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Margo doesn’t whoop, which I appreciate. She just reaches over and squeezes my hand, once, and June beams into her hot chocolate, and for a second I’m a normal girl with normal friends admitting a normal good thing, and the floor doesn’t open, and nobody leaves, and the world keeps going.

I let myself have it.

That’s the thing I’ll think about later, when it all comes apart — that for a few weeks in the dead of November I actually let myself have it. The bed and the drawer and the walks home and the study sessions and the goal he found the camera for. The way he reaches for my hand without thinking now. The way I’ve started reaching back. The fact that the rule I wrote in pen — don’t forget this is fake — is so dead and buried that I’ve stopped even visiting the grave.

It’s real. He knows it. I know it. The whole campus knows it.

I lie in his bed the night before he comes home and I let myself, for once, not catalog the exits. I let myself listen for the truck without being ashamed of the listening. I let myself believe, against the entire evidence of my life, that maybe this is the thing that doesn’t get taken, that maybe I’m finally in a room where the floor holds.

I should know better.

I do know better, somewhere, in the nine-year-old part of me that’s never once been wrong about this. She’s quiet right now, that girl, lulled by the warm and the want and the cleared drawer.

But she’s still in there.

And the thing about my life — the one reliable thing, the only law I’ve ever been able to count on — is that the floor always opens eventually.

It’s just been waiting for me to get comfortable enough to forget.

Chapter 23

Beau

We lose to Boston College on a Friday and it’s the kind of loss you can live with.

They’re good — ranked, deep, a top line that moves the puck like they share a brain — and they beat us 3–1 in a game that was closer than the score, and you tip your helmet to a better team on a better night and you go home and you stew about the one shift you’d take back and then you let it go. That’s a survivable loss. O’Grady’s quiet in the room after but not cold, which is O’Grady’s version of we’ll be fine, and I believe him, mostly.

It’s the second one that’s the problem.

UConn comes to Corbin the following Tuesday and we lose to them 5–2, and there’s no tipping your helmet to that. UConn’s been the bottom of the conference for three years. UConn is the team you’re supposed to beat to keep your spot in the upper half of the standings, and instead they come into our barn and they outwork us, out-hit us, out-want us, and the Nest goes from loud to murmuring to half-empty by the third, and I skate off our own ice to a smattering of boos for the first time in my Whitmore career.

It drops us to fifth in the conference. We were second three weeks ago. Two losses and a slide and suddenly the math that looked easy in October — home ice for the conference tournament, the seeding that gets scouts in the building — that math is in question, and everyone in the room knows it, and nobody says it, which is worse than if they did.

I had a bad game. I’m not going to dress it up. I lost a step in the second period and I didn’t get it back, and there was a puck in the corner I should’ve won and didn’t, and the goal that broke it open came off the rush down my wing while I was half a stride behind where I needed to be. Half a stride. That’s all it is. That’s all it ever is.

I know exactly where the half a stride went.

It went into the first period, on a faceoff, when I tied up their center and went to win the puck back the way I’ve won ten thousand pucks back — that little muscle-memory wrench of the upper body, a thing I don’t even think about — and the shoulder gave a warning so sharp and so deep that for half a second the rink went white at the edges and I lost the draw. First faceoff I’ve lost clean in I don’t know how long. And after that I was protecting it without deciding to, the body doing the math the brain won’t, shaving a degree off every reach, half a beat off every battle, because somewhere underneath the part of me that competes is the part of me that’s scared, and the scared part was driving by the third.

You can’t compete at this level at ninety-five percent and hide it. The good ones find your ninety-five and they live there. UConn found mine. They forechecked my corner all night because their tape told them the captain wasn’t winning his battles, and the tape was right, and I knew it was right, and I kept my face arranged into nothing and lost another one and another one, because the alternative — coming off, telling O’Grady, telling the trainer, saying the word out loud — the alternative is the end of something I’m not ready to end.

I’m not going to say any of that out loud.

I skate off to the boos and I keep my chin up because that’s the job, the captain’s chin stays up, and I do not look at the bench and I do not look two rows behind it where I know she’s sitting, watching, reading the whole rink the way she reads a room, because if I look at Sloane she’ll see it, she sees everything, and I can’t have her see it tonight.

The locker room after is the kind of quiet that has teeth.

O’Grady doesn’t yell. That’s the tell — when O’Grady yells, it’s fixable, it’s a teaching moment, he’s still coaching. When O’Grady goes quiet and looks at you for a beat too long before he speaks, that’s the one that lands. He stands in the middle of the room with his arms crossed and he looks at us, all of us, and he says, “That’s not a hockey problem. That’s a compete problem. I can fix a hockey problem.” And then he doesn’t finish the sentence, just lets the other half hang there, and walks out, and the room sits in it.

Cash breaks it the way Cash breaks everything, which is loudly and badly.

“Well that was a steaming pile of—” He kicks a roll of tape across the floor. “UConn. UConn. My grandmother could forecheck harder than we did tonight and she’s been dead since I was nine.”

“Cash,” Wyatt says, tired.

“I’m processing, Wyatt. Let me process. We lost to a team whose third line I’m pretty sure includes an actual scarecrow⁠—”

“Stop talking,” Theo says. Flat. From the corner, half out of his gear, not looking up.