Page 168 of Offside

EPILOGUE

RYAN

Later, when the yard had mostly emptied and Theo had gone first, then Danny and Kasperi, then Paige, I sat on Cole’s back steps with Maren beside me and the desert evening around us. Cole had disappeared inside somewhere—his own house, his own rules—and for the moment it was just us.

Eli was the last to go. He’d stood at the gate with Iris asleep on his shoulder, the flamingo float tucked under his other arm, and I’d walked them out and stood at Cole’s front door and watched Eli’s car disappear down the street and thought about what Eli had said on the pool steps an hour ago. Haven’t found the right person yet. Still putting the words together, still working on it.

Someone would find Eli eventually. Or Eli would find someone. It didn’t happen on your timeline.

I went back to Maren on the steps.

The Phoenix sunset was doing its thing. The colors that still stopped me after a full season, the orange and pink and bruised purple that spread across the whole enormous sky. Unreasonably beautiful, the way Phoenix sunsets always were. I understood now why the city kept trying. Why it had absorbed the loss of one team and shown up for another, filling the arena, buying the jerseys, learning the names. Phoenix was a city that believed in second chances because it had needed them so many times, and tonight I thought that was not a weakness but an act of faith.

The Sidewinders had gone to the second round in their inaugural season. They’d lost to a team that had been built over a decade, with All-Stars and playoff experience and a depth the Sidewinders simply didn’t have yet. But they’d gotten there. We’d made believers out of a city that had every reason to be skeptical, and the front office had started talking about the offseason moves that would make next year different. This team was not a novelty act. This team was something real, and Phoenix knew it, and the league knew it, and I knew it the way I knew things that were going to matter for a long time.

My phone buzzed.

My father. In Swedish, as always, when Erik had something real to say.

I read it in the low light of Cole’s backyard, Maren warm at my side, the desert going quiet around us.

Du gjorde något av det. Och du hittade någon värd att göra det med.

You made something of it. And you found someone worth making it with.

I stared at it for a long moment.

Then I turned to Maren. She was watching me with the quiet attention she gave things that mattered, her shoulder against mine, waiting.

“My dad,” I said. I translated it for her, simply, the whole thing.

She was quiet when I finished. Her hand found mine.

“He’s right,” she said. “About both parts.”

I held her hand and stared at the sky and thought about Erik Lindqvist in Minnesota watching playoff hockey on his television, watching his son captain a franchise in the desert, watching something that had started as a second chance become something worth rooting for. I thought about what I was going to say when I called my father back tomorrow. I thought about next season and the season after that and the house Maren and I were going to find together somewhere in this city, something with room for two people who had been careful for so long and were done being careful.

I held her hand and sat with my father’s words.

Du gjorde något av det.

Erik Lindqvist had driven to games in weather that had no business allowing road travel and said almost nothing specific after any of them. He’d taught me that presence was its own language. Sixty-one years old and he’d put the real thing in a text because that was the register he had for it.

I thought about the season. Not the statistics—-the texture of it. Griffin walking in last on the first day of training camp. The fresh paint smell of a facility that barely existed. The slow accumulation of thirty men learning to trust each other. Theo going quiet and useful instead of quiet and guarded. Griffin making thirty saves and accepting congratulations with the flat expression of someone who expected nothing less of himself.

The city filling in around us. The arena louder in March than October, louder still in April. Phoenix deciding, without asking permission, that this team was theirs.

I’d wanted to captain a team my whole career. What I hadn’t understood was that the C wasn’t the thing. The room it put me in charge of was the thing. The room had turned out to be full of people worth it.

“I have a house,” I said.

She turned. “What?”

“In Sweden. Outside Malmö, near my grandfather’s rink.” I paused. “I’ve never mentioned it because—-I don’t know. It was private. It’s not big, it’s old, it needs work. But it’s mine and it’s been there a long time.” I met her eyes. “I want to take you there this offseason. Show you the rink. Meet Anna properly. Show you where I come from.”

She held my gaze. Her expression moved through something I’d learned to read over seven months. The moment she decided something, the settling of it, her voice dropping half a register and staying there.

“Yeah,” she said. “I want that.”