Chapter 19
nineteen
Luke
By the time the trophy presentation ended, I had scanned the crowd twice.
Wives and girlfriends pressed against the glass, screaming, crying, holding up signs.
Maya was there, soaked in champagne someone had sprayed too close.
Kylie had her arms around Wyatt's neck. Amber had climbed the boards to get to Finn.
No Dani.
I told myself she was in the concourse. Bathroom line. Bad cell signal in the tunnel. I told myself a lot of things standing on that ice with twenty thousand people screaming my name, and none of them made the hollow feeling in my chest go away.
Once we finished the on-ice interviews, my jersey was heavy with sweat and champagne, and I still hadn't seen her.
I found Maya near the tunnel entrance.
"Where's Dani?"
Maya's face did something complicated. "Luke?—"
"Where is she?"
"She needed space. I spoke with her and tried to explain that this series has been so intense for you—that you really care about her."
"Thanks, Maya—I appreciate that. I really do." I looked at the floor for a moment. "But I need to see her." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to.
"Luke." Maya's eyes were kind but firm, the kind of firm that came from being someone's sister for twenty-two years. "Give her tonight."
I didn't give her tonight.
I tried anyway—showered fast, skipped the champagne room, skipped the reporters still circling for one more soundbite. I called Dani's phone from the parking garage. Straight to voicemail. Called again. Same thing.
I drove to the hospital first, some stupid hope that she'd picked up an extra shift to avoid thinking. The night nurse at the desk gave me a look that said she recognized me from the highlight reel and told me Dani wasn't scheduled.
I drove to Eli's house next. Empty driveway. The lights were off except the porch light Maya always left on.
I sat in my car outside that dark house for ten minutes, engine running, hands on the wheel, trying to think like Dani instead of like a man who'd just won the biggest game of his life and had nobody to share it with.
Then I remembered.
The hotel by the airport.
The one Dani had mentioned weeks ago, almost in passing. She and Lily had stayed there when they first arrived because they’d gotten to New York earlier than planned, while Maya and Eli were still out of town with the team.
She’d said it like it was nothing. A practical detail. The kind of thing people mention once and forget they ever said.
I hadn’t forgotten.
I broke every speed limit getting there.
The lobby was quiet, fluorescent, smelling like carpet cleaner and rancid coffee.
I asked the woman at the front desk if a Danielle Cormac was checked in.
She wasn't supposed to tell me. I must have looked wrecked enough, or maybe she recognized the jersey number stitched into my jacket, because she glanced at her screen and said, very quietly, "Fourth floor," before pretending she hadn't said anything at all.
I took the stairs. Couldn't stand still long enough for an elevator.
Room 412. I knocked before I'd fully decided to.
The door opened on the chain first. Then all the way.
Dani stood there in leggings and an old T-shirt, hair messily pulled back, eyes red-rimmed like she'd been crying and trying to stop and failing. Behind her, a suitcase sat open on the bed. Half-packed. Lily's stuffed rabbit sticking out of a side pocket.
Past her shoulder, in the room's second bed, Lily was curled up asleep, one arm flung over the edge, blissfully unaware that her whole world was being quietly repacked around her.
"You're leaving." My voice cracked on it.
"Luke—"
"You're actually leaving. Tonight. Without telling me."
"I was going to call you tomorrow. After the flight." Her arms crossed over her chest, a wall she was building in real time. "I didn't want to do this in the middle of everything. You just won the Cup. You should be celebrating, not?—"
"Not what? Not standing in a hotel hallway watching the only thing that matters more than hockey pack a suitcase?"
That landed somewhere. I watched it land.
"Can I come in?"
She hesitated long enough that I thought she'd say no. Then she stepped back and let the door swing open.
The room was small. Airport-hotel small, generic art on the walls, the hum of the air conditioner too loud in the silence between us. I stood just inside the door because I didn't trust myself to get closer yet.
