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He reaches over and opens the glove box. Inside, on top of the registration and a pack of gum and an ice scraper, there's something pink.

He hands it to me.

It's my laces. The pink ones. The ones I took out of my skates in December and stuffed in the side pocket of my duffel before I flew home for Christmas.

"Your mother found them," he says. "In your bag, at Christmas, when she was doing your laundry. She's been carrying them around for six months. She didn't know when to give them back."

I hold them in my lap. They're still bright. They haven't faded at all.

"Whatever happens with the captain," my dad says. "That's between you and him. But you don't hide for him. You don't hide for anybody. Not for me, not for him, not for some sports drink." He puts his hand on the back of my neck, heavy and warm. "You came out at sixteen so nobody could make you small. Don't let anybody make you small now."

"Papa," I say, and my voice breaks in half.

He pulls me across the bench seat and holds on, hard, his arms around my shoulders, my face pressed into his wedding shirt, which smells like the cedar closet at home. He doesn't let go.

It's the first time he's ever done this in the truck. Every other time, the truck was where he went to be alone.

After a long time, Maman knocks on the window with three tourtières in takeout boxes.

"Are you two going to sit in here all night," she says through the glass, "or are you going to eat?"

It's midnight. I'm sitting on my orange couch with my skates in my lap.

We fly to Nashville in the morning. Game six. If we lose, it's over. The whole season, the whole year, all of it.

I pull the black laces out of my right skate, slowly, eyelet by eyelet. They're the plain ones the equipment guys hand out by the box. I've been wearing them for six months, and I never once liked them. Then I thread the pink one in. I pull it tight. I tie it in a double knot.

Then I do the left.

When I'm done, I sit there and look at them in the lamplight. They look ridiculous. They look like me.

My phone's on the coffee table. I pick it up. I open my messages. His name's still at the top, even though nobody's said anything in it for four days. The last message is from before game three.

Sleep well. Big day. — O.

I type: I heard about your knee.

I delete it.

I type: Are you okay?

I delete that too.

I put the phone down on the coffee table, face-down, the way he always does.

Not yet. Not because I'm scared. Because I have to do this part for myself first. I have to play one game, just one, like the kid who came through the door in October singing with one earbud in.

Then I'll decide what I want to say to him.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

OWEN

Crutches are harder than they look. Seventeen years of learning to stop on a dime, and I can't get across my own kitchen.

Anand put me in a brace from my hip to my ankle, locked straight, and told me not to put any weight on the leg until the surgery on Monday. Not one ounce, he said. If you so much as stand on it to reach something off a shelf, I'll know. I believe him.

So I crutch. From the bed to the bathroom. From the bathroom to the couch. From the couch to the kitchen, where it takes me six minutes to make a cup of coffee, because I have to lean on the counter and hop, and the coffee maker's at the far end.