Page 34 of Knights Like These
I picked her up the next morning, asked about coffee, talked about school, and pretended nothing had changed because I didn’t know what else to do. I was eighteen. I didn’t have the words for what I felt, and by the time I found them, I’d already built a life on the wrong side of the door.
I married Bree. I had kids. I made every choice based on safe, steady, and sure, and not one of those choices was Sydney. Now she’s sleeping in my guest room, making my kids laugh, and standing in my dining room doing a comedy bit about cauliflower. And I’m sitting at a firepit alone, wondering what would have happened if I’d been braver when it mattered.
I take a sip of whiskey. The fire crackles.
I’ll never know. That’s the thing about the past—you don’t get to go back and run the play differently. You just have to live with the version you chose.
I sit with the fire until it goes out on its own and wonder what life might be like if I had chosen something different all those years ago.
Chapter Eleven
The Shift
Archer
The Bruins score first, seven minutes into the opening period, off a rebound I should have covered. The puck spins loose from my blocker, and their center buries it top shelf before I can reset, and the Garden goes quiet for about three seconds before twenty thousand people start making noise again.
I tap my posts. Shake it off. Stay in the crease.
The thing about being a goalie is that you don’t get to dwell. Forwards can miss a shot and skate back to the bench and sit with it for a shift. Defensemen can blow a coverage, and the next whistle gives them a breath. But I’m out here for all sixty minutes, and every puck that gets past me lives on the scoreboard for the rest of the night, so you learn early to let it go, or it eats you alive.
I let it go.
The second period is mine. I stop seventeen shots in twenty minutes—glove save on a wrister from the circle, pad save on a two-on-one that had no business staying out, and a full-stretch blocker save on a one-timer from the slot that the crowd reacts to before I even realize I’ve made it. My body does the work, and my brain stays quiet, and this is the version of me that functionsbest—reactive, instinctive, every thought reduced to angle and depth and the weight of the puck.
Zayden ties it up late in the second on a power play goal, wristing one over the goalie’s glove from the hashmarks. He points at me on the way back to the bench, which is our thing—he scores, he points, I nod. We’ve been doing it for two seasons, and neither of us has ever discussed it.
The third period grinds on. Both teams tighten up, chances get scarce, and the clock bleeds down, and I’m tracking everything—sticks, eyes, the angle of the shooter’s hips before he even loads up. I stop two more dangerous shots in the final five minutes, including a deflection from the crease that I get a piece of with my shoulder because my glove was out of position, and sometimes you just throw body parts at the puck and hope for the best.
We go to overtime.
Overtime in hockey is a different animal. Three-on-three, wide open ice, the game moving at a speed that makes regular play look like it’s happening underwater. Every save matters twice as much because one goal ends it, and the crowd is standing, and the building is vibrating, and I love this. I hate it and I love it. My hip is screaming, and my glove hand has been numb since the third period, and I’m running on adrenaline and muscle memory and the particular calm that settles over me when the stakes get high enough that there’s no room for anything else in my head.
Banks steals the puck at center ice, goes wide, feeds Zayden cutting to the net, and Zayden roofs it over the goalie’s shoulder, and the building explodes.
I pump my fist once, then I’m already skating to the bench, already pulling off my mask.
Postgame is the usual—handshakes, media, the locker room happy but chill. It’s still early in the season—way too early to celebrate.
I shower, dress, and check my phone.
Nothing from Sydney since 8 PM, when she sent a photo of the twins in their pajamas with the caption:Bedtime negotiations have begun. Lily is demanding two stories and a song. Luke wants to know if you won yet. I told him the game just started. He said, “Tell Daddy to win.”
That was three hours ago. It’s 11:14 now, and she hasn’t texted since, which means either bedtime went smoothly, or it went so badly she’s still recovering.
I drive home through quiet streets, the city winding down around me, that post-win buzz still humming in my chest. The house is dark from the outside.
I pull into the garage, come in through the kitchen, and set my bag by the door. The house is quiet. The TV is on, volume low, playing the end credits of something animated.
I walk into the living room and stop.
Sydney is on the couch. Both twins are on top of her. Lily is draped across her chest, face buried in Sydney’s neck, one arm hanging off the side. Luke is tucked against her left side, his thumb near his mouth, his head resting on her ribs. Sydney’s arms are around both of them—one hand on Lily’s back, the other curled around Luke’s shoulder—and all three of them are completely, deeply asleep.
The TV flickers. The blanket is half on the floor. There’s a sippy cup on the coffee table and a picture book wedged between the cushions, and Lily’s stuffed giraffe is on the floor where it must have fallen, and Sydney is holding my children the way you hold things that are precious to you.
I don’t move.
I stand in the doorway of my own living room and look at this—my kids, my couch, my best friend, all of them tangled together in the blue light of the television—and I can’t be in this room right now. I can’t stand here and look at this and keep pretending I feel what I’m supposed to feel, which is gratitude, friendship, appreciation for a woman who’s helping me out.
