Page 17 of Pucking Inevitable: Bonus Scene

He taps the glass once. Then he turns to go, the team is waiting, the tunnel is waiting, there is a whole post-game process that exists between the ice and coming home. Before he skates away, he looks back, just once, just for a second.

At me.

Not the game. Not the rink. Not the crowd that is still on its feet for him. Not even the puck bunny who is begging for a scrap of his attention.

At me.

I hold his gaze.

He turns away.

Em watches him go until he disappears into the tunnel and then she lowers her hand from the glass and turns to look at me with those eyes, his eyes, gray, direct and already certain about more things than she should be at three years old.

“He looked at you for longer,” she says.

I look down at her.

“Did he?” I say.

“He always looks at you for longer.” She says it the way she says most things, as a fact being reported, no particular ceremony to it. Then she holds up her arms to be carried and I pick her up. She settles against my side and looks back at the ice, which is now empty.

“He's going to be hungry,” she says.

“He's always hungry after a game.”

“Can we have pasta?”

“We can have pasta.”

“He likes the one with the⁠—”

“I know which one he likes.”

She nods, satisfied, and rests her cheek against my shoulder.

I stand there for a moment after most of the crowd has begun to file out, holding my daughter in Xaden's arena in Xaden's city with our hands still faintly warm from where we pressed them against the glass. I feel the particular fullness of a life I didn’t see coming and wouldn’t trade for anything that has ever existed or ever will.

Down the tunnel somewhere, Xaden is doing the post-game things. He’ll shower and talk to the team and answer whatever questions need answering. He’ll do all of it with the specific impatience of a man who is going through the required steps as quickly as they can be gotten through.

Because he comes to us first.

He always comes to us first.

He will be in the parking lot in twenty-three minutes and Em knows this because she has timed it. She told me once, very seriously, that Daddy takes twenty-three minutes after the final horn. She had been keeping track and when I try to move toward the exit, she stops me.

“Four more minutes,” she says.

“We can wait by the tunnel, bug.”

“I want to wait here.” She looks at the ice. “This is where he was.”

I look at the ice. Empty now. The boards still carry the marks of the game, the scuffs and gouges that mean it happened, that he was out there being exactly the person he was always meant to become.

“Okay,” I say.

We wait four minutes.

Then we go find him.