Page 360 of The Lies We Play

I bark out a laugh. “You can’t promise stability.”

“Next year it won’t be like this⁠—”

“You don’t know that,” I cut in. “Next year it’s someone else deciding they need me. They don’t need me. They just don’t know what the fuck to do with me.”

The sentence hits something deep and my stomach turns, because I’m not only talking about hockey. I’m talking about my whole damn life.

I almost choke on it.

Because I’ve been hearing versions of that line since I was six.

I was safe once. I remember it in flashes that feel too bright to look at for long—my parents in the front seats, my mother turning around to smile at me in the backseat like the world couldn’t reach us if we stayed inside that car. My father’s hand on the wheel.

Then the accident. The hospital.

Months where the ceiling became my sky.

Then, foster homes. Temporary bedrooms. New rules. New faces. Adults who smiled like they cared and then disappeared.

It took more than a year for the state to find Uncle Ernie.

He showed up, and he didn’t recoil from my silence or my anger. He packed what little I had left and moved me across the country like he was pulling me out of a burning house. He did his best. He was good. He was kind. He gave me structure and told me I was safe.

He couldn’t give me my parents back. He couldn’t give me that feeling that things stayed. All he could do was teach me survival.

He gave me hockey, thinking it would heal me. I poured everything into it because my dad loved hockey. Then, because the puck did what physics said it would do. Because effort mattered. Because I could control something in a world that had taken control away from me.

And now⁠—

Now, hockey is my identity.

Unfortunately, men in suits decide where I exist.

“Why bother,” I say, voice quieter, “when I don’t do stability?”

“Monty.” Conrad Pierce’s tone shifts—persuasion mode sliding into place. “You’re going to a team that wants the Cup now. They’re not rebuilding. They’re not waiting. They want you to be the guy.”

I clench my jaw. “I already am the guy.”

“You’re going to be the guy on a team that can actually finish,” he pushes.

That hits a tender place inside me. A place that has wanted one thing for years and never admitted it out loud because wanting makes you vulnerable.

Sure, I want that Cup. Not as much as I want Vesper, but I do want it.

I want it in my bones, in my hands, in the muscle memory of every practice and every bruise and every night I went home alone because obsession is easier than intimacy.

I want it because the Cup is proof.

Proof you mattered.

Proof the suffering made something.

Proof you weren’t just a body on skates wearing a mask and rituals that make people laugh until they realize those rituals are the only thing keeping you sane.

I fucking want it.

That doesn’t mean I want to be moved like furniture to get it.

“Who am I being traded for?” I ask because I need something concrete, something I can grab before anger turns into something that scares me.

He gives me names. Prospects. Picks. A forward with potential. A defenseman Portland doesn’t want to lose, but will. It’s all numbers dressed up as strategy.

“You need to remember,” he says, “this is management. This is the cap. This is⁠—”

“This is them deciding I don’t belong,” I cut in.

“Monty, that’s not⁠—”

“Fuck, but it is,” I interrupt him, wanting to throw my phone, wanting to fire him. Wanting to . . . I’m so fucking done with this shit.