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Nobody says anything.

"Say it," Cole says. "Say all of it. Your way. We'll back you. Every one of us. We already wrote it down."

I sit there on Wes's floor in the dark with the phone against my ear.

"Okay," I say.

I call my mom first. I promised.

She's at the offices again. She stops the buffer.

"Tomorrow," I tell her. "Halvorsen's setting up a press thing. Before Game 3."

"Okay, baby."

"It's going to be bad, Mom. People are going to say stuff. About me. About you, maybe."

"Theo." Her voice is very calm. "I clean toilets for a living at three in the morning. You think anybody's going to say something about me I haven't heard?"

I laugh. It comes out wet.

"You tell it," she says. "All of it. And then you come home for Easter and I'm making pot roast, and that man's never going to eat it again."

Halvorsen's in his office at nine the next morning. He's on the phone. When I knock, he looks up, and he sees my face, and he says into the phone, "I'll call you back, Jim," and hangs up.

"Do it," I say. "File it. All of it. I'll talk."

He sets the phone down.

"You're sure."

"Mikey and Cole called me last night. There's seven of them. They want to."

He nods slowly. He picks up the phone again.

"Theo," he says, as he dials. "One more thing. Dane came to see me on Tuesday."

I go still.

"He asked me to hold everything. Not to file, not to call anybody else. Until you decided. Whatever you decided, even if it was nothing." Halvorsen looks at me over his reading glasses. "He asked me to tell you it came from him."

Something turns over in my chest.

"Just thought you should know," Halvorsen says, and turns to the phone. "Jim? Yeah. It's Erik again. He's in."

They do it in the media room at Kettle, at two o'clock on Thursday.

It's a small room. A table, a backdrop with the Wardens logo on it, the iron lantern, two microphones. Rows of folding chairs. I thought maybe four or five people would come. There are more like thirty. Cameras on tripods at the back. Somebody from Detroit. Somebody from a national hockey site. Phones held up.

I wipe my hands on my pants under the table.

Nico's standing next to me.

He drove up again on Tuesday and never went home. He's in a Graymoor hoodie with his hands in the pocket, and when I came in, he didn't say anything. He just walked up and stood next to my chair, on my left, close enough that his elbow's touching my shoulder.

"You don't have to," I told him.

"Shut up, Swede," he said.