When the buzzer went and I headed to the locker room, Coach followed me in. His eyes were sharp but not unkind.
"Taz," he said quietly, low enough that only I could hear beneath the room noise. "Talk to me."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're three goals against on twelve shots, and two of them were saves you make with your eyes closed." He paused. "What's going on?"
"Nothing. I'll lock it down."
He studied me the way he studied game tape—looking for the thing that wasn't there, the pattern behind the pattern, the reason we’d won or lost. I held his gaze and gave him nothing, because giving him something meant explaining a man in a hallway and a phone screen and a deadline and the fact that my heart was currently located in a Denver apartment I couldn't see but could somehow feel.
Kinkaid exhaled through his nose. Then he turned and said, "Levin. You're in."
The words hit me like a check I hadn't braced for. Not because I didn't expect them—I'd been playing badly enough to earn them three times over—but because hearing them made it real. Made the consequence tangible in a way that texts and silences and empty bed space hadn't quite managed.
I was being pulled. From a playoff-race game. On a road trip I'd fought all season to make meaningful.
Levin was already moving, grabbing his mask, shaking out his gloves with the nervous energy of a backup who hadn't expected to see ice tonight. He was twenty-four. Good reflexes. Decent positioning. Absolutely not ready for a hostile building in a game with wild card implications, but that was my fault, not his.
I plodded to the bench without looking at anyone. Sat down. Pulled my mask off and set it down in front of me with hands that were steady only because the cold made them that way—not composure, just ice, doing what ice did when everything else fell apart.
Obviously I followed them all back out, and ignored the announcers. The bench was too warm. Too close. Players shifted to give me space the way they always did when a goalie got pulled—not out of judgment but out of superstition, like failure might be contagious. I didn't blame them. Right now, it probably was.
Max settled beside me after his next shift. Didn't speak. Just sat there, breathing hard, his shoulder pressed against mine in that deliberate, wordless solidarity that was worth more than any pep talk. After a minute, he said quietly, "Where's your head?"
"Gone," I said. The honesty surprised us both.
He nodded slowly. "Is this about Cinder?"
My jaw locked. The cold spiked hard enough that frost bloomed along the edge of the boards beneath my gloves before I caught it and pulled it back. Max saw. He didn't react—he'd seen stranger things from me over the years, though he'd never known why—but his eyes narrowed with a sharpness that told me he was filing it away.
"He wasn't on the travel roster," Max said carefully. "Nancy seemed upset about it."
"He's covering in Denver. Dunn's call."
"Dunn's an idiot."
I almost smiled. Almost. "It's complicated."
"It's always complicated with you." Max bumped my shoulder. "But you've never played like this. Not once. Not even when—" He stopped himself, which meant whatever comparison he'dbeen about to make was bad enough that even Max's legendary lack of filter couldn't let it through.
On the ice, Levin made a sharp pad save on a shot from the slot. The bench erupted. I watched the kid reset, tap his posts, settle into his stance with the particular intensity of someone who knew this was his moment and was determined not to waste it. Good. At least one of us was functional.
"Whatever's going on," Max said, standing for his next shift, "fix it. Because that—" He gestured at the ice, at the scoreboard, at everything. "That isn't you."
He jumped over the boards and was gone, leaving me alone on the bench with three goals against and a heart that felt like it had been run through a skate sharpener.
Levin held them. Stopped everything they threw at him for the rest of the second and all of the third—fourteen saves, a couple of them spectacular, the kind of desperate, athletic stops that made crowds gasp and coaches exhale. He was good. Better than I'd given him credit for, and the shame of that realization—that I'd been so consumed by my own crisis that I hadn't properly assessed my own backup—added another layer to the guilt already calcifying in my chest.
Cole and Keegan clawed back two goals in the third. It wasn't enough. We lost four-three, and the standings tightened by a point, and as I sat in the visitors' locker room afterward, still in full gear because I hadn't been able to make myself undress, I could feel the weight of what I'd done settling onto my shoulders like snowfall.
Not just the loss. The loss was a symptom.
The disease was the distance I'd put between myself and the only person who made the cold make sense.
My phone sat in my stall, dark and silent. I picked it up. Opened the thread with Cinder. Read the last exchange—his measured, careful offer to go home, my measured, careful acceptance—and felt every word like a blade between my ribs.
I wanted to call him. Wanted to hear his voice—that particular quality it had late at night, softer and less guarded, the clinical precision giving way to something warmer and more human. I wanted to tell him everything. The man in the hallway. The threat. The reason I'd let three inches of mattress become a canyon. I wanted to say I'm sorry and I love you and I'm terrified and none of this was because I stopped wanting you—it was because wanting you felt like the most dangerous thing I'd ever done, and I've faced down things that would make most people run screaming. But I didn’t.