Chapter 1: Sudden Death
Eleven minutes into overtime, Shane Hollander stopped being able to feel his legs, and that was fine, because he'd stopped needing them a period ago. They knew what to do. They'd known since he was four years old on a frozen backyard rink in Ottawa, his dad holding the flashlight.
What he could feel was the building. Nineteen thousand people in Boston, every one of them on their feet, every one of them hating him personally. He could feel it through the boards when he leaned on them, a low vibration like standing next to a subway. The noise had stopped being noise sometime in the third period. Now it was weather.
Game seven. Conference final. Two-two, sudden death. Somewhere behind the bench his coach was saying something about gap control and nobody was listening, least of all Shane, because Shane was watching the Raiders captain line up for the next faceoff, and the Raiders captain was Ilya Rozanov.
Ilya was laughing.
Not openly. Not where the cameras would catch it. But Shane had spent seven years learning that face. On the screen in a sports bar it was a sneer; up close it was a sneer with the corners giving way, the look of a man who was having the best night of his life and would rather die than admit it. His hair was dark with sweat under the helmet. He had a cut over one eyebrow from the second period that the trainers had glued shut, and he kept touching it with his glove like it was a joke he was remembering.
He looked across the ice, right at the Metros bench. Right at Shane.
Shane looked away first. He always did, in public. It was one of the rules.
"Hollander." His coach's hand landed on his shoulder pad. "You're up. Go win me a hockey game."
Shane went over the boards.
Afterward, the replay would show it from four angles, and the analysts would call it a heads-up play, a veteran read, a goal-scorer's instinct. Shane watched it on a phone in the locker room with Hayden Pike's arm around his neck and champagne going down the back of his shirt, and he didn't recognize any of it.
What he remembered was this: Ilya, at the Raiders' blue line, receiving a pass he'd been receiving cleanly since their rookie year. Ilya's head coming up to find his winger. And Ilya, for one half-second, finding Shane instead.
Their eyes met. Shane saw something go through his face. Not surprise. Recognition. Oh, it's you.
Ilya bobbled the puck.
It wasn't much. A quarter-inch of rubber off the heel of his blade. On any other night, from any other player, it wouldn't have mattered. But Shane was already moving, already there, his stick in the gap before Ilya's could close it, and then he had the puck and he was alone, and the net was enormous, and the goalie was very far away, and the only thing in the whole cathedral of noise was the soft dumb click of Shane's own wrist turning over.
Top shelf, glove side. The net bulged like a sail.
The building went silent so fast it felt like a pressure drop.
And then his team was on him, a wave of white jerseys and screaming, and he went down under all of it, and from the bottom of the pile, through somebody's elbow, he looked back up the ice.
Ilya was still at the blue line. He hadn't moved. He was standing there with his stick across his knees, bent over at the waist, staring at the ice where the puck had been.
The handshake line was the worst part. It always was.
You did it at the end of every series, win or lose, two lines of exhausted men skating past each other with their gloves off, saying good series, good series, good luck, and meaning it about half the time. Shane had done it a hundred times. He'd shaken Ilya's hand in it six times before tonight. Three wins each. Every time, he'd had to be careful with his face.
Tonight he couldn't feel his face at all.
Ilya was near the end of the Raiders line. Captain's spot. He was shaking hands like a man getting through a funeral receiving line: firm, quick, nothing in his eyes. Then he got to Shane.
He held on a beat too long. His palm was hot and damp, and he squeezed, hard enough to hurt, and leaned in close as if he were saying what everybody said.
"Fuck you, Hollander," he said, very softly, in that accent that made every consonant sound like it had been carved. "That was beautiful."
And then he was past, and the next Raider was there, and Shane said "good series" to a defenseman whose name he forgot even while he was saying it.
Media took forty minutes. Shane said the things you say. Great team effort. Credit to Boston. Proud of the guys. One reporter asked him what was going through his head on the goal, and he said "I just tried to get it on net," which was true, and also a lie so enormous he was surprised the microphone didn't short out.
