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And then, the way it always does when it matters most, the noise drops away and it gets simple.

Because this is the one thing I actually know how to do. Stand in the gap. Keep the dangerous thing on the outside. Never let it in clean. I’ve been doing it since before I understood I was doing it, and I don’t have to think about it, I just have to be it, and there’s a Bruins scout in the building and a girl in section 108 and my whole life on the line and all of that goes into the same place it always goes, which is nowhere, which is out past the boards where it can’t touch me.

I hop the wall for my next shift, and I play the best eighteen minutes of my life.

They come with everything in the third. Of course they do. It’s their barn and their crowd and their season, too.

And I don’t let them in. That’s the whole story of that period, from where I stand: I don’t let them in. I block two shots with my body that I’ll feel in my bones for a week. I break up a two-on-one by taking away the pass and trusting Wyatt to have the shooter, and he does, because we’ve done it a thousand times. With four minutes left they pull a shift where they’re buzzing our zone, cycling, looking for the seam, and I stand in the middle of it and eat every play they’ve got, calm as I’ve ever been, because the alternative is a blue jacket in the upper bowl watching me flinch, and I have never once flinched.

Then, two minutes left, tied, their D-man on the right side drops his shoulder before he pinches.

Every time. Just like Beau said.

And River Callahan — all elbows and speed, on the ice for the biggest shift of his young life because Beau talked Coach into trusting him — River sees it. I watch him see it. The kid reads the drop, and he goes, and he doesn’t look back, and he springs in behind the pinching defenseman with the whole sheet of ice open in front of him and Wyatt hitting him in stride with a pass like a laser, and it’s a breakaway, and the barn stops breathing, and River Callahan buries it top corner like he’s done it ten thousand times in his driveway, which he probably has.

2–1.

The bench explodes. I don’t, because I don’t, but I get to River as he comes off and I grab the back of his helmet and pull his head to mine and I say the only thing worth saying, which is, “That’s the read. That’s the whole game. Remember what it felt like.” And the kid’s grinning so hard he can’t talk, and over his shoulder I see Beau on the bench with his good arm raised, roaring, prouder than if he’d scored it himself, and I get it, finally, the thing Beau’s been doing all year. You build the kid up and then you get to watch him fly. There’s something in that I don’t have a word for and won’t go looking for tonight.

We kill the last two minutes. Their goalie pulled, six attackers, the barn howling, and I block one more with my ribs and clear it down the ice and the horn goes, and we win, 2–1, gritty and ugly and earned, the best kind.

And I skate off past section 108 without looking up, and I feel her watching me the whole way, and I have never wanted to look at anyone so badly in my life and I don’t, because we’re nothing to each other in public.

The scout’s gone by the time I check the upper bowl. Blue jacket, empty seat. No way to know how it went. No way to know anything except that I played the best I’ve got and it’s out of my hands now, which is the worst feeling there is for a man who needs to control the variable.

I carry it into the shower and it doesn’t wash off. I carry it onto the team bus to the hotel and it sits on my chest the whole ride. Everything I want, and I don’t get to know if I got closer to it or not, and there’s nothing to do with that, no gap to stand in, no play to make.

There’s just a girl in a hotel two floors up who saw the whole thing.

The team’s got rooms Coach assigned, doubles, two guys each, curfew at eleven, bed check that Coach does himself because he’s old-school and doesn’t trust us, which is correct. I’m with Wyatt. Wyatt’s asleep before I’ve got my shoes off, out cold and snoring, a man who played forty minutes and has no thoughts to keep him up, and I lie in the dark of the Marriott in Burlington, Vermont, staring at a popcorn ceiling with my whole future sitting on my chest, and I do not sleep.

My phone lights up at 12:40.

Margo

You awake?

I look at it for a second. Then:

yeah

Margo

430. two floors up. I booked a suite for me, Beau, and Sloane; they took the second room.

A pause. Three dots. Then:

Margo

don’t make me say it twice, Theo.

And I should say no. There’s a curfew and a bed check and a coach who does not play, and I’m one dumb decision from a suspension the exact week a Bruins scout watched me, and everything about tonight says the smart thing is to stay in this bed and stare at this ceiling and not risk the one thing I can’t afford to risk.

I’m already up. Already got my hoodie on, already easing the door shut behind me so it doesn’t wake Wyatt, already in the stairwell because the elevator dings and stairwells don’t.

Because here’s what I’ve figured out about myself in five weeks that I didn’t know before: the pressure that’s been sitting on my chest since Coach said Bruins scout, he’s here for you — the thing I can’t stand in a gap and stop, the thing that has no play — there’s exactly one place it goes quiet. One person who reaches into the noise and turns it off. And she’s two floors up telling me not to make her say it twice.

Fourth floor. The hallway’s dead, carpet the color of a headache, ice machine humming somewhere. 430’s at the end. Beau and Sloane are behind that wall, asleep, close enough that if I think about it, I’ll lose my nerve, so I don’t think about it.