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My mother sighs. "She says she's known since your junior prom. She says you spent the whole night talking to Tommy Lindqvist's older brother about carburetors."

"I liked carburetors."

"Nobody likes carburetors that much, Owen," my mother says, and she's laughing now, and crying, both at once. "Then fix it," she says. "Hales fix things. Your father fixed that dock three times after the ice took it. Go fix it."

At seven o'clock, I'm on the couch with my leg up and the TV on and the Christmas lights going in the window.

The anthem ends. The broadcast cuts to the teams lining up at the blue line. The camera's panning down our line, slow, one face at a time. Kowal. Webb. Brandt, with the C on his chest now, which is strange to see. Sorel.

Then him.

He's standing at the end of the line with his helmet under his arm. His hair's pushed back. His face is calm. Not the empty face from Pruitt's suite. Not the smile he uses on reporters. Something else. Something I haven't seen since October.

The camera goes down, the way broadcast cameras do, a slow pan from helmet to skates.

His laces are pink.

"Well, would you look at that," the play-by-play guy says. "The pink laces are back, folks. First time since December. Castel's brought them back for game six."

"Hashtag bring back the slide," the color guy says, and laughs.

I don't know when I start crying. I just notice at some point that my face is wet, and I'm laughing too, both at once, alone on the couch in the apartment he filled with color, with my leg in a brace and his hoodie hanging by the door.

The puck drops.

I pick up my phone. I open my messages. His name's at the top. The last message is still mine, from before game three. Sleep well. Big day. — O.

I don't text him. Not now. Not during the game. Not with his phone sitting in a locker room in Nashville. He's doing this part for himself. I know that. I can see it in his face.

I scroll down instead. Past his name. Past Webb's. Past Laurel's.

I find Moretti.

After the game, I type. Win or lose. I need to talk to you. Pruitt too. Nadia. All of you. I'm ready.

I hit send.

Then I put the phone down, face-up, for the first time in seventeen years, and I watch him play.

Chapter Thirty

RÉMY

Sorel sees the laces in the dressing room before warmups and doesn't say anything for a full ten seconds, which for Sorel is a medical event.

Then he says, "Finally."

"Don't make it a thing."

"I'm not making it a thing." He sits down next to me and starts taping his stick. He's smiling at the tape. "I'm just saying. Finally."

Across the room, Brandt's in Owen's stall. Not really. He's in his own stall, but he's wearing the C now, stitched onto the chest of his jersey where the A used to be, and every time I look at him I see the wrong face under it. He catches me looking. He looks down at my skates.

"Pink," he says.

"Pink."

He looks at them. I wait for it. The circus joke. The parade.