Page 259 of Wild Card 13

Ty checking on his grandma every morning and letting her complain because love in his family had always known how to arrive carrying something delicious.

I thought about my mother’s canceled dinners. The porch at eighteen. The terrible lesson I had learned too young and repeated until it sounded like truth.

People left.

People loved you and still chose the door.

The pencil rested lightly against my fingers.

Then I looked at the lake I had drawn from memory, the view from a house where Ty had finally told the truth and let the silence belong to me. A house I was not ready to return to. A man I was not ready to let fully back into my life.

But when I lowered the pencil to the page, my hand did not shake.

I darkened the line of the far shore first.

Then the porch.

Then, carefully, I began to sketch the faint shape of light where the windows would be.

CHAPTER 33

BUZZ

NOW

The thing about a season dying slowly was that nobody wanted to be the first person to call it dead.

Not while there were still games left on the schedule. Not while the standings still technically allowed for the kind of math that required three other teams to lose, one team to implode, and possibly a minor weather event in western Canada. Not while Coach could stand in front of us after an ugly loss and say we still had to play the right way, because the right way mattered even when the scoreboard had stopped offering mercy.

So no one said dead.

We said,tough one.

We said,need help.

We said,not eliminated yet.

We said every stupid phrase men said when hope had gotten too thin to hold but pride would not let anyone set it down.

The locker room at Talon Arena smelled like sweat, damp gear, old tape, wet towels, and the bitter edge of the coffee someone had abandoned on a side table sometime before warmups. The showers hissed in the back. Skates clattered against rubber mats. A roll of tape bounced once off the floor near Jonah’s stall and kept rolling until it hit a pile of gloves nobody had the energy to move.

The music was on, but not loud enough.

After wins, the room got stupid at full volume. After normallosses, it got mean for a while, then loud, then normal. After losses like this, late in the season, with the playoff picture turning into a prayer nobody wanted to admit they had stopped believing in, the room tried too hard.

Every laugh sounded a little forced.

Every chirp came with teeth behind it.

Every man in the room knew we had pissed away another game we needed. Every man in the room also knew that if we sat in the truth too long, someone might say something that could not be taken back.

So we made noise.

Marco was doing most of the work, because De Luca considered emotional discomfort a stage and himself the only performer with range.

“I’m only saying,” he announced from his stall, bare chest still damp from the shower, towel slung around his hips with the dramatic confidence of a man who knew exactly what he looked like, “if Harry stops letting in goals, we win more games.”

Harry, who had made forty-one saves and was currently sitting in front of his stall with ice bags strapped to both knees, lifted his head slowly. “I will throw this water bottle through your skull.”