Chapter 3
CARTER
Winning the Stanley Cup doesn't end when the horn sounds. That's the part nobody tells you. The horn is just the starting gun.
For two hours after we beat Carolina, the celebration just would not stop.
The handshake line. The Cup getting passed from man to man until every one of us had lifted it over our heads.
The trophy presentation. Family flooding onto the ice.
Ty Hendricks openly weeping into anyone who’d hold still, and champagne in the locker room until the floor was a lake of it. I skated with the Cup.
I kissed it. I handed it to Mark Ewing in the tunnel and watched a man who'd given me everything hold the thing I'd been chasing since I was a kid on a public rink, and neither of us could say a word.
By the time the building finally emptied out, I'd been celebrating for so long I'd half forgotten a person needed to eat. But the night wasn’t close to over — nobody wanted it to be — and there were two people in that building I still hadn’t gotten to.
So I showered fast and got dressed faster, because I didn’t want to miss a single minute with Jess and Justin.
We’d made a plan to eat together after. Not a nightclub, not a team blowout — just dinner, family-style, everybody who mattered around one table. Because after a night that big, what you want isn’t the party. It’s the people.
Burgers and milkshakes at the kind of place that didn't care if you walked in still half-celebrating, because half the people in the building were doing the same thing — me, Liam, Anne, Jess, Justin, and Finn, both boys still wearing pieces of their helmet-parade outfits, neither one anywhere close to running out of energy.
Justin narrated the entire meal like a man giving testimony, recapping every period of the game in granular detail to anyone who'd listen, occasionally correcting Finn's version of events with the gravity of a fact-checker.
"And then Carter passed it to your dad," Justin told the table, for what might have been the fourth time, "and your dad scored it, and everyone went crazy."
"I was there," Finn said. "I saw it happen."
"I'm just saying it again."
"You don't have to say it again."
"I want to."
Jess caught my eye across the table and didn't even try to hide her smile. I didn't try to hide mine either.
"There's a party tonight," I said, somewhere between the burgers and the milkshakes arriving, looking at Jess like the rest of the table didn't exist. "Team thing. You should come with me."
"He's not exaggerating," Liam said. "Whole team, families, the works. First one of these any of us has ever thrown — you should be there for it."
Jess hesitated, glancing at Justin, who was mid-sentence about something involving Finn and a penalty he still felt strongly had been miscalled. "I don't have anyone to watch him. I can't really just?—"
"My mom already has Finn tonight," Anne said, already reaching for her phone like the problem had barely registered as a problem. "Let me see if she minds one more — she loves Justin. Trust me, she'll be thrilled."
She stepped away for a minute, phone to her ear, and came back grinning. "She says yes. She's already planning what to feed them both for breakfast, which means she's planning on keeping him overnight, which means you have officially lost your son to my mother for the evening."
"Then it's settled," I said. "Jess is coming to the party with me."
Jess gave me a look. "I didn't say yes yet."
"You will."
She didn't argue the point, which I took, correctly, as a yes.
Anne's mother met us at the restaurant twenty minutes later, delighted and already fussing, ready to whisk both boys back to Anne's place for the night — Finn had enough of everything for two, and Justin traveled light anyway.
The handoff happened fast — kisses, reminders about teeth-brushing, Justin informing her that he intended to stay up "at least a little late" in honor of the occasion.
Then it was just the four of us, and the night was wide open.
The party was loud and crowded and exactly what you’d expect from a team that had just won everything. Somebody’s backyard, string lights, a sound system blasting whatever the rookies had voted on.
Half the organization’s front office was mixed in with players and their families, like the lines between them had dissolved for the night.
Jess got pulled away almost immediately by a cluster of the other wives and girlfriends who’d apparently been waiting all season to properly meet her. I lost track of her for a while, in the best possible way, catching glimpses of her laughing across the yard.
Liam found me by the cooler, two beers deep. He didn’t have to follow my gaze to know where it had been — across the yard, on Jess.
"You good?" he asked.
"I'm great." I tipped my beer toward the yard, toward Jess, who was mid-laugh at something one of the wives had said. "She's gorgeous, man. I'll give her that."
Liam raised an eyebrow. "That's it? 'She's gorgeous'?"
"What do you want from me, a sonnet?"
"I want to know why you've been standing here for ten minutes instead of doing your usual thing."
"What's my usual thing?"
"Working the room. Talking to everybody. Being—" he gestured vaguely at all of me, "—you."
I shrugged, like it wasn't worth examining too hard. "Maybe I'm tired. I did win the Stanley Cup tonight."
"Carter." Liam was grinning now, the smug grin of a man who'd caught his friend doing something out of character and had no intention of letting it go easily. "You've barely looked at another woman all night. That's not tired. That's something else."
"It's two weeks, Liam. Relax."
"I'm relaxed. You're the one standing very still by a cooler."
"I like coolers."
He laughed at that, finally, and let it go — mostly. "Justin lights up every time you walk into a room, you know that? Kid doesn't fake that kind of thing."
I didn't have a smooth comeback ready for that one, so I didn't try to find one. I just nodded, took a drink, and let the comment sit there without picking it apart.
Later, I found her by the firepit, half-listening to Anne argue good-naturedly with one of the equipment guys about something that had clearly been an ongoing debate for months.
She peeled off when she saw me coming, falling into step beside me without either of us deciding to walk anywhere in particular.
