For a few minutes, I let myself believe it would be okay. He made three saves in quick succession—a glove snag and two with his pads, one that sent the puck harmlessly into the corner—and the office exhaled collectively, Harris clapping once, Nancy uncrossing and recrossing her arms.
But I could see it. The thing nobody else in this room had the context to identify, because they hadn't spent months mapping his body the way I had, cataloging every micro-expression and involuntary shift in posture.
He was a fraction late on everything. Not enough for the commentators to notice, not enough for anyone watching casually to flag. He was compensating with positioning, with experience, with the sheer stubbornness of a man who'd spent decades making up for things he couldn't explain. But compensation had limits. It was his focus. His dragon didn’t give him faster reactions.“I don’t cheat.”He’d sounded horrified. If anything, the whole temperature up and down caused immense strain on him, and it certainly didn’t keep his head in the game.
Dallas scored again at the fourteen-minute mark. A cross-ice pass that found an open spot on Taz's weak side. He got a piece of it—his pad deflected the puck upward—but it had enough velocity to spin over his shoulder and drop behind him. The red light went on. Two-nothing.
"Damn," Jess said softly.
Taz didn't slam his stick. Didn't tap the posts. He just stood there for a moment, mask tilted toward the rafters, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm I could read even through the screen. Too fast. Too shallow. The breathing pattern of someone whose body was running on cortisol and nothing else.
The third period was an exercise in attrition. Cole scored early—a beautiful rush that split two defenders and ended with a wrist shot so fast it barely seemed to move before it was in the net—and the office erupted. Two-one. Clawing back. The Dragons pushed, hemming Dallas in their own zone for stretches that felt endless, the puck cycling from point to wall to slot andback again. Ember hit the post. Max had a shot kicked away by the Dallas goaltender's pad. Ash fired one wide by inches.
But Dallas was disciplined. They clogged the middle of the ice, forced everything to the outside, and waited for counterattack opportunities with the patience of a team that knew they were ahead and only needed to survive.
They didn't just survive. They punished.
At the eleven-minute mark, Dallas's fastest forward came sprinting past the defense with the puck on his stick and nothing between him and Taz except sixty feet of open ice. I watched Taz come out to challenge, watched him drop into position, watched his body do everything correctly, textbook, exactly the way the coaching staff would have wanted.
The shooter went high glove side, and Taz's hand reached but didn't get there, and the puck disappeared behind him with a sound I couldn't hear but felt in my bones.
Three-one.
Nancy's office went quiet. Not the stunned quiet of a bad goal but the resigned quiet of people watching something they couldn't fix from eight hundred miles away.
Taz made four more saves in the final minutes. Good saves. Professional saves. The saves of a veteran goaltender running on fumes and pride and whatever frozen thing lived inside him that refused to quit even when the rest of him had already surrendered. But the damage was done, and when the final horn sounded—three-one, Dallas—the camera found him standing alone in his crease, mask still on, stick across his knees, perfectly still in a way that looked less like composure and more like someone who'd forgotten how to move.
Someone turned the volume down. The office sat in the particular silence of people who'd invested emotionally in an outcome they couldn't influence and were now processing the cost.
"Levin's going for imaging tonight," Nancy said, reading her phone. "Patel's with him."
I nodded. Processed the clinical information automatically—imaging meant they were ruling out structural damage beyond the concussion, which was standard, which was correct, which was exactly what I would have ordered if I'd been there.
If I'd been there.
The thought lodged in my chest like a splinter—small, sharp, impossible to ignore.
People filed out slowly. Harris squeezed Nancy's shoulder on his way past. Jess collected the popcorn bowl, half its contents spilled across the desk. The office emptied until it was just Nancy and me, and the screen showing postgame footage I wasn't watching.
"Cinder," Nancy said.
I looked up. She was standing by the window, backlit by the city lights, arms folded. Her expression held something I hadn't seen directed at me before—not pity, not professional concern, but the fierce, maternal frustration of a woman who'd spent her career taking care of people who refused to take care of themselves.
"He's falling apart," she said. Not a question.
I swallowed. "He's tired. The schedule—"
"Don't do that." Her voice was gentle but immovable. "Don't give me the clinical deflection. I've known Taz for four years. I've watched him play through things that would have hospitalized anyone else. I've seen him take fifty shots in a game and walk out like it was a Tuesday." She paused. "That man on the screen tonight is not tired. That man is broken. And the break happened here, not on the road."
"Nancy—"
"Something happened between you two." She held up a hand before I could protest. "I don't need the details. I don't wantthe details. What I need is for you to stop sitting in my office pretending you're fine while the best goaltender I've ever worked with unravels on national television."
My throat closed. I stared at the carpet, at the popcorn kernel lodged in the weave near my shoe, and focused on it with the desperate intensity of someone who knew that if they looked up, they'd crack.
"He pulled away," I said. The words came out barely above a whisper. "After the playoff clinch. Something changed, and he—he stopped reaching for me. Stopped arguing when I gave him space. Just... let me go. Like it was easy."
Nancy made a sound that was half laugh, half scoff. "Easy. You think that looked easy to you?"