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I stand there in my crease with my mouth open and nothing comes out.

He looks at me.

"I never wanted you to back off," he says.

That's all. He says it quietly, almost gently, the way you'd tell somebody something they should have known all along.

Then he turns around and skates away.

He doesn't collect. He doesn't say you're done with me. He doesn't say anything else. He skates back to the bench and picks up the cardboard tray with both coffees and goes down the tunnel, and the door bangs shut behind him.

I'm standing in the crease alone.

On the bench there's something he left. I skate over to it.

It's my coffee. He took the tray, but he left mine. Black. Sitting on the boards by itself, still steaming.

I sit on the bench for a long time with the coffee in both hands.

I couldn't say it. Five months of saying things to him in the dark, in rooms with the door shut, in my bed, through a wall. Every true thing I've ever said to him, I've said where nobody else could hear it. In there. That was the deal. In there it's us. Out there, I do whatever I want.

And out there, what I wanted was to make him small.

Everything I took from him, I took in front of the whole room. The card table. The bag. The pucks on his knees. Gunnar's stick and the knee in his ribs, with twenty-five guys watching and me three strides away doing nothing. All of it, out there, where everybody could see.

And every time I tried to give anything back, I did it in the dark.

I take a drink of the coffee. It's terrible. It's gas station coffee. He's been bringing me this every day for three months.

I pull out my phone.

Me: Nico. What time do you get to Kettle tonight?

Nico: 5. priya's driving. why

Me: Get good seats. Center ice.

Nico: ...why

Nico: D what are you doing

I put the phone face down on the boards next to the empty cup, and go get my pads.

29

THEO

Kettle Arena holds eight thousand one hundred people. There are more than that tonight. They're standing in the aisles and on the stairs and three deep behind the glass at both ends, and the fire marshal is standing by the Zamboni doors looking like he's given up.

The student section has a new banner. It's bigger than the last one. It says WE BELIEVED THEO, past tense, and somebody's crossed it out and written underneath, in red, WE STILL DO.

On the other side of the building, there's no chicken.

Somebody on the Harrow side brought a sign that says MARRACK OUT. Somebody else tore it down. There was a fight in Section 112 during warmups, and security took two guys out, and the Harrow student section has been weirdly quiet since.

Marrack's behind the bench. Same quarter-zip. He's not smiling tonight.

Nico's at center ice in the front row, right behind the glass. He's got Priya on one side and my mom on the other.