Page 165 of Secrets on Ice

“Then tell her.”

“I told her once, and she didn’t choose me. If I ask her again, I’m not sure I could handle her rejecting me again,” I confess to my sister.

“Oh.” She’s taken aback by my answer. “You’re scared.”

“Of course, I’m scared,” I tell her. “Look, we’re going to the playoffs. I need to concentrate on that. We have a chance at winning the cup, Cass, that is my focus.”

Her eyes narrow. “You’re right, the cup is your priority.”

I let out a long breath. She gets it. “I promise after we win the cup, I will take my chance then.”

“Okay. I can live with that. Shake on it,” she says, holding out her hand. I take it and shake on it.

“So, no interfering until after the cup. Can you promise me that?” I ask her.

She rolls her eyes. “Fine.”

And then she flips me off and heads back downstairs.

The playoffs start, and the world shrinks down to one thing. That's the beautiful part about this time of year. Everything else goes quiet. No noise, no thinking, just muscle memory and the next shift, the next game.

Sleep, eat, tape, ice, repeat.

We finish top of the conference, which means the first round gives us the second wild card. They come in with nothing to lose and play us dirty for it. Best of seven, and we close them out in six. Bouch takes a cross-check to the back of the head in game three and comes back for game four with a grille on his helmet and unhinged eyes. Nelly crushes it in game five, making forty-one saves. When the horn goes, he just skates to the bench like he's finished a morning skate, absolute machine.

Second round is a war. It's the team that came out of the other side of our division, and they know us inside out, because when you play a division rival twice a year for a decade, there are no secrets left. Seven games. We drop the first two at home, and with home ice, that's supposed to be the death of you. The city writes us off, and Emmett comes into the room after game two and doesn't yell, doesn't say anything for a solid minute, and then tells us very quietly that he isn't done playing hockey with us yet, and that's the whole speech. We take four of the next five. Fish blocks a slapshot with his ankle in game six and plays the rest of the game on it. I take a puck to the face in game seven and lose a tooth I wasn't especially attached to. Jo tapes me up on the bench, tells me I'm an idiot, and sends me back out.

Everyone has stopped shaving, we all look a mess, but it’s the ritual you do during playoffs.

Conference Final, the last two teams standing in the East, and the city loses its mind. There are flags on cars, and kids in Mavericks jerseys on every corner. There's a bar down the road from my building that's put my face in the window, which is deeply weird, and Bouch has taken about nine hundred photos of it.

We take it in five.

After the horn goes in that fifth game, I stand on the ice in a sold-out arena with the noise coming down on us like weather, and I look up at the family box, and they're all there, all of them, Harper with Bastien on her hip, Issy with her hand on her bump, Collette screaming her lungs out, and Ember smiling down at me. She’s been at every single home game, and I swear I can hear her calling out my name among the crowd. She's there, in the box, in an old Mavericks shirt with her hands over her mouth, and Cassidy's got an arm around her, crying and laughing at the same time.

They wheel the conference trophy out onto the carpet, and Emmett does what every captain who's ever wanted the real thing does. He looks at it, nods at it, and he does not lay one finger on it. None of us do because we know about the curse. We line up and skate past it like it isn't there.

We’re four wins from the thing I've wanted since I was a kid stacking pucks against a garage door in Wisconsin, and I made a promise to my sister and to myself, and I'm holding to it.

Win the cup.

Then I'll go and get her.

The Final is the longest two weeks of my life. We take game one at home in overtime, and I have never been so tired and so awake at the same time. Bouch scores it, of all people, off his own shin, and spends the entire post-game interview claiming he meant it.

We lose game two, badly, four-one. The room afterward is silent, and that scares me more than shouting would.

Game three is a grind. We win it two-nothing, with Nelly working overtime. By the end of it, three of us can't lift our arms above our shoulders. Game four, they beat us in double overtime, and I have to sit on the bench afterward for ten minutes before I can get my skates off.

Two-two.

Best of three now.

Game five at home, and the building is unbearable. Emmett scores in the first, Fish adds one in the second, and we hang on through a third period that feels like it takes nine years off my life.

Game six in their barn, one win away, they come out like men who know they're finished and don't care. They beat us in regulation, and the flight home is grim.

Which brings us here. Game seven. On our ice. Everything I have ever wanted, everything any of us have ever wanted, one game.