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"Okay," he says.

I stare at him. "Okay?"

"Game five. Dinner. I'll come." He takes a breath. "I'd like to meet them. I'd like to meet the people who made you."

I don't say anything. I don't trust my voice. I just crawl across the cushion and put my head on his shoulder, the one on the side of his good knee, and he puts his arm around me, and we watch Varga score again, silently, on a loop.

We fly to Nashville the next morning.

The hotel's downtown, a big one, all glass, with a lobby full of country music memorabilia and a guitar-shaped pool on the roof. Beth hands out keys by the elevator. Eight-fourteen. Owen and me.

It's been eight months since she handed me the first one in Denver. I think about that as the elevator goes up. About standing in the gold doors, trying to decide what kind of face to have. About the list, two pages, both sides, and rule ten.

He's already in the room when I get there, the way he always is. His suitcase is open on the bed by the door. Everything's folded.

Some things never change.

That night, the night before game three, we don't do anything. We just lie in the same bed, his bed this time, with the lights off and the air conditioning going, and he holds on to me like I'm going to roll off the world, and I let him.

"I'm scared," he says into the dark.

I've never heard him say that. Not once. Not in Toronto, not at the lake, not in the stairwell in Santa Monica with his heart slamming against my hand.

"Of Varga?"

"Of losing." He's quiet. "It's my last chance. After this, it's over. I'm done. My knee's done. Seventeen years and I've never gotten this close, and it's right there, and I'm so scared I'm going to be the reason we don't get it."

"You won't be the reason."

"You don't know that."

"I do," I say. "I know it the way you know where I'm going to be when you throw the puck to empty ice. I just know."

He doesn't answer. After a while, his hand comes up and finds the back of my neck, and stays there, warm.

Around midnight, I get up to get water from the ice machine, and when I come back he's standing in the doorway of the room in a T-shirt and his boxers, holding the door open for me, half asleep.

"You took forever," he says.

"The ice machine's all the way at the end of the hall."

"I missed you."

"I was gone four minutes."

"I know," he says, and leans down in the doorway, with the door open, and kisses me on the mouth. Slow. Sleepy. Right there in the hall.

It lasts maybe two seconds. The hallway's empty. It's midnight. There's nobody there.

I don't think about it again until game three.

Game three is in Nashville's building, and it's the loudest place I've ever been.

Every time I touch the puck, nineteen thousand people boo. Somebody in the second row behind our bench has a sign that says CASTEL'S A CRYBABY, with a drawing of me in the penalty box with tears coming out of my eyes. It's a good drawing, honestly. Somebody put effort into it.

Varga's quieter tonight. That's what scares me. He doesn't say anything for two whole periods. He just plays. He hits me clean on the boards twice, and he wins a faceoff against Owen and scores on the play, and he doesn't say a word about it.

It's two to one for them in the third when he finally does.