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Ford snuck a bike bell into the cart when he thought Cole wasn’t looking. Cole caught it and made him take it out. Ford grumbled about it and then pulled him in by the back of the neck and kissed him instead, slowly, no reason to stop and nowhere to be. The bell could wait. So could everything else. They had the house until Sunday, and past that they had a whole lot more. Cole let himself believe this wasn’t all a dream that would eventually shatter.

TEN

Ford had gotten good at keeping his expression flat and not letting a sound come out of his mouth. He’d had plenty of practice: a bad hip, a job he played in front of ten thousand people, and a six-year-old who read his moods better than any therapist ever could. He put all of it to use now, flat on Dr. Friedman’s table with his knee folded up to his chest while Friedman rotated his hip through an arc that sent blinding pain shooting through his body.

Ford stared at the ceiling and counted tiles so he wouldn’t give anything away. Forty-two of them, door to far wall. He’d counted them twice because counting beat thinking about why he’d finally come in, the better part of a year after the first doctor diagnosed the most likely issue and Ford decided not to believe it.

Friedman had opened with the easy questions, the ones that got a man talking and loosened his guard before the exam started. How long? Worse in the cold, or all the time? Any nights it kept him up? Ford had kept all his answers light, and Friedman had written them down without questioning whether he was being truthful. He put his hands on the joint and found the truth for himself in about four seconds.

“There.” Friedman felt Ford’s breath catch despite him and set the leg down gently. “I have to agree that it’s almost certainly an impingement with a likely labrum tear as well. We’ll have to send you for imaging to know how bad it is. I have to tell you, putting off coming to see me has undoubtedly worsened the injury to the point we may have to consider surgery.”

“I’ve been managing it so far,” Ford protested. “I’m sure I can get through the rest of the season, and we can talk about surgery in spring.”

“You’ve been outrunning it.” Friedman rolled his stool back and looked at him over the top of his glasses. “Which, at your position and age, is genuinely impressive. It’s also the exact thing that’s going to take the choice away from you if you keep it up. You have to take this seriously, Ford.”

Ford sat up slowly, got his feet back under him, and waited for the rest of the lecture. A goalie learned to wait out a shooter without giving anything away, and he put that face on now.

“Here’s my honest opinion, since you look like you’re the type who won’t hear anything but brutal honesty.” Friedman pulled Ford’s x-ray from earlier in the year up on the screen and forced him to look at it. “The hip needs surgery. It’s not an emergency. You can finish this season on it if you’re smart about it. PT, an injection when it flares, and you stop pretending it doesn’t hurt so your trainer can actually help you. Then we go in during the offseason and clean it up. That’s if you haven’t done more damage since the original images were taken.”

“And then I’m good.”

“I’m not a miracle worker, Ford.” Friedman said it plainly, not trying to soften the blow. “You’re a thirty-four-year-old goalie with a lot of miles on him, and I’m not going to sell you a repair that makes you twenty-six again. But the seasons you have left can be good ones, and they’ll be yours to decide about, on your schedule. What you don’t get to do is keep hiding it until the leg quits in the middle of a game and forces you into retirement.”

Ford nodded along, like they were talking about somebody else’s leg. He asked the practical stuff—the injection, how long the rehab ran, whether he could still take Charlotte skating on Sundays. Friedman answered all of it straight, wrote out a PT referral, and shook his hand. Ford pulled his jeans on over a hip that hurt exactly as much as it had when he walked in. The only thing that had changed was that somebody had finally said it aloud.

He sat on the table for a second after Friedman left, and it wasn’t the surgery he was stuck on. He’d been a goalie since he was nine. It was the only thing he’d ever been that made him worth anything to a room full of people, and he had no idea who Ford Callahan was without it. A dad, sure, and that was the best of him, but kids grew up and left. He didn’t have an answer for who that guy was, and he wasn’t going to find one sitting in a doctor’s office. So he left and drove to the rink to make a plan with the one person whose job it was to keep him standing.

Practice was half over by the time Ford got there, and he didn’t gear up. He went to find Theo instead. They spent twenty minutes in the trainer’s office with the original imaging pulled up, working out how to get him through to the offseason on a hip that wanted to quit: PT three times a week, an injection when it flared, backing off on the practice days that didn’t matter. Theo didn’t sugarcoat it, and he didn’t pity him either. That was the only reason Ford could stand to hear what he had to say. By the end, they had a plan. It wasn’t a cure. It was a way to keep standing, and right now, that was enough.

He watched the back half of practice from the bench in his street clothes, and that part got under his skin. Danny Halstead, the team’s backup goalie, looked decent out there, but he kept making stupid mistakes. He was still green, and it showed. Not only that, he was cocky as hell and didn’t want to listen to anything the coaching staff had to say to him. Sitting on the bench watching the other guys without him was exactly the thing Friedman had just warned him was coming, and it turned out he hated it even more than he’d guessed.

When he and Cole made eye contact, Ford could see the questions from behind his visor. Cole was itching for an update. A week ago, Ford sitting out a practice in street clothes would’ve had Cole gliding over to ask what was wrong. Now he couldn’t. They’d agreed Ford would handle the appointment alone and Cole would keep his distance, and neither of them had thought about what that distance would cost with real news in the building. Ford gave him a small nod. Later. Cole took it and got back in the drill.

They passed in the tunnel on the way to the locker room, close enough that Cole’s shoulder caught his for half a second, the only thing either of them could afford in a hallway full of teammates.

“All good?” Cole asked, barely moving his mouth.

“Talk at home.” Ford was all talked out after his meeting with Theo. They had a solid plan to get him through until the imaging was done, at which point they’d figure out where to go next.

Ford had an ice pack on his hip and game tape muted on the laptop when Cole finally came in, thirty minutes behind him. Ford didn’t waste a second on platitudes. He wanted to get this over with so they could go on with the night.

“Surgery,” he said. “Doc thinks we can hold off until the offseason. I can play until then if I stop being an idiot about it.” He made himself finish. “He gave me a season or two after that. Being generous, probably.”

Cole didn’t tell him it would be fine. He didn’t say guys came back from worse, or that a season or two was still a season or two, or any of the things people reached for when they had nothing. He came around the couch and sat and put a hand on the back of Ford’s neck, warm and heavy, and left it there.

“Okay,” Cole said. Just that.

It shouldn’t have been enough, but it was. Ford let his head drop into the weight of Cole’s hand and got to be not-brave about it for a minute. It turned out that was exactly what he’d needed and had never known how to ask for.

They didn’t get long to dwell on the news. The clock over the stove said the after-school program was about to close, and Charlotte would be the last kid in the gym again if somebody didn’t move.

“I’ll grab her,” Cole said, already reaching for his keys. “You rest. You’ve earned a night of somebody else doing the driving.” At the door, he stopped, then doubled back. Ford’s stomach flipped when Cole bent down to kiss him. “She keeps asking me why you take the stairs funny, by the way. Told her your leg gets tired from working hard. True enough for a six-year-old.”

Ford kept his eyes on the muted screen so Cole wouldn’t see what that did to him. The fact that Cole had been quietly handling his daughter’s worry for who knew how long and had never made it one more thing for Ford to carry.

“That’s the right answer,” he said, rough. “Leave it there for now. I’ll tell her more when there’s more to tell.”

Cole came back forty minutes later with Charlotte’s hand in his and a grocery bag hanging off his other hand.