Chapter 145 Six Games

Chapter 145 Six Games
Game six went to overtime, and Tyler scored the winner, a wrist shot from the top of the circle that beat the Nashville goaltender high glove side four minutes into the extra period. The building came apart around him in a way that no longer felt like something happening to him from outside. He was inside it fully now, the way Avery had described it before: not watching himself be present, just present.
The handshake line took longer than usual, the way it always did after a series that had cost both teams everything they had. Nashville's captain held his hand a beat and said, "Good luck the rest of the way," and meant it, the particular grace of men who had spent two weeks trying to hurt each other within the rules and had nothing left over for bitterness once the buzzer sounded.
Nashville's enforcer found him near the end of the line, the same man who'd said something about Diego two games ago. He didn't apologize, exactly, but he held Tyler's hand a beat longer than the formality required and said, "You didn't bite. Respect that."
Tyler nodded once. Three years ago, he would have bitten, would have made the man pay for it on the spot and worn a suspension for the privilege. Tonight, it had cost him nothing to let it pass through and out the other side, unremarkable, already forgotten by the time the next hand reached for his.
Carter found him at center ice afterward, the two of them standing where the ceremonial handshake had happened, before they peeled off toward the tunnel.
"Conference final," Carter said. "Again."
"Again."
"Different opponent this time. Different everything." Carter's eyes went somewhere distant for a second, and Tyler understood he wasn't only talking about hockey. "Might be the last one I get to stand here for."
"You don't know that yet."
"I do, actually. I've known for a while." Carter smiled, and it wasn't sad exactly, more settled, a man who had made his peace with an ending before the ending arrived, which Tyler understood now was its own kind of gift you could give yourself if you were patient and honest enough to see it coming. "I'm glad it's you standing here with me for it. Whatever round this turns out to be."
They walked off the ice together, sticks over their shoulders, and Tyler thought about Diego, about how he used to believe endings only ever arrived as accidents, sudden and cruel and impossible to prepare for. Carter was teaching him something different now: that some endings could be chosen, walked toward deliberately, met with your eyes open instead of your back turned. It didn't make Diego's ending less of a wound. It just gave Tyler a second kind of ending to hold up beside it, proof that loss didn't only come in one shape.
Sofia was waiting in the family area with Emma, who had clearly been allowed to stay up well past any reasonable bedtime and was vibrating with it, notebook already open to a fresh page.
"You scored in overtime," Emma informed him, as though he might have missed it. "I recorded the time. Four minutes, eleven seconds. Is that a record for you?"
"Not quite a record. Close, though."
"I'll keep tracking. For the record." Emma flipped back several pages, showing him a column of times and dates with the seriousness of a scout preparing a report. "You're getting faster in overtime. Statistically."
"Good to know."
"I'll present the full findings at the end of the playoffs. There may be a certificate involved."
Sofia caught his eye over Emma's head, something warm and private passing between them that had nothing to do with the game, everything to do with the floor of the spare room two days ago, the paint sample she'd shown him that morning, the soft yellow already sitting in a can in the hallway closet, waiting for a Saturday with time enough to use it.
In the car, Emma finally losing the fight against sleep in the back seat, Sofia pulled up her phone.
"Flights are booked," she said. "June fourteenth, confirmed, both ways. I did it during the second intermission. Couldn't wait any longer."
"You booked flights during the game?"
"I trust you to score. It's not really a gamble at this point." She smiled at the windshield, not at him, the private kind of smile she wore when she was pleased with herself and didn't need him to notice it to enjoy it. "Cape Town. One year, almost exactly, since Table Mountain and the wine and you not sleeping the whole flight over because you'd never seen mountains meet an ocean like that before."
"I remember."
"I want to stand on Clifton Beach again and see if it still feels the same as it did on the honeymoon. Or if it feels different, because we're different now."
"It'll feel different," Tyler said, certain of it in a way he hadn't been a few years ago. "Better different. Same as everything else has."
She reached for his hand at the red light, the same way she had after the last home game, the gesture already becoming its own small tradition between them, a marker of games won and roads driven home together. Behind them, Emma slept on, notebook closed in her lap, the record of the night's overtime goal already committed carefully to paper, waiting to be read aloud tomorrow at breakfast the way every important thing in their home eventually was: out loud, together, nothing kept quiet that didn't need to be.
Ahead of them: one more round of hockey, a can of soft yellow paint waiting in the hallway closet, a flight booked for the fourteenth of June, and a room standing empty and full at once, patient in the way everything worth having in this family had always learned to be.
Tyler watched the streetlights slide across Sofia's face at intervals, steady, familiar, and thought that if someone had told him four years ago, gutted and furious in a hospital waiting room, that this was the life waiting on the other side of it, he would not have believed a word of it. He was glad, now, that belief had never been the requirement. Only showing up, again and again, until it became true.