Nonna had a saying for everything. She had sayings about weather, money, love, death, the proper consistency of ricotta, and the spiritual implications of poorly made espresso. She was four-foot-eleven and ran her kitchen in Hoboken like a benevolent dictator, and I had absorbed her philosophy of life the way bread absorbs olive oil, which is to say completely and irreversibly.
Her most important saying, the one she repeated more than all the others, was this: "Luciano, the world is cold. Be the warm thing."
So I was the warm thing.
This had always been my strategy. My identity. My operating system. I walked into rooms and I made them brighter because that was what I knew how to do, and in twenty-five years of doing it, I had discovered that the vast majority of people responded well to warmth. They leaned into it. They relaxed. They told you things they wouldn't tell a stranger, which meant you stopped being a stranger faster, which meant you built a lifeof connections and friendships and the particular kind of love that comes from being genuinely interested in other people.
There was one notable exception to this pattern, and his name was Wes Chen.
I had been the Atlanta Reapers' equipment manager for three weeks, and in that time I had successfully befriended approximately twenty-nine of the thirty players on the roster. I knew their stick curves, their skate sizes, their preferred blade hollows. I knew that Jonah Park liked his sticks extra stiff and that Cole Briggs went through tape like it was a renewable resource and that Mik Volkov organized his equipment stall with the precision of a man who alphabetized his spice rack, which I was almost certain he did.
I knew all of these things because my job was to know them, and also because I was Italian and we are biologically incapable of not paying attention to people.
Wes Chen was the holdout. The wall. The one player who had responded to my warmth with something that could only be described as architectural resistance. Three attempts at conversation. Three refusals, each colder than the last. The third one came with an expression so hostile that it could have refrigerated produce. The team had a name for that expression. I had decided not to learn it.
I was not deterred. Deterrence required that I feel intimidated, and I did not feel intimidated by Wes Chen. I felt curious about him, which was worse, because curiosity was the engine of every terrible decision I had ever made, including the one that had ended my hockey career and the one that had ended my last relationship, and here I was, idling in the same engine, watching the gas gauge tick toward empty and pressing the accelerator anyway.
What I knew about Wes Chen from three weeks of observation: He arrived at the facility early, not as early asVolkov but earlier than most. He trained alone when he could. He fought because that was his role and he was good at it and the team needed him to be good at it. He sat by himself in the locker room and read nothing and talked to no one and projected the particular energy of a man who believed that solitude was the same thing as safety.
I knew this energy. Not from personal experience. I was the opposite of solitary. But I had dated a man once who operated on the same frequency, a man who kept the world at arm's length because arm's length was the distance required to avoid being hurt, and the relationship had taught me two things. First: you cannot love someone into openness. They have to choose it. Second: you can make the choice easier by being the kind of person it feels safe to choose.
I was making biscotti for Wes Chen. This was either kindness or insanity, and the distinction was, at this point, irrelevant.
The biscotti were my nonna's recipe. Almond, with a touch of anise, twice-baked to the precise texture that separated excellence from competence. I had made them the night before in my apartment in Midtown, which was small and chaotic and full of boxes I hadn't finished unpacking because I had moved to Atlanta three weeks ago and had spent every waking hour at the facility learning thirty men's equipment preferences instead of organizing my own life.
My apartment had one redeeming feature: a window in the kitchen that faced east, which meant morning light while I cooked, and I was a man who needed morning light the way other people needed coffee. Light and food and human connection. These were my trinity. Remove any one of them and I became a diminished version of myself, and the diminished version was something I had experienced once, after the shoulder surgery that ended my career, and had vowed never to experience again.
The shoulder still ached sometimes. A ghost pain. The orthopedic surgeon had called it "residual nerve memory," which was a medical term for the body remembering what it had lost. I understood residual nerve memory. I carried it in my shoulder and in my chest, in the place where the version of me that played hockey used to live.
I had loved hockey the way Nonna loved her kitchen. With my whole self. With the specific, consuming passion of a person who had found the thing that made the world make sense and had organized their entire identity around it. When the shoulder blew, sophomore year at Northeastern, I lost more than a career. I lost the organizing principle of my life, and the two years that followed were the darkest I had known.
The equipment gig was a resurrection. Not the same life. A different one, built adjacent to the old one. Close enough to touch the game without being in it. Close enough to hear the sounds and smell the ice and feel the particular electricity of a locker room before a big game. It was not playing. It would never be playing. But it was being present, and presence was enough.
I brought the biscotti to Wes's stall before he arrived because I did not want to make a performance of it. The note was a risk. I knew this. The note was personal in a way that a plate of cookies was not, because a plate of cookies could be for anyone but a note that said "you looked like you could use a cookie" was specific. It was an admission that I had been watching him, that I had noticed something, that I had seen past the wall to the thing underneath it.
The thing underneath was exhaustion. Not physical exhaustion, though that was there too. Something deeper. The exhaustion of a man who had been performing a role for so long that the performance had consumed the person. I had watched Wes fight two nights ago, a brutal, efficient demolition of a guy who outweighed him by twenty pounds, and when Wes hadskated to the penalty box, the crowd chanting his name, I had seen his hands shaking in his gloves and his eyes vacant in a way that scared me.
Nobody else saw it. Nobody else was looking.
I was looking. I was always looking at Wes Chen, and this fact was something I had not yet decided how to categorize. Professional attentiveness? Certainly. I was paid to notice things about these players, and Wes's equipment required particular attention because his gloves took more abuse than anyone else's. But professional attentiveness did not explain the way my chest tightened when he sat alone in the locker room after a fight. Professional attentiveness did not explain the tea.
The tea was a problem.
I had brought him Earl Grey because I'd noticed he drank it every morning and the break room stuff was garbage. This was a reasonable, collegial thing to do. I brought coffee to other staff members regularly. But I did not write "For Grumpy" on their cups. I did not draw smiley faces. I did not spend four minutes selecting the right tea from my own collection and steeping it for exactly three and a half minutes because I had Googled the optimal brewing time for Earl Grey at 11 PM the night before.
These were not the actions of a professional colleague. These were the actions of a man who had a problem, and the problem was six-foot-one and covered in scars and had said "thank you" to me this morning in a voice so raw and unused that it sounded like a door opening for the first time in years.
My sister Sofia would have opinions about this. Sofia had opinions about everything. She was three years older than me and lived in Jersey City and texted me memes in Italian and had once told me, with the diagnostic precision of a woman who had watched me make the same mistake four times, "Luca, you are attracted to broken things because you think your love is glue. Itis not glue. It is warmth, and warmth is beautiful, but warmth alone does not fix a fracture."
She was right. She was always right. And I was standing in a hockey locker room falling in something with a man who communicated primarily through silences and violence, and Sofia's voice in my head was saying "here we go again" in the particular tone she reserved for my most spectacular lapses in judgment.
But here's the thing about being the warm thing: you don't get to choose where the cold is. You don't get to decide which rooms need you and which don't. The warmth goes where it goes, and it had gone to Wes Chen, and the fact that he responded to it the way a stray cat responds to an outstretched hand, with suspicion and hunger in equal measure, did not make me want to pull my hand back.
It made me want to hold it out longer.
After practice, I was in the equipment room inventorying sticks when Wes appeared in the doorway. He stood there for a moment without speaking, which I was learning was his way of entering a conversation. Other people said hello. Wes materialized in doorframes and waited for the other person to acknowledge his existence, as if initiating contact was a vulnerability he couldn't afford.
"Chen," I said. "What can I do for you?"