Page 40 of Power Play
He just texted his husband a photo of it, and one word, the truest one, and Shane texted back nine exclamation points and a heart andMOM SAYS SHE TOLD YOU SO, and Theo Lindgren stood in his own kitchen in the country that had tried to send him home and let himself, at last, be happy, the thing that had scared him longer than any injury, any trade, any shoulder that wouldn’t report cleanly. The only thing, in the end, worth staying for.
Epilogue
The following spring.
Theo got the call in April: not the call-up he’d spent a whole season’s worth of his life chasing and giving away, but a different one, an older dream he’d stopped letting himself want. Sweden wanted him for the World Championship. The national team. A roster spot, a sweater with three crowns on it, a tournament in a city in Europe where the rinks were the right width and the men spoke his language. Theo Lindgren, the offensive prospect who’d never translated, the defensive specialist who’d remade himself to survive, would get to go home, in the best possible way: as a man his country wanted back, on his own terms, for two weeks, with a return ticket to a husband.
Shane came along. Of course, Shane came along; the Fury’s season was over, they’d missed the playoffs by a point, a heartbreak Shane was processing by talking about it constantly, his only method, and a free two weeks in Europe watching his husband play for a national team was not a thing Shane Novak was going to miss.
“I’m gonna learn so much Swedish,” Shane announced on the flight. “I’m gonna be fluent. Your mom’s gonna be so proud.”
“You have learned four words and one of them is wrong.”
“Which one’s wrong?”
“I will not tell you. It is funnier this way.”
* * *
Theo played his first game in the three crowns on a Tuesday, in an arena where the boards were the right width and the anthem was in his own language, and Shane sat in the family section in a Sweden jersey two sizes too big with LINDGREN across the back, because his own name would have been strange and Theo’s was, now, also his. They’d talked about it, late, in the dark, and Shane had said I’m not changing mine, my mom’s the only Novak left and I’m keeping it for her, and Theo had said good, keep it, names are for the living, and then Shane had bought the Lindgren jersey anyway, to wear, just here, just for the weight of it.
It was a thing to watch your husband come home. That was what Shane kept thinking. Theo had come to North America at twenty so sure no one wanted the person under the points, and here was a whole country that had never stopped wanting him, that put him in the sweater and the anthem and the family section, and Theo skated out for the warmup and looked up into the stands and found Shane in the too-big jersey, and his face cracked open the same as it had in Milwaukee and in the surgery waiting room and a handful of times Shane had memorized without meaning to, and Theo tapped his stick twice on the ice, go, their word, the word that meant I’ve got the back side, the word that had started everything in Cleveland a lifetime ago, and Shane’s eyes stung, in an arena in Sweden, in a borrowed name.
Sweden lost in the quarterfinal, the way most tournaments end: short of the medal, in honor, a few bounces away. But Theo played the tournament on a shoulder that was, at last, a managed and honest thing, reported and rehabbed and no longer a secret he carried alone, and he was, by the quietconsensus of a country that knew its hockey, the player they’d hoped the kid from Gothenburg might become, not the scorer he’d failed to be but steadier and rarer, a man you could not play against and could not knock down. It turned out the points had never been worth wanting. It had taken him seventeen years and a fake marriage to a loud American to find that out.
* * *
The money came back before the green card did.
Gitta had gone home from the wedding and done exactly what she’d promised, made the father’s lawyers wish they had never learned her name, and the trust was restored to Theo’s name inside a month, every krona, because the man on the other end of it had discovered that the one thing more expensive than a son who’d married wrong was Gitta Lindgren with a grievance and nothing left to lose. The father signed. And then, because something in him had cracked the rest of the way, he called, himself, the first time since Theo was twenty. They did not say much; the Lindgren men never did. But he watched the quarterfinal from the family section three rows behind the LINDGREN jersey, and in the tunnel after he put his hand on the back of Theo’s neck, the old gesture, the only tenderness the man had ever owned, and said he was sorry, the word costing him everything a kind word had always cost him, and Theo said okay, and they were, in the small real way that was the most that family ever managed, good.
The fortune mattered less than the boy who’d lost it would ever have believed. Theo had already spent everything and been loved anyway. The money coming back was not the rescue. Itwas only the gravy, and it arrived, the way the best things in his life arrived now, after he’d stopped needing it to.
* * *
They found the bar at two in the morning, by following the sound of a dozen languages and the gravity of athletes with a rare night off. The team hotels all bled into one another in these tournaments, floors of players from rival nations stacked on top of each other, and the bar on the ground floor was neutral territory, a demilitarized zone where Finns and Canadians and Americans and Swedes nursed beers they didn’t finish and pretended they weren’t all going to try to take each other’s heads off in three days.
Theo and Shane took a corner booth. Theo had a beer he was holding as a social prop. Shane had a club soda, because old habits, because even on vacation, even happy, Shane Novak was not going to be the guy who fell out of shape. They were halfway through an argument about whether Shane had embarrassed himself trying to order in Swedish (he had) when Theo went still.
“What?” Shane followed his gaze.
Two men at the bar. Not together. That was the first thing: pointedly, aggressively not together, two stools apart with an empty one between them, enforced. One was enormous and fair and radiating a contained Nordic fury Theo recognized in his own bones: Nate Koskinen, the Finnish captain, a center with a reputation for being impossible to play against and impossible to talk to. The other was lean and dark-haired and all sharp angles and motion, gesturing at the bartender, loud even in profile, wearing a USA team quarter-zip: Carter James, the American captain, a forward, a mouth, a problem.
They weren’t talking. They were very much not talking, in a way that took more energy than talking. And the air betweenthem: Theo knew that air. He’d lived in that air for two years. It was the precise frequency of two people who could not stand each other and could not stop being aware of each other, a hatred so loud and so total it filled the end of the bar, and every few seconds one of them would say a word, short and sharp, without looking, and the other would fire one back without looking, and neither would turn his head, and the empty stool between them sat there as a fact both of them were refusing to acknowledge.
Theo and Shane watched them for a moment. Then they looked at each other.
It was a whole conversation, the look. It said: do you see it? It said: I see it. It said: that is us, that was us, in a parking lot, on a bench, screaming about a third goal. It said everything two people who’d come the long way around to each other could say without a single word, and Shane’s mouth twitched, and Theo’s did the same, the rare crack in the permafrost that only Shane had ever caused.
“Twenty bucks,” Shane said, quiet, deadpan, watching the Finnish captain say two words that made the American captain’s whole spine go rigid, “says those two are sharing a hotel floor by the end of the week.”
“That is not a bet,” Theo said. “That is a certainty. I will not take it.”
“Smart man. That’s why I married you.” Shane stole a sip of Theo’s prop beer, made a face, put it back. “God. Look at ‘em. Somebody should tell ‘em it’s easier if you just—”
“No one tells anyone,” Theo said. “It does not work that way. They have to find out the long way. Everyone finds out the long way.” He watched Nate Koskinen move one stool further from Carter James, a deliberate inch, somehow bringing the empty stool into play, somehow ending up arguing across a single seatinstead of two, the kind of progress neither of them would admit to. “We did.”
Shane’s phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then a third time.
