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“Why not?”

“Because then it’s a police thing instead of a hockey thing. And because that’s what he wants. He wants us doing something off the ice where he gets to be the one who didn’t.”

Rafe leans back in his chair with his coffee. “He’s right.”

“So what, we wait?”

“We play,” Rafe says.

I point at him. “That, Koda.”

Koda looks at both of us like we’ve disappointed him, and then he nods.

Thursday’s captain’s skate is at noon. Berwyn is in the hallway outside the locker room when I come in, leaning on the wall by the whiteboard with a mug, which is where he’s allowed to be. Greeley is already there, dressed and taping his stick, with his eyebrow taped and the whole side of his face gone yellow and purple.

Berwyn looks at Greeley’s face for a long time. Then he looks at my lip and my knuckles.

“Walk into a door, Greeley?”

“Something like that, Coach.”

“You too, Kennebeck?”

“Yes, Coach.”

Berwyn takes a sip of his coffee. “Lot of doors in this town,” he says, and walks back into his office and shuts it. That’s all. Two weeks before he can run a practice, with a second-line spot open and two centers wearing the same week on their faces, he looks at us and decides not to ask.

The locker room is quiet when I walk in. Greeley’s stall is three down from mine. He says something to Weber, and Weber laughs. Nobody says a word to me about Tuesday. Not one guy.

Koda drops onto the bench beside me and starts on his skates like he’s alone in the room. Rafe takes the stall on my other side. Dannebrog comes in with his gloves under his arm and reads the lines off his phone, and when he gets to the second one, he says, “Barnes, Kennebeck, Waleska.”

Koda says, “Yes,” out loud to nobody, and Rafe smiles at the floor.

I don’t know how to explain what happens with the three of us out there, except that it starts working on the second shift and doesn’t stop. Koda is fast and mean in the corners and never stops moving his feet, which is the one thing Greeley ever got right about him. Rafe can beat anybody in this building one-on-one and has spent five weeks proving it instead of using it, and today, for whatever reason, he uses it. He draws two guys to the wall and moves the puck, over and over, and every time he does, the ice opens in front of me like somebody pulled a curtain.

I win twelve draws and lose two. On the sixth or seventh shift, I come in low the way my dad taught me at twelve, Koda chips it past the D without looking, Rafe is already gone, and the three of us are through the neutral zone side by side before anybody’s turned. Rafe takes it wide, drags the D with him, and puts it back across the slot, and I one-time it under the bar. The whole rink makes a noise.

We do it again ten minutes later, different entry, same idea. Then a third time, off a turnover. Koda strips somebody at our own blue line and hits me in stride, and I feed Rafe on the back door. He buries it and turns and points his stick at Koda, not me, all the way back to the bench.

Dannebrog blows it dead. “That’s a line,” he says to the whole ice. “That’s what it looks like.”

Greeley’s group doesn’t score once in the scrimmage. He’s good, and he plays hard, and he gets nothing, because the third time down the ice, he’s the one backchecking and he can’t catch any of us. On the last shift, he catches me at the boards and puts his shoulder into me. It’s clean, and it hurts like hell across my back, and I take it and move the puck up to Koda. He says something as we both turn. I honestly don’t hear it. Somebody’s yelling for the puck and my ears are full of my own breathing. By the time I’ve thought about whether to care, I’m forty feet away.

In the room afterward, Pennock taps my shin pad with his stick on his way past. “That was good.”

I nod. It’s the first thing anybody outside the three of us has said to me since Tuesday. Koda has his jersey half off and he’s grinning. Rafe is unlacing his skates with his head down, lit up from the inside, which he does not do in this room.

Dannebrog comes over. “Kennebeck. My office.”

The noise drops about thirty percent.

“Now?”

“When you’re dressed.”

Dannebrog’s office isn’t an office. It’s a converted supply room off the hallway with a desk, a whiteboard, two chairs, and about nine years of team photos taped to the wall. He sits on the edge of the desk instead of behind it, which tells me something before he opens his mouth.

“Shut the door. Sit or don’t.”