Chapter 141: Home Ice

Nashville came into Roanoke with the series tied two games apiece, and Tyler could feel the difference in the building before warmups ended. Playoff crowds had a sound to them, something beneath the noise, and tonight it sat low and steady, like the building itself was holding its breath.

He found Carter by the bench, taping his stick more slowly than usual.

"You good?" Tyler asked.

"I'm good." Carter didn't look up. "Focus on your side of the ice."

It wasn't a real answer, but Tyler let it go. There was a version of himself, two years ago, who would have pushed. He wasn't that version tonight. Carter would talk when Carter was ready, the same way Tyler had needed to be ready before he said anything to Avery that mattered.

Nashville came out fast, testing the lines, looking for whoever might crack first. Tyler took a check along the boards in the first period that would have put him in the box a year ago, retaliating on instinct. Instead, he skated it off, got back on the rush, and set up Chen for a wrister that rang the post.

Hernandez said nothing to him on the bench about the hit. That was its own kind of message. Two seasons ago, the coach would have been at his elbow immediately, gauging whether Tyler needed to be pulled from the shift rotation before something worse happened. Now he just tapped Tyler's shoulder pad once, the way he did for everyone, and sent the next line out.

Chen sat beside him between shifts, breathing hard, grinning. "You used to answer that."

"I used to answer everything."

"Better now?"

"Different now." Tyler watched the play develop below them, tracking the puck without needing to say more. Chen didn't push. Nobody on this team pushed anymore, not about that. It had taken a season and a half of Tyler proving it in small moments, one clean shift at a time, before the locker room stopped waiting for the old version of him to reappear.

In the second period, Nashville's enforcer found him behind the net and said something about Diego. Tyler had heard worse. He said nothing back, boxed the man off the puck, and moved it up ice clean. Chen scored on the next shift. 1–0.

The building noise changed pitch. Tyler felt it in his chest, not as pressure but as something closer to permission.

He scored the second goal himself in the third, a rebound off Carter's shot from the point, five feet out, no time to think about it, just the stick finding the puck and the puck finding the net. He didn't do the fist pump this time. He looked up at the glass instead, found Sofia's section out of habit more than plan, and saw Emma standing on her seat with the notebook raised over her head like a trophy. Sofia's hand was over her mouth in the way she did when something moved through her too quickly to arrange into a smaller expression.

Final score: 3–1. Series: 3–2, Roanoke.

After the tunnel, Carter caught his arm. "Good game."

"You too."

Carter's face did something Tyler hadn't seen before, not quite a smile. "We'll talk soon. Not tonight. Soon."

Tyler nodded and didn't ask. He filed it next to the taping thing, next to the way Carter had watched the whole third period from the bench instead of pacing it the way he usually did. Something was coming. He'd let Carter bring it when he was ready, the way people had let Tyler bring things when he was ready, three years of Thursdays with Avery teaching him what that kind of patience looked like from the receiving end.

Sofia was waiting outside the family entrance with Emma asleep against her shoulder, one shoe already off in that way Emma had of unraveling the moment she stopped needing to perform being awake.

"She made it to overtime warnings before she went down," Sofia said. "Tried to hold on for the handshake line."

"She'll hear about it tomorrow."

"She already told me to wake her for the handshake line. I did not."

Tyler took Emma from her carefully, the small weight settling into the crook of his arm the way it had a hundred times now, familiar as anything. Sofia watched him do it with an expression he'd learned to read as one of her quiet ones, the kind that didn't need translating.

In the car, Emma buckled up and, breathing slowly, sat in the back seat, while Sofia pulled up the flight search on her phone.

"June fourteenth still works," she said. "If the series goes long, we might be cutting it close on the back end, but the flight out is fine. I checked three times while you were in the third period, which tells you how nervous I get watching you take checks along the boards."

"It'll work." He meant it as certainty, not hope. A year ago, he wouldn't have trusted himself to promise something that depended on hockey going a particular way, but this year felt different. Solid under his feet in a way that had nothing to do with the score.

"I keep thinking about the spare room," Sofia said, not quite looking at him, her eyes on the phone screen like the confession needed somewhere else to land.

"I know."

"We should actually talk about it. Not just think about it separately in the same apartment."

"Yeah." He reached over and found her hand on the console between them. "We should."

"Not tonight, though. Tonight you have a game to still be inside of."

He laughed, low, the version Carter had watched come back in the car two years ago, still his, still Diego's too in the shape of it. "Fair."

She turned her hand over under his, laced their fingers together at the red light, and neither of them said anything else for the rest of the drive home. It didn't need saying. The conversation was there, sitting in the space between them, patient in the way Sofia had taught him patient things could be. It would keep until they were ready to open it properly, the way the jacket had stayed on the hook until he was ready to bring the second one, the way everything true between them had always arrived exactly when it was supposed to and not one day sooner.