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He doesn’t push. He just reaches into his bag and sets a banana on the bench next to me like it wandered there on its own, and goes back to his laces. That’s Wyatt. He won’t make you talk. He’ll just keep quietly putting food where you’ll have to look at it.

Across the room Cash is too loud. He’s been too loud for four days. He’s narrating his own warmup, doing a bit about Kingsbury’s goalie, working the room like it’s his job, and it is. Tonight, his job is me, and we both know it and neither of us is going to say it.

Theo says nothing. Theo’s been watching me since Tuesday, the way you watch a guy you think might be concussed. Quiet. Sideways. Counting something.

“You know what we should do,” Cash announces to the room, “is win. Wouldn’t that be something? A win. I’ve heard great things about them.”

“You’ve been saying that since October,” Wyatt says.

“And one day it lands.” Cash drops onto the bench next to Theo. “Kingsbury’s goalie’s got a glove hand like a screen door, by the way. Anybody shoots glove-side tonight, it’s a goal. Write it down.”

“You don’t watch tape,” Theo says.

“I watched some tape.” A second. “I watched a highlight. Counts.”

It’s all bit. He’s filling the air so I don’t have to, and every guy in here knows it, and we let him, because that’s the deal. That’s what a room does for somebody who’s coming apart quiet in the corner.

“Sorensen.” O’Grady, in the doorway, clipboard under his arm. “A word.”

I go. In the hall he looks at me a long second, and O’Grady’s not a soft man, O’Grady’s a man who once made us skate suicides until a freshman threw up because somebody was late, but he looks at me in the hall and something in his face gives.

“Heard you and your girl split,” he says.

“Yes, sir.”

“You good to play?”

“Always.”

He doesn’t believe me. I can see he doesn’t. But there are two scouts in the building tonight, one of them flew in from Boston, and Coach isn’t going to bench his captain in a barn full of scouts on a feeling. “Kingsbury’s chippy,” he says. “Briggs runs around back there, number six, he’ll take a head off if you give him the chance. Keep your feet. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“When do I do anything stupid?”

“Tonight,” he says. “I’ve got a feeling about tonight. Keep your feet, Beau.”

I tell him I will. It’s the second lie I tell him in under a minute, and I don’t even clock it as a lie until later, because by then I’ll know I went out there with no intention of keeping anything.

Corbin’s full. It’s always full, but tonight it’s the kind of full where you feel it in the glass, the crowd noise coming up through the boards into your skates. We line up for the anthem and I look up, out of habit, to the section behind the bench where she used to sit with the girls when she came, which she pretended was for the concessions.

She’s not there. Of course she’s not there.

Mormor is. Three rows back, in the good wool coat, her hands folded in her lap like she’s at church. Margaret, to everyone in Haven who buys their books off her—Mormor only to the four of us who are hers. She closed Margaret’s Books an hour early and walked over because she said she had a feeling she ought to see me play, and my mother’s Swedish mother does not explain her feelings, she acts on them and she’s usually right, which is its own kind of terrifying. She catches my eye and she does not wave. She just looks at me. She’s been looking at people like that for years and getting the truth out of them.

I look away first.

The puck drops.

The first shift I feel it right away. Not the shoulder — the shoulder’s been bad since October, a dull wrong thing I’ve been managing with ice and ibuprofen and not telling anybody, the same way I don’t tell anybody things. I mean the other thing. The not-caring. I go into the first corner with Briggs and I don’t chip and chase the safe way, I put my head down and take the hit to make the play, and I make the play, and the bench likes it, and it costs me a shoulder into the boards that lights up all the way down my arm and I don’t care. That’s the discovery of the night. I genuinely do not care what happens to my body.

It’s the lightest I’ve felt in four days.

“Easy,” Theo says, when I come off. Two syllables. From Theo that’s a speech.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not playing fine. You’re playing like you forgot you have to come back tomorrow.”

“We up or down?”