“You’re doing the dry-cleaning run this week,” Grady told him.
“Worth it.”
WHEN THEphone rang in the middle of the night, Max woke up out of a dead sleep.
Blinking in the darkness, he tried to remember where he was. His house in Newark? No. Grady’s house in California? He blinked and tried to remember.
Then he caught the orange glow of the Las Vegas strip creeping in around the blackout curtains. Right. He was in Vegas, because they had a playoff game against the Heatwave tomorrow.
Why hadn’t he put his phone on Do Not Disturb?
Grumbling, he reached for the nightstand in the dark. The call display readHEDGIE.
Oh shit. Max scrambled to answer and belatedly realized it was a video call. “Hello? Is it happening?”
A few seconds later the video came through and he saw Hedgie in a brightly lit hospital room. Was it already morning on the East Coast? Max’s eyes hadn’t woken up enough to focus on the time in the corner of his phone screen.
“She’s here!” Hedgie looked like he’d gone three rounds with the baddest defenseman in the league. His eyes were bloodshot and had bags under them, which made sense because Max already felt like that and he only had to play hockey, not stay up with a partner who was delivering their child. He was grinning like a maniac. “Why’s it so dark where you are?”
“Because it’s, like, six in the morning,” El said from somewhere behind him.
Oh good, at least one of them could do math. “Looks like the baby takes after El, if she was actually on time.” El’s due date was today. Or yesterday. Max’s brain wasn’t awake enough to determine which.
Hedgie made a face. “You’re the third one who’s said that. Be nice to me or I won’t let you see her.”
“Yeah, right,” Max said immediately. “You can’t wait to brag about this kid. Show me the baby, Hedgie.”
The phone jiggled for a moment, and then the camera flipped around and Max was looking at El sitting in a hospital bed, hair up in a knot, with a little pink-wrapped bundle in her arms.
“Looking good, Mama,” Max said. Truthfully she looked better than Hedgie. “And who’s this with you?”
Hedgie brought the phone closer and Max got his first glimpse of a squish-faced infant with Hedgie’s nose. He immediately fell in love. “This is Amelia Kate.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Amelia,” Max said. His throat suddenly felt tight. “Good job, guys. She’s perfect.”
“We’re pretty pleased with her,” El agreed. “We’ll let you—and me, to be honest—get back to sleep now, but we wanted to say hi and everyone’s doing fine.”
“Congratulations, all of you.”
When the call ended, Max blinked a few times in the darkness of the room. He’d wanted to be there for El and Hedgie’s milestone, but the pang of missing out stayed brief. He’d meet Amelia this summer. Maybe he wouldn’t get to watch her grow up the same way he would have if he’d been in Newark, but he had other people here. He had a good team who let him play a role he liked much better.
He had Grady, whose team had won their third straight game of the series that night.
And he had a playoff game to win today. So he should really put his phone down and go back to sleep.
THE MOMENTGrady’s blades touched the ice for warm-ups in Vancouver, he could feel the energy of the building reverberating through his feet. The Orcas were on the brink of elimination, and half the city had turned up to support their efforts to turn the series around.
Grady was going to give everything he had to ensure those fans went home disappointed. It wasn’t personal, but he wanted this victory more than those six hundred thousand Canadians combined.
The team stayed loose during warm-ups, and Mitch heckled them all during the shootout drill. He was easily the most laid-back goalie Grady’d ever met.
He expected the other end of the ice to be tense. If Vancouver lost tonight, their season was over. But at least to Grady, they seemed to be fine. Focused, but not grim. As Grady rounded the back of his own net, laughter rang out—Kirschbaum, it looked like. Weird. Grady had always thought he was kind of dour.
Warm-ups ended, and they filed back to the locker room for one of Dawg’s pep talks—one they didn’t need but responded to with cheers anyway. With the Condors, Grady had cut his Instagram meditation down to just a minute or two, and he didn’t feel the need to leave the locker room. This team had a totally different energy for him, one he didn’t find toxic.
Maybe he’d been part of that toxicity before, but he had a blank slate here. He was making the most of it.
In any case, he smiled when he checked Instagram and saw Max had uploaded a badly photoshopped picture of Gru peeing on the Orcas’ mascot.
