31. Nova
Chapter thirty-one
Nova
The story is everywhere.
My phone hasn’t stopped buzzing since midnight, and I’ve read exactly none of it.
Don’t need to.
I already know what it says. I know the framing. I know the angle Webb ran with, which outlets picked it up, and what the comments look like. Reading it at seven a.m. won’t change any of that.
So I don’t.
I make coffee. I stand at the counter of my apartment and look at my phone on the table and think — one notification. Just one. To know how bad it is. Then I think about every time I’ve done that and how it never helps, and I pick up my coffee instead.
Aurora: I’m not reading it either. Call me when you’re ready.
I put the phone down. Drink my coffee.
The bowl by the window has Dina’s food in it. It’s been there since last night. She ate some of it. She always comes. She just never comes all the way in.
I know the feeling.
Riley’s office smells like burnt coffee and damage control.
I’m there before anyone else. Notebook open. Coffee untouched. Phone facedown because if I look at it one more time I might throw it through the window.
The door opens.
Jax walks in.
And because my life is rude, he looks good. Not polished-good. Not camera-good. Worse. Tired-good. Jaw rough with a night he probably didn’t sleep through. Black training hoodie stretched across his shoulders. Hair still damp from a shower, curling slightly at the ends.
His eyes go to me first. Not Riley’s chair. Not the table. Me.
He doesn’t smile. I know him well enough now to know what that means. I know what his warmth looks like — I’ve had it — and the absence of it is its own conversation. Not cold. Not angry. Just contained. Holding something carefully.
That’s the part that sits in my chest.
He crosses the room and takes the chair beside me. Nothing about Jax Mercer is accidental.
Riley doesn’t say a thing.
Forty minutes. Joint statement. One position. No apology.
We nod. We stand. We leave.
He goes first. I watch the back of his neck down the hall — the way he carries himself, unhurried, like whatever comes next he’s already decided to be ready for.
Two feet apart. I know the difference.
The statement exists. My name is on it next to his and not underneath Webb’s framing, and that’s not nothing. That’s the difference between a story someone tells about you and a story you tell yourself.
I chose which one landed first.
That’s the only thing I did right.
Practice.
I do my job. Camera. Recorder. The professional version of me that has been showing up in this building long enough to know how to move through a room like I’m not carrying anything.
Katarina finds me after the morning skate. No coffee. Just her at the glass, watching the ice clear.
“He’s not mad,” she says.
“I know.”
“Do you.”
I look at the ice. “He stayed. He told me exactly what he had to say and didn’t leave.” A beat. “That’s harder than mad.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It is.”
She doesn’t move. Neither do I.
“He’s trying to figure out how to be in it with you,” she says. “That’s what scared looks like on someone with good posture.”
She leaves.
I stand at the glass for a long time.
Game 3.
I bring both notebooks.
The professional one and the personal one, side by side in the press box. I look at them and think — okay. Both. The whole thing.
The Cyclones lose 4-1. I photograph all of it anyway.
Aiden’s goal — the one bright moment in the second period.
Liam’s face when the final buzzer sounds, jaw set, already somewhere else.
Aurora in the family section with her hands folded in her lap, very still.
Brody doing something with his stick on the way off the ice that I absolutely do not photograph because some things stay in the building.
The professional notebook fills up. The personal one fills up more.
The things that aren’t for print. The way Jax taps the posts after every save — left, right, crossbar, same every time, even when it isn’t enough.
The way Aiden and Liam always find each other in the chaos after a buzzer like they need to confirm the other one is there.
Like the ritual doesn’t change based on the result.
Both of them mine. Both of them true.
The city is quiet in the third period.
Not defeated. Just holding. Like the building knows how to absorb a hard night without letting go of the thing underneath it. Twenty thousand people who drove here and paid for parking and wore their jerseys and are going home with a loss, and not one of them leaves early.
I lower my camera.
Just watch.
Thirty-one in his crease stopping twenty-seven of thirty-one. Four got through. I know which one cost him — I watched his face after the second period goal, the micro-hesitation, the way his hand came up after like he was checking something. I know what that is. He knows I know.
After the buzzer I find him in the weight room. Not the tunnel. The weight room, lights half up, gear half off, alone with the kind of quiet a man needs after a night like that. His right hand moving — rolling the shoulder, checking the ghost.
I stand in the doorway long enough that he knows I’m there.
He doesn’t look up.
“Two of them were the ghost,” he says.
“I know.”
“Two were just hockey.”
“I know that too.”
He looks up then.
Camera down.
“Two more,” I say.
He looks at me — not the press conference look, not the crease look, just him, like I’m the only fixed point in a room that’s still processing a hard night.
“Two more,” he agrees.
The series. And everything else. Neither of us says the rest of it.
I head home.
The apartment is quiet. I sit on the step outside and Dina comes. Eats. Doesn’t look at me. I sit above her the way I always do — patient with something that moves on its own schedule and has never once adjusted it for me.
Tonight she finishes eating and doesn’t disappear immediately.
She sits. Tail wrapped around her feet. Looking at the dark.
I look at the dark too.
Then she goes.
I go inside. Open my notebook. Find the page where I wrote the word small, near the margin, the way you write something you’re not sure you meant yet.
I tear it out.
Start a new page.
Write it in the middle. Not small. My actual handwriting — the fast slightly slanted kind I use when I’m done being careful.
Stay.
Just the word. On the page. In my handwriting.
I look at it.
It looks right. It looks terrifying. It looks like the thing I’ve been circling for months without landing on.
It looks like staying.
I close the notebook.
Two more wins.
I turn off the light.
I close my eyes.
I think about what it looks like to win.