"I have a question," I said.
"Okay."
"Season's over." I shrugged, like it was no big deal, even though some part of me was paying very close attention to the answer. "So what's the plan? You going back to Chicago tomorrow, and then what — I just don't see you again?"
"That does seem to be the usual outcome when someone lives four hours away, yes."
"I'm asking if we can avoid the usual outcome."
Jess considered me for a second, unhurried, like she had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
"Justin and I would love to see you," she said simply.
It wasn't complicated, and somehow that made it hit harder. She wasn't promising me anything she didn't actually mean.
We stayed at the party until the crowd thinned out and Anne's mother texted that Justin was finally, miraculously asleep. I drove Jess back to her hotel myself, in no hurry at all.
At her door I kissed her — and it was nothing like the careful, testing goodnight I'd given her after our first dinner earlier in the week. This time she kissed me back like she'd decided something.
She tasted like champagne. Everybody did that night; the locker room floor had been a lake of it. But on her it stopped being a celebration and turned into something else entirely.
I'd won the Stanley Cup nine hours earlier. Standing in that hallway with my hands in her hair, I could not have told you where it was.
It went on a while. And when we finally broke apart, every reckless instinct I had was telling me to ask if I could come up.
I didn't.
Not because I didn't want to. Because I could see her weighing it behind her eyes — the kid, the four hours, the whole carefully built life she wasn't going to blow up over a good night and a Stanley Cup — and the last thing I wanted was to be one more man who pushed a woman past a line she'd drawn for good reasons.
"Goodnight, Jess," I said, and stepped back, and caught the surprise on her face, and then something warmer moving in underneath it, like I'd passed a test she hadn't told me she was giving.
"Goodnight, Carter."
I drove back to my place alone and didn't regret it for a second, which was, for me, its own kind of new.
The parade was two days later, and I almost didn’t ask her to stay for it.
Not because I didn’t want her there. Because wanting her there that badly was exactly the kind of thing that had always sent me running in the other direction — the wanting was the dangerous part, the part that could be taken away.
But I was standing in the hotel lobby the morning after the win, watching Jess load a very reluctant Justin toward a car that was going to drive them three hundred miles away from me, and the words came out before I could talk myself out of them.
“Stay for the parade.”
She turned. “Carter?—”
“I know you’ve got work. I know he’s got school.
” I stepped closer, lowered my voice, because this was for her and not for the lobby.
“But it’s a Stanley Cup parade, Jess. There’s going to be exactly one of these in Justin’s whole childhood, and he’s going to be in the city for it, and I—” I stopped.
Started again, more honest. “I want you there. Both of you. I know it’s a lot to ask. I’m asking anyway.”
She looked at me for a moment, and I watched her think, working through the logistics the way I was learning she always did — the job, the kid, the carefully arranged life she wasn’t in the habit of rearranging for anyone.
Then she pulled out her phone.
“I’m not promising anything,” she said, already dialing. “I have to call the unit. And his teacher. And if either one says no, we drive home, no argument.”
Neither one said no. Her charge nurse told her the floor would survive one more day and to send pictures. Justin’s teacher, when Jess explained, apparently said that missing school for a championship parade was the kind of thing a six-year-old should be allowed to remember forever, and to have fun.
So they stayed.
Half a million people came to that parade.
I’ve played in front of big crowds my whole life, but there’s nothing like riding down Market Street on the back of a slow-moving convertible with the Cup gleaming three cars ahead and the entire city of St. Louis screaming itself hoarse on both sides of you.
Confetti everywhere. Blue jerseys as far as I could see.
Kids on shoulders, old men crying, somebody’s grandmother holding a sign that had clearly taken a week to make.
And somewhere in all of it, I was scanning the crowd. The whole route. Not for anybody in particular — except that was a lie, and I knew it was a lie, because I was looking for exactly two people in a crowd of five hundred thousand.
I found them near Ninth Street.
Jess had Justin up on a newspaper box so he could see over the crowd, both of them in Blaze blue, and the second Justin spotted me his whole body went off like a firework — jumping, waving both arms, screaming my name in a voice I somehow heard over the entire roaring city.
I didn’t decide to do it. It just happened.
“STOP THE CAR — hang on, one second —” I was already climbing down, jogging to the barricade, and the crowd around them lost their minds as I reached over and grabbed Justin under the arms and hauled him up and over. “Come on, bud. You’re riding with me.”
“I’m RIDING IN THE PARADE?”
“You’re riding in the parade.”
I looked back at Jess. She had both hands over her mouth, and her eyes were bright, and she gave me a nod — go, it’s okay, go — and I swung her son up onto my shoulders and climbed back onto the car, and we rode the rest of Market Street that way, Justin’s hands fisted in my hair, both of us waving at a screaming city with the Gateway Arch rising up gold and enormous at the end of the street.
“CARTER,” Justin yelled down at me, halfway to the Arch. “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY WHOLE LIFE.”
“Mine too, bud,” I said, and meant it, and was surprised to find it wasn’t the Cup I meant.
It was the kid on my shoulders and the woman in the crowd who’d rearranged her whole careful life to give him this. It was having, for the first time I could remember, exactly the people I wanted at the best moment of my life.
I’d spent my whole life keeping my hands empty so nothing could be taken from them.
Riding toward that Arch with Justin on my shoulders, I finally understood what I’d been missing.
Full hands were the entire point.