anyway—the team, the trophy, the roar of twenty thousand people who'd waited their whole lives for this—and let myself feel it, because I'd earned this much at least.
But somewhere under the celebration, a part of me stood completely alone.