Page 27

I got up and did push-ups on the carpet until my arms shook. It didn’t help. I shut off the lamp and lay down.

We won Denver in the third on a Ryan power play goal. I blocked two shots in the closing minutes and caught one above the boot on the outside of the left ankle. The trainer worked the bone and called it a bruise.

Cole’s messages were waiting when I woke up.

Cole: okay so I found the podcast

Cole: the one D was talking about at the facility

Cole: Eli she has so many opinions about the Hargrove episode

Cole: I’ve been texting her for an hour

Cole: this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me

So she’d been up late, texting back and forth with Cole Westbrook.

It was fine. They were two people with a shared interest in a podcast. Cole was my teammate and my friend and he would never act on it. The tightness across my shoulders had nothing to do with jealousy, because it wasn’t jealousy. It was early morning irritability.

I got in the shower. I let it run too hot with both palms braced on the cold tile and thought about coverage assignments and neutral zone positioning and whether our second pairing needed to tighten their gap.

The steam was thick and I was completely focused on hockey. I wasn’t thinking about Cole Westbrook two doors down the hall of this same hotel, who’d spent half the night talking true crime with Delaney. I wasn’t thinking about how her voice dropped and slowed when a subject interested her, with a laugh caught in it.

I was hard, standing in a hotel shower in Denver at seven in the morning, over my nanny’s voice saying the word podcast. I left both palms on the tile and didn’t pretend otherwise. Then I turned the water to cold and stood in it for as long as I could take it.

We flew out at noon and played St. Louis the same night and won by a goal. A photo came in on the bus, a gray crayon arch with an enormous 44 under it and DADY WINS along the bottom, the S squeezed in small where she’d run out of room.

I’d flagged Harker in my own notes before we ever left Phoenix. He was physical, played the edge, and had a history of taking liberties after the whistle. Calloway mentioned him in the morning skate meeting and moved on. I hadn’t written down that this one was personal.

It showed in warmups. Harker skated a circuit past Griffin, came back around, and did it again. He didn’t acknowledge him either time. He kept his head forward, deliberate, biding his time.

He waited until the second period. Griffin had the puck behind the net, the whistle blown and the play over, and Harker came in late with his full weight. Griffin went into the base of his own net and took it off its pegs with him. The sound carried across the ice heavier and lower than a legal hit. It sounded meant.

I had Harker by the front of the jersey before Griffin’s skates were back under him. The first man to a run goalie was always a defenseman. Nobody taught that and nobody had to. Sutter arrived half a step behind me, and between us we put Harker into the end boards and the glass moved in its frame.

Harker’s face never moved through any of it. He didn’t look smug and he didn’t look sorry. He looked empty, and it took work to keep a face that blank after a late hit. The work told me what I needed to know.

Griffin was up before the linesmen had us sorted. He waved the trainer off and set the net back on its pegs himself. He rolled the shoulder once, and a while later again, smaller, when the bench had quit watching him.

Harker got four. I got two, Sutter got two, and the sheet came out even. Nobody got a power play. A man had put our goaltender through the back of his own net, and the arithmetic put three of us in two boxes with an official sitting between them and called it square.

A linesman walked me to the box and the route went past Harker. I got close enough for him to hear me clearly. I said one word. “Smart.”

His chin came up. He’d heard it, and I’d meant him to.

I sat in the box while Griffin played. He gave up nothing for the rest of the period, and he played the puck behind his own net every single time it came to him.

We won in overtime. Ryan buried my pass in the first seconds of it.

Griffin sat in his stall afterward and taped the same stick down to the toe, then stripped it and started over, again and again. Any other night he taped it once and left to find his food.

Ryan sat down beside me. “Harker,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Home game. December.”

“I know,” I said.