Page 42 of Victory Lap

He doesn’t kneel. He steps in close instead, the way he did on a balcony in Miami before either of us was brave. He takes my hand and turns it over. There’s nobody on this beach but a cat person whose cat is holding down an apartment in Atlanta, a retired winger, a man in white gloves pretending not to watch, and the heaviest trophy in sports. Luca Berger looks up at me with the whole Atlantic behind him.

“Nothing is a ten,” he says. “That’s the rule. A ten implies perfection, and perfection implies there is nothing left to want. There is always something left to want. I have been saying that for years, and it has always been true.” His jaw sets. His eyes are wrecked and certain at the same time. “You are the something, Wes. You have been the something the entire time. Marry me, and I’ll finally have to retire the rule.”

Hockey teaches you to keep your feet through anything. I lose mine anyway. Some interior version of them anyway. Whatever a man stands on when he’s been steady for other people.

“Yes,” I say. Nothing else comes out. I should be able to give him all the words I have ever thought of and here I am at the big moment, holding one word.

“Yes?”

“Luca. Baby. Yes, I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Then, the rest comes out of me. “I want mornings here. I want to learn the fish market before the tourists find it. I want to teach you the camera, and I want one full season of watching you play from a seat instead of a bench. I want to cook for Sina at Christmas.”

“You’ve been thinking about a lot of things,” he says, wrecked, his eyes glassy.

“So many things.”

He exhales, and it shakes on the way out. Then he laughs, and I catch it with my mouth and pull him in close to me. The wave comes in over both our feet and neither of us moves. The Cup stands witness on the sand, between the wet and the dry. Right on the line. Exactly where everything changes.

Later, on the balcony, with the two glasses and the limes and the deed in a kitchen drawer where he insists important documents live now, I set the camera on the railing and put the timer on and get in the frame. Both of us. The Cup between the chairs. The bougainvillea photobombing from the left, structural ambition and all.

“Who do we tell?” I ask him, his head on my shoulder, the island turning purple.

“Nobody,” he says. “Not yet. It’s ours. We just got it.” Then, after a while, in the voice he uses for verdicts: “The team can have it soon. There’s a group chat with a book club that thinks it knows everything.” I feel him smile against my shoulder. “It’s going to be a very good chapter.”

The engagement is unrated. He never says why, and I never ask. But I know the rule and I know the man. Some things you don’t put a number on, because the number would be a ceiling.

We sit on the balcony of our house until the stars come out over the water. No part of me is trying to catch the second everything changes. I’m in it and see it’s never just one change. It’s a series that gets better and better.

Chapter 15: Avi

“They traded me,” Mäkinen says. No hello when I picked up the phone. His voice is staying level. But I can hear what it’s taking to do that. “To Montreal. My agent called. It’s already being posted online.”

I know what a phone call like that sounds like before it changes someone’s life. I learned that on a running trail in Philadelphia. Seven missed calls and a reporter’s number lighting up in my hand. The phone does not sound different. That is the cruelty of it. It rings the way it rings for dinner reservations.

I am standing in my kitchen. Ash’s coffee cup is in the sink. The cat is on the windowsill, supervising the street.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“Driving. I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Yes, you do. Meet me at the arena,” I say, and hanging up, I send two quick texts, get my keys, and head out the door.

The facility in August is a building holding its breath. No music, no tape, no skate blades on rubber. The ice is out. They pull it after the season and pour it new in September. The rink is bare concrete, a slab of gray below us. A ghost of a hockey rink where a hockey rink will be again in another month.

Mäki is already in the seats when I come up the tunnel. Section 112. Third row. He didn’t pick it because it means anything. He picked it because it’s where you end up in this building when the noise in you needs somewhere quiet to sit. And where he knows I go, where we have talked before.

When I first started coming to this section, the walls of this place held framed drawings of what the building would look like when it had won something.

Now, it has.

I climb to his row. He moves his bag. I push the seat down beside him and the click of the plastic is the loudest thing in the building.

We sit. Below us, the concrete. Above us, bolted into the rafters over center ice, the rigging that went up last week. Cables and a winch and an empty space with a shape to it. The banner arrives in October. Right now it is a hole in the air. I find I like it better this way.

“My father called,” Mäki says. “Before my agent did. He has a friend on their staff.” He laughs, one breath of it, but not really a laugh. “He said, call Avi.”