Page 163 of Offside

I’d seen it during warm-ups. The number 17 on her back, my name across her shoulders, unmistakable from the ice. I’d gone completely still on my skates, just a moment, and then Griffin had passed me a puck and I’d gotten back to work. But I’d known she was there, wearing it, in public, in front of everyone, and I’d played the best sixty minutes of hockey I’d played all season.

When the final horn sounded and the bench erupted, I skated one lap and then went straight to the glass.

She was there. She was always there for home games now, same section, same seat, and I found her face in the crowd the way I always found things that mattered. She was on her feet, hands pressed to her mouth in front of seventeen thousand people who could draw whatever conclusions they wanted.

I stopped at the boards.

She came down to the glass.

I pressed my hand flat against it and she put hers on the other side and we held like that for a moment, the Plexiglas between us, and then she laughed. I skated back to my team because I had a celebration to be present for, but I was smiling when I got there and Griffin raised an eyebrow at me and I didn’t even try to explain.

Nolan Mercer found me in the corridor just off the ice, still in my gear, the celebration noise behind us and the quieter hum of the building ahead. He looked easier tonight than usual, the satisfaction of watching something you built become what you believed it could be.

“Hell of a season,” Nolan said.

“We’re not done yet.”

“No.” He smiled. Brief, real. “You’re not.” He paused a beat longer than the conversation needed. Whatever came next, he had already worked out how to say it. “I played a long time. Won some things. Built a life out of it. The one thing I got wrong, the thing I’d go back and tell myself if I could, is that hockey ends. It always ends. And what you have when it does is what mattered.” His eyes moved briefly toward the corridor where the Callahan family would be waiting. “A good woman who knows what this life costs and chooses to spend it with you anyway. That’s not nothing, Lindqvist. That’s everything.”

He clapped me once on the shoulder and walked back toward the arena before I could respond.

I stood in the corridor for a moment. Then I went to find Maren.

I found her properly after. In the corridor with her parents, Tom with his arm around Linda, Linda with her hand over her mouth. When I came through the doors Maren turned and I was already moving toward her.

I kissed her in the corridor with Tom and Linda Callahan six feet away and didn’t care, and she didn’t either. She kissed me back with her hands in my still-sweaty jersey and someone behind me wolf-whistled and I was fairly certain it was Cole.

“You saw the jersey,” she said against my mouth.

“During warm-ups.” I pulled back enough to see her face. She was flushed and bright-eyed and wearing my name on her back in front of seventeen thousand people. “You had it the whole time.”

“I had it the whole time,” she agreed. “I was waiting for the right moment.”

“This is the right moment.”

“I love you,” she said. Against my mouth, barely above a whisper. Like it had gotten out before she’d decided to say it. “I love you.”

I went still. Both hands on her face, seventeen thousand people somewhere behind me, my best friend somewhere in the noise. I pulled back far enough to see her. She was looking at me and not looking away, and her chin had come up half an inch to manage it, and she held it there anyway.

“Jag älskar dig,” I said. Her eyes went bright. I kissed her again, slower, and she kissed me back with her hands in my jersey and the whole arena roaring somewhere around us and neither of us went anywhere.

Tom Callahan appeared at my shoulder and clapped me on the back hard enough that I felt it in my shoulder. “Hell of a game,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tom,” Tom said firmly. “We’ve been over this.”

Linda took my face in both hands and kissed my cheek and said something I was fairly certain was finally but I couldn’t be sure over the noise, and Griffin appeared behind his parents staring at the ceiling with heroic patience, and I laughed full and unguarded, and Maren’s hand found mine and held on.

We went to the playoffs.

The first round was against Colorado. A team we’d faced twice in the regular season and split with, a hard-grinding physical team with a goalie who was quietly one of the best in the conference. It went six games. Griffin was extraordinary. A performance that reminded everyone in the building what it looked like when someone was the best at their job, thirty or more saves a game, stopping shots that shouldn’t have been stopped, keeping us in it on nights when the offense struggled.

I had three goals and four assists in the series. I played the way I’d always wanted to play when it mattered most, clear-eyed about the stakes and unwilling to waste a single shift. Theo scored the series clincher in overtime of game six. A wrist shot from the top of the circle that I had set up with a screen and a pass, and Theo’s face when the puck went in was one I knew I’d carry for a long time. The rare, unguarded eruption of pure joy from a man who spent most of his time in careful control of himself.

We celebrated in a Denver hotel bar at two in the morning with the chaos of a team that had just won something. Cole ordered champagne and sprayed half of it on Kasperi, who protested loudly in Finnish. Eli sat at the end of the bar and drank one beer and smiled more than I’d seen him smile all season. Maren was there. Maren was always there now, no hedging, no managing the optics, sitting next to me with my hand at the back of her neck, talking to Griffin about his positioning in game four, and Griffin was listening, which I counted as a meaningful development.

The second round was Vegas.