Chapter 149 Standing Beside Him

Chapter 149 Standing Beside Him
Roanoke closed out Minnesota in six games, a series that had gone as far as either team wanted but that both had earned. When the final horn sounded, Tyler felt something different from what he had felt after Nashville. It was quieter, heavier, with an awareness that never quite left him of what would come after the celebration ended.
The locker room afterward was subdued in a way playoff wins rarely were; guys who'd normally be shouting and spraying champagne were instead moving through the room with a kind of careful tenderness, everyone aware that this particular win belonged to Carter in a way none of them wanted to say out loud yet. Chen found Tyler by his stall and just shook his head, unable to find words for it, and Tyler understood completely, having spent three weeks failing to find the right words himself.

Carter had asked for the press conference to take place the following morning, before the team flew out, while the win was still fresh enough to soften what he needed to say alongside it.

"You don't have to do this," Tyler told him in the hallway outside the media room, both of them in suits instead of gear for the first time in what felt like weeks. "Nobody would blame you for waiting."

"I've waited long enough. Longer than I should have, if I'm being truthful about it." Carter caught himself repeating the phrase and huffed something like a laugh. "See, even I fall into old habits. Avery would tell me to say what I mean instead."

"What do you mean, then?"

"That I'm ready. That waiting any longer would be fear wearing a patient costume, and I've spent enough of my life letting fear dress up as something reasonable." Carter straightened his jacket, the same careful motion Tyler had watched him make before a hundred games, muscle memory finding a new use. "Walk in with me."

They went in together, and the room quieted the way locker rooms quieted, reporters sensing something before the microphones confirmed it. Carter sat, adjusted the mic, and didn't waste time on preamble.

“This is my last season,” he said. “Whatever happens in the final, win or lose, I’ll retire at the end of it. I had a heart incident two years ago that should have ended my career then. I was given extra time, and I’ve used it to the best of my ability. I’m not going to keep pushing beyond what that time was meant to hold.”
The room erupted into questions, the ordinary chaos of a story breaking in real time, and Tyler stood beside him exactly where he'd promised he would, watching Carter field each one with the same steady economy he brought to everything, no performance in it, nothing dressed up to sound braver or sadder than it actually was.

"Why announce it now, before the series is even decided?" one reporter asked.

"Because I didn't want my team playing a final not knowing what it meant to me. I wanted them to know exactly what they're playing for, and I didn't want to hide it from them to protect my own privacy a few weeks longer." Carter glanced sideways at Tyler, brief, warm. "And because somebody taught me recently that naming a thing plainly is better than carrying it silently and hoping nobody notices the weight."

A few reporters turned toward Tyler, waiting for him to add something, and he found he had exactly one true thing he wanted the room to have.

"Carter Hayes is the best centerman this league has seen in nine years," Tyler said. "That's not an opinion; it's just fact at this point. Ask anyone who's played against him. But that's not even the biggest thing he did for this franchise. Four years ago, he put himself beside a guy nobody else in that locker room wanted near them, and he did it without being asked, and he kept doing it every single day since. I wouldn't be sitting in this chair today without him. I don't think a lot of people in this league would be who they are without him."

Carter's jaw worked once, hard, and he looked down at the table for a second before finding his voice again. "Wasn't hard. He just needed someone to believe the work would eventually show."

After they walked through the tunnel together and the cameras were finally behind them, Carter exhaled long and slowly, as though something he had been carrying physically had finally been set down.

"How do you feel?" Tyler asked.

"Lighter. Scared. Both, somehow, at the same time." Carter shook his head, almost laughing. "Avery says that's normal. Says most true things feel like both right up until they don't anymore."

"She's usually right about that stuff."

"She usually is." Carter clapped him on the shoulder, the same gesture he'd used a hundred times over four years, familiar as anything, except this time it carried the particular weight of something they both understood was numbered now, precious in the specific way only endings could make ordinary things precious. "Go home. Call Sofia. Tell her the good news about the series before the reporters beat you to it."

"I will."

"And Tyler." Carter paused at the tunnel's mouth, half turned back. "Whatever the final brings, win or lose, I meant what I said in there about you. Wanted you to have heard it plainly, not read it later in a transcript."

"I heard it."

Tyler drove home with the radio on this time, something easy and unremarkable filling the car. He realised he no longer needed the silence he had sought after learning Carter’s news alone three weeks earlier. The weight had a home now, shared properly, out loud, in a room full of people who understood exactly what it cost to name a hard thing plainly instead of carrying it quietly and hoping nobody noticed.

He thought about the conference final ahead, whoever waited on the other side of it, and understood for the first time that the outcome mattered less to him than it once would have. Winning would be good. Carter deserved a trophy on his way out the door if the hockey gods were paying attention. But the thing that actually mattered had already happened in that media room, out loud, witnessed, no longer a private weight either of them had to carry alone through a season that was always going to end eventually, one way or another, the same as everything did.