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He doesn’t start with hockey. That’s the first sign this is going somewhere different than I expected. He just looks at me for a long moment, the whiteboard behind him still covered in the same opponent tendencies from three weeks ago, and then he leans back in his chair.

“You’ve been somewhere else for two days,” he says. “I’m not going to pretend I haven’t noticed. I’m also not going to make you tell me anything you don’t want to tell me. But the door’s open, if you need it to be.”

I think about Beau last night. About the specific relief of finally saying it out loud to someone who didn’t flinch. I think about my dad, who isn’t an option, has never really been an option, not for something like this — the specific ache of a father who’s never once been the person you could call with something this size, and how much lonelier that makes everything. There’s a version of a life where I’d call him right now and he’d say the right thing, and I don’t have that version. I’ve never had that version. I stopped expecting it somewhere around fifteen and I haven’t missed it much since, except in exactly moments like this one, where the absence has real weight instead of just being background noise.

“I need somewhere to put this,” I say. “And I don’t have anyone else who’d —” I stop. Start again. “My dad’s not someone I can talk to about this. He’s never been that.”

Coach nods, slowly, like he already understood that without me saying it directly.

“Talk,” he says.

I don’t tell him everything. I don’t need to. I give him the shape of it — a girl, six weeks, twins, the specific vertigo of a future I thought I understood completely getting rewritten overnight.

Coach listens the whole way through without interrupting, the same full attention he brings to film sessions, the same patience he’s shown me since I was a scared eighteen-year-old freshman trying to figure out how much of myself I was allowed to bring into this program.

When I finish, he’s quiet for a moment.

“How old were you when your parents split?” he asks. Not out of nowhere — I can tell he’s building toward something.

“Fifteen.”

“So you’ve spent six years learning that big life changes mean somebody’s about to disappear on you.” He says it plainly, no pity in it, just observation. “That’s the lens you’re looking at this through right now. I’d bet money on it.”

I don’t answer, because he’s right, and there’s nothing useful to say to a read that accurate.

“I’m going to tell you something,” Coach says. “Not many people on this team know this, and I’m telling you because I think you need to hear it more than you need me to keep it private.” He leans forward, forearms on his desk. “My wife got pregnant our junior year of college. We were together two years, both of us twenty, both of us scared out of our minds, neither one of us had a plan for it. I was playing college hockey same as you, trying to figure out if pro was even a realistic thing for me, and suddenly there’s a kid on the way and every plan I had got rewritten in about ten minutes.”

I look at him. I’ve known Coach O’Grady for three years and I’ve never once heard this.

“It was hard,” he says. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you it wasn’t. We were broke. We were scared. I remember specifically the night we found out, sitting in a parking lot outside her dorm, both of us just staring at a piece of paper trying to figure out how our whole life had changed in one afternoon.” He shakes his head slightly, some old memory moving behind his eyes. “I didn’t handle it perfectly, if I’m being honest with you. I was angry for a while too. Not at her, exactly — at the timing, at the fact that something I hadn’t planned for had suddenly taken over everything. It took me longer than it should have to separate being angry about the circumstances from being angry at the person standing in front of me.”

“How long.”

“Longer than I’m proud of.” He says it plainly, no flinching from the admission. “A couple weeks, if I’m honest. I wasn’t cruel about it. I just went quiet, the way you’re going quiet, and I let that quiet do some damage before I figured out it wasn’t actually helping either of us.” He holds my eyes. “I’m telling you that part on purpose, Mercer. Because I don’t want you thinking the goal here is never being angry. The goal is not letting the anger run the show for longer than it has to.”

I sit with that. It lands somewhere uncomfortable and honest.

“But I’ll tell you the truth, Mercer, because you need to hear the truth and not some easier version of it. That kid — my daughter, she’s twenty-six now, works in Denver — she’s the best thing that ever happened to either of us. Not despite the timing. Not in spite of the hard years. Just — the best thing. Full stop.”

“How did you know it would work out.”

“I didn’t.” He says it simply. “Nobody knows that going in. You don’t get a guarantee. You just get a choice, over and over, about whether you’re going to show up for it or not. My dad wasn’t around much either, if it makes you feel better to know that. I made a decision early that I was going to be the kind of man who shows up, and I kept making that decision every single day for twenty-six years, and it turns out that’s most of what it actually takes.”

I sit with that for a long moment. The whiteboard behind him. The opponent tendencies. The whole impossible size of everything sitting in my chest, and underneath it, something small and unfamiliar starting to loosen.

“The draft,” I say, finally. “The Tab. Everything I’ve been building —”

“None of that has to stop,” Coach says. “It gets harder. I won’t lie to you about that. But hard isn’t the same as impossible, and I’ve watched you build things out of nothing for three years now. You didn’t need perfect conditions to become the player you are. You’re not going to need them for this either.”

I walk out of his office into the March cold with my head somewhere I haven’t let it go in two days — not fully forward yet, not fully past the anger, but somewhere that isn’t just stuck anymore.

I think about the Tab. The number I’ve been carrying since I was seventeen, the one I’ve always thought of as debt, as weight, as the thing standing between me and being free. I think about it differently for the first time — not just as proof of what I owe, but as proof of what I can build out of almost nothing when I decide to. A spreadsheet that started at zero and grew into a plan. A kid from three rooms in Dorchester who turned a full ride and a stubborn refusal to quit into a legitimate shot at the NHL.

I’ve never built anything easy. Maybe that’s not actually a disadvantage right now.

I pull out my phone in the parking lot. Her message is still there, unanswered, exactly where I left it last night.

I know you’re not ready to talk. I just need you to know I’m not going anywhere, whether you want me to or not. I love you. I’m sorry. That’s all I needed to say tonight.