"I texted you," I said, quieter now, matching the hush of the room. "Before the game. I told you I wanted you in my life."
"I know." Her voice was small. "I read it eleven times."
"Then why are you packing?"
"Because I've heard promises before." She sat down on the edge of the bed, hands twisted together in her lap.
"Lily's father told me he'd be different too.
Told me basketball wasn't going to change anything.
And then he changed everything, and I was alone with a six-month-old in an apartment I couldn't afford by myself, and I swore—I swore I would never let a man's career decide whether my daughter got to keep him. "
"I'm not him."
"You don't know that. You don't know what you'll be like a year from now, when the contract's bigger, when the media's louder, when there's a next Cup to chase?—"
"Dani." I finally crossed the room and knelt in front of her so we were eye level, so she couldn't look anywhere but at me. "I called my mom before the game."
That stopped her.
"I don't call her much. You know that already—I've told you why.
" I took a breath. "But I called her before warm-ups, and I told her about you.
About Lily. And she said something that's been sitting in my chest ever since—that loving someone and letting them see it aren't the same thing.
That she spent years doing one without the other, and I learned it from her without even realizing it. "
Dani's eyes were wet.
"I don't want to control everything anymore," I said.
"My whole life, I've controlled what people saw—the jokes, the flips, the guy who never let anyone close enough to actually leave.
It kept me safe. It also kept me alone." I held her gaze.
"Tonight I won the Cup, and the first thing I felt wasn't pride.
It was terror, because you weren't there to see it.
Because somewhere in the last few weeks, you stopped being someone I was managing and became someone I actually needed.
That's the same thing I'm asking of you.
Not to just trust the parts of me that are easy to trust. To risk something on the parts that aren't."
"Luke—"
"I want a life that's bigger than hockey," I said.
"I want you. I want Lily asking me about dragon guards and I want to be there every single time she does.
I'm not asking you to trust me because I said pretty words in a hotel room.
I'm asking you to give me the same patience you give a scared kid in the ER at three in the morning.
The same patience you give Lily when she's melting down over socks.
I just want you to risk some of it on me too.
Not just patience. The actual risk. What I'm asking for is different. I'm asking you to actually bet on me. "
She was quiet for a long moment. The air conditioner hummed. Somewhere down the hall, a door closed.
"I'm scared," she said finally. Just that. No qualifiers.
"I know."
"I don't know how to not be scared."
"You don't have to know tonight." I reached up and wiped a tear off her cheek with my thumb, the way she used to press cool cloths against my forehead in a different room, a different version of us.
"I just need you to not get on that flight tomorrow.
Not yet. Give me the weekend. Come back to Maya's.
Let's actually talk this through instead of you disappearing before I get the chance to fight for it. "
Dani looked down at the suitcase. At the rabbit sticking out of the side pocket. At the version of her life that was already halfway packed and ready to run.
"Okay," she said.
Barely a whisper. But I heard it.
"Okay?"
"I'll cancel the flight." Her voice steadied as she said it, like the decision itself gave her something to stand on. "I'll go back. We'll talk." She met my eyes. "But Luke—I need you to understand this isn't a yes. Not yet."
"I know."
"I need time."
"I'll give you all of it." I meant that more than I'd ever meant anything on the ice. "Just don't get on the plane."
She almost smiled. Almost.
"I'm not getting on the plane," she said.
I stood, and for a second neither of us moved, both still deciding what came next. Then she reached out and took my hand—just held it, just that—and something in my chest that had been clenched since I first saw the empty spot in the stands finally started to loosen.
"We should both get some sleep," she said quietly.
"I'll see you this weekend."
"You'll see me this weekend."
I left the hotel with the trophy still somewhere back at the arena and none of it mattering half as much as the fact that her suitcase was still open on the bed, still unfinished, still hers to close or unpack depending on what happened next.
For the first time all week, I let myself believe it might go the way I wanted.