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“Thanks, Coach.”
He moves on. Beau finds me at my stall, still in half my gear, sweat cooling on the back of my neck.
“Told you,” Beau says.
“You didn’t tell me anything. You gave a speech.”
“The speech worked.”
“The speech didn’t stop me taking a hooking penalty in the first.”
“No,” Beau agrees. “But it got you through the rest of it.” He looks at me for a second, something steady in it. “You good?”
I think about the two Delgado reads I missed and the one I finally got right when it mattered. I think about the late hit that didn’t get called and the fact that I didn’t let it turn into a second penalty. I think about the imperfect pass to Wyatt that could’ve cost us everything and didn’t. I think about Beau standing on that bench in a brace for sixty minutes plus overtime, watching a game he couldn’t play, still finding a way to be the reason we came together in the third.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I’m good.”
He nods. Moves off toward Wyatt, who’s getting mobbed by half the team for the overtime winner and looks deeply uncomfortable about all the attention.
I finish getting out of my gear. Tape off, skates off, the specific relief of getting out of equipment after two full periods and overtime of holding tension in every muscle. I shower — longer than usual, letting the hot water work on my shoulders — and by the time I come out through the tunnel toward the family area, the crowd’s mostly thinned. Just the die-hards, the parents, the people waiting for someone specific.
Margo’s waiting for someone specific.
She’s leaning against the wall near the exit, Sloane a few feet away talking to Beau, and when she sees me she pushes off the wall and doesn’t wait for me to cross the distance. She meets me halfway.
For one second, in a mostly-empty hallway with just enough people around that we have to be careful, she puts both hands on my chest and looks up at me like the whole game is written on my face and she’s reading every word of it.
“You were incredible,” she says. Quiet. Just for me.
“We were down two-one for most of the third.”
“And then you weren’t.” She smiles. “I watched you get frustrated. I watched you pull it back. That’s — Theo, that’s the whole thing. That’s what makes you good.”
“You watched the whole game like a hockey scout.”
“I watched the whole game like someone who’s been paying very close attention to one specific player since October.” She tilts her head. “I saw the hooking call. I saw you get in your own head about it.”
“I did not get in my own head about it.”
“You absolutely did. You skated the next shift like you were trying to hit someone through the boards.”
I almost laugh, right there in the hallway, which is dangerous, because laughing draws attention and Cash is twenty feet away narrating his fictional overtime heroics to a small cluster of parents who look politely trapped.
“One more win,” I tell her. “Frozen Four.”
“I know.” Her eyes are bright. “I’ll be there for that one too.”
“I know you will.”
She doesn’t touch me again — can’t, not here, not yet — but she doesn’t have to. I carry the whole night home with me anyway: Beau’s speech, the Delgado read I finally got right, Wyatt burying the overtime winner off an ugly pass, and Margo on her feet in section four with both hands over her mouth, watching the exact moment the whole building found out what we already knew.
We’re one win away.
I’m not losing this one.
Chapter 21
Theo
