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There's a link.

I stand in the hallway outside Room 214 while people push past me with their backpacks, and I watch it on my phone with the volume all the way down, and then with the volume up, holding it against my ear.

I didn't act alone. I acted. But I wasn't alone.

I watch it three times. The third time I'm sitting on the floor of the hallway with my back against a bulletin board, and a professor I've never seen asks me if I'm all right, and I say yes.

I'm sorry to the people at Graymoor who had every reason to hate me this year, and who let me be on their team anyway.

He didn't say my name.

He didn't have to. I heard it anyway.

I drive to Kettle. Skate's over by the time I get there. The lot's emptying out. I sit in my car by the side door with the engine running and watch the guys come out in twos and threes. Petey and Okoye, laughing. Gunnar with a broken stick under his arm, for some reason. Jace.

Wes comes out with Theo.

Theo's carrying his own bag. Wes says something to him, and Theo laughs, and puts his head down, and they walk across the lot to Wes's truck.

He doesn't look at my car. I don't think he sees it.

I don't get out.

He told it. He told it himself, in his own words, on his own terms, the way he wanted. With Nico on one side of him, and Halvorsen on the other, and seven guys from Harrow behind him in a stack of statements. He did it without me.

He was right. It was his.

I sit there until Wes's truck pulls out of the lot. Then I go home and go upstairs and sit on my bed.

The Book of Grudges is on the nightstand.

Friday, I go to practice. He's there. We skate the same drills on the same ice. He's on the second line again; Halvorsen moved him back up. When he shoots on me, I stop most of them, and he doesn't chirp and I don't say anything. When he skates past my crease, he doesn't look at me.

But once, in a line rush, he comes in on me two-on-one and he passes it instead of shooting, a perfect saucer pass to Okoye that goes right over my stick. And when Okoye buries it, Theo circles past my crease and says, low, so nobody else can hear:

"You'd have stopped me."

It's the first thing he's said to me since whistle.

I don't say anything back. I don't trust my voice.

Friday night I don't sleep.

I lie on my back and look at the ceiling. Through the wall, Nico's old room is empty. Theo's still on Wes's floor. The house is quiet. Tomorrow is Game 3. Win, and we're conference champions and in the national tournament. Lose, and the season's over and everybody goes home.

And then there's no after the season. There's just after.

At four-thirty I get up and stretch. Hips first, then hamstrings. I drive to Kettle in the dark.

Lou's not even in yet. I let myself in with my key. I turn on the overheads. Half of them. I dress alone. I put the pucks out myself, all five, on the blue line in a perfect row. I fill two water bottles and put them on the net.

Then I stand in my crease, and scrape my ice, and tap my posts.

At five-fifty-seven, the door bangs open.

He comes down the tunnel in full gear with his helmet hooked on one finger and a cardboard tray with two coffees in it.

He stops at the end of the tunnel and looks at me.