Page 95 of Thin Ice

Remy looked down at him. They were cute.

Alex shifted. His hand found my arm. Squeezed.

"Hey," he said. Quiet. Just for me. "Come outside with me for a second."

"Now?"

"Before midnight."

"Everything okay?"

"Yeah. I have something for you."

He swung his legs off my lap and stood.

"We'll be right back," he said to the group.

"You're supposed to wait for the New Year for that!" Noah said, wiggling his eyebrows.

I laughed and followed Alex through the kitchen and out the back door onto the deck. The cold hit immediately. Sharp and clean after the warm cabin. The sky was clear for the first time all week. Stars everywhere, the kind you only see away from cities, scattered and bright and so many of them that the sky looked crowded. The lake was silver in the moonlight. The snow in the yard was blue.

"What's going on?" I said.

"I have a Christmas gift for you. Late."

"Stay here."

He went down the steps and across the yard to the car. I stood on the deck with my hands in my coat pockets and my breath making clouds, and the sound of the party muffled through the cabin wall behind me. I could hear Noah laughing about something.

Alex came back carrying something wrapped in his coat. Heavy. He walked across the yard, up the steps, and stood in front of me.

"I didn't plan this," he said. "I want you to know that. I didn't go there to get this. I went there for my mom. And on the way out, I walked into my dad's office and I just took it."

He unwrapped the coat.

I looked at it. A trophy. Old. Metal and wood. Tarnished at the edges, the brass plate clouded but was still legible.

IRA Championship, 1967. Riverside State University.

I stopped breathing.

"Alex."

"It was on his shelf. My whole life. I walked past it a thousand times."

I took it from him. The weight of it. Solid. Real. I turned it in my hands and read the names on the plate, the crew, eight names and a coxswain from sixty years ago. Hale's mentor was on this list. The '67 boat. The only national championship Riverside ever won. The trophy that disappeared in 1970 and nobody could prove where it went, and Tyler had been talking about it since the first day I walked into the boathouse.

It had been in Thomas Harrington's office. The whole time.

"I didn't even think about it," Alex said. "I saw it a week ago. And after my mom said sorry… I just went and took it. I didn't plan it. Kinda crazy, right?"

I looked at him. His face in the moonlight. His eyes bright and scared and proud and waiting.

"You stole a trophy from your dad's house."

"I recovered stolen property."

"You're insane."