The Metros weren't flying home until the morning. Something about crew rest rules and a late puck drop. The team hotel was a tall glass tower near the harbor, with a lobby full of potted palms, and when the bus pulled up there were already Montreal fans outside it, a few dozen of them in red, who had driven five hours on a hunch. They screamed when Shane got off. He waved. He signed a jersey. He let a woman in a homemade foam crown kiss him on the cheek.
Hayden caught him at the elevators. Hayden was drunk in the cheerful, loose-limbed way of a man whose wife had banned beer for the entire playoff run.
"Bar," Hayden said. "Bar, bar, bar. The whole team. Come on. Coach is buying."
"I'm gonna shower first."
"You showered at the rink."
"I'm gonna shower again."
Hayden squinted at him. They'd been friends for seven years; he knew Shane didn't like crowds, didn't drink much, would sooner stand in a corner nursing a soda water than get up on a table. He didn't know anything else. That was also one of the rules.
"You're gonna go upstairs and eat a bowl of steamed broccoli and go to sleep at ten," Hayden said accusingly.
"Maybe."
"You just won us a series in overtime. In Boston. You're a legend. Legends don't eat broccoli." Hayden pointed at him. "One drink. You come down in an hour, or I'm coming up and dragging you."
"Sure," said Shane. "One hour."
The elevator closed. He leaned back against the mirrored wall and shut his eyes, and the silence of it was so complete after four hours of noise that his ears rang.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He didn't look at it right away. He knew who it was. There was only one person who'd text him right now and not say congratulations, and that person was listed in his contacts, for seven years now, as Lily. Because Shane Hollander was not a man of great imagination, and because, the first time, at twenty, in a hotel room in Ottawa, he'd been too scared to type the real name.
The elevator dinged at the twenty-sixth floor. He walked to his room. He sat down on the edge of the bed, still in his suit, and then, only then, he looked.
Lily: Are you alone
He typed yes. Deleted it. Typed it again. Sent it.
The three dots came up and went away. Came up again.
Lily: Lobby. Your elevators need a key card. I have been standing next to a palm tree for ten minutes. Some woman thinks I am a valet
Shane laughed out loud, alone in the hotel room. Then he stopped laughing, because the next part of his body had caught up with his brain, and his brain had shown it, very vividly, the image of Ilya Rozanov downstairs in a ballcap pulled low, one hand in his pocket, standing in the lobby of the enemy team's hotel two hours after losing a game seven.
He'd come here. He'd come here.
They had rules. Seven years of rules. Never in a city where either of them lived. Never two nights in a row. Never in the team hotel, never the night of a game they'd played against each other, never anywhere a teammate might knock. Ilya had made half the rules himself. Ilya was the one who'd always been better at them.
Shane stood up so fast he got dizzy.
He was halfway to the door before he remembered to grab the key card, and halfway down the hall before he remembered his suit jacket was still on the bed, and then he decided he didn't care. He jabbed the down button four times, like that would help. It did not help. The elevator took its own sweet time coming up from the lobby, the numbers above the door dropping and climbing, stopping somewhere in the low twenties and staying there for a full ten seconds while Shane stood with his hands in fists and his whole body humming.
He thought about the handshake. That was beautiful. Ilya's hot palm. The ache in his knuckles from how hard he'd squeezed.
He thought about last March in Raleigh, the last time, nearly three months ago now. Ilya's mouth on the inside of his wrist. The way he'd said Shane's name into the pillow, not Hollander, just once, like it had slipped.
The elevator came. Empty, thank God. He rode it down twenty-six floors with his heart going like he was still in the third period, and when the doors opened on the lobby he saw him immediately.
Gray hoodie. Black Raiders cap pulled low. He was leaning against the wall beside a potted palm with his arms folded, the cut over his eyebrow shining under the lobby lights, and when he looked up and saw Shane his whole face did something complicated and then went perfectly, deliberately blank.
He pushed off the wall and crossed the lobby like he had somewhere else to be. He walked straight past Shane into the elevator without a word. Shane followed, feeling like he'd swallowed a live wire. He swiped the key card. He hit twenty-six.
The doors began to close.
"Hold it! Hold the door! Oh my God, hold it!"
A hand slapped the gap. The doors bounced open. And into the elevator, laughing, staggering, reeking of beer and heartbreak, came two very large Bostonians in matching black-and-gold Rozanov jerseys.