CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
RHETT
The Final
The championship series lasts seven games.
By the seventh, everyone is injured somewhere. My wrist is taped. Lucas has a bruise across his ribs. Mateo skates on an ankle that looks like spilled ink.
Nora attends games two, four, and seven. She works during three and five and refuses to apologize.
I do not ask her to.
Before the final game, I find her in the photo bay.
"You are not working tonight," I say.
"Personal project."
"What project?"
"Unseen panic in male athletes."
"Exploitative."
She smiles and touches my ring through my glove. "Whatever happens, come home."
The sentence would once have sounded like consolation offered in advance.
Now it sounds like a fact.
The game goes to overtime.
I do not score the winning goal.
Lucas stops a breakaway. Mateo clears the rebound. Our rookie, Benji Cole, takes the puck the length of the ice and shoots through traffic.
Red light.
Goal.
For one frozen second, no one moves.
Then the arena breaks open.
We win.
Teammates pile over the boards. Gloves fly. Lucas tackles Benji. I fall beneath three bodies and laugh into the ice.
When the trophy reaches me, cameras crowd close.
Captains lift first.
I look toward Benji, twenty-one and crying.
Then toward Lucas, who kept us alive.
"Together," I say.
We lift it as a line.
Afterward, reporters ask whether the championship completes my redemption story.
"No," I say. "It completes a hockey season. My life is not a scoreboard."
In the tunnel, Nora waits without a camera.
I go to her.
She kisses me while the arena is still roaring.
"You came home," she says.
"I always intended to."
This time, home is not the place she waits unseen.
It is the life we enter equally.