Chapter 19: After Hours

Brent's wife let Lars's call ring out in her pocket, and nobody touched it.

The next night, at ten, she met us at the staff door of Lakeshore Arena.

She had a ring of keys and a flashlight.

"Ten minutes in the control room," she said. "Then the ice, if you want it."

"The guard thinks I'm checking the banners."

"Are you?" I said.

"I did. Yours is still the biggest."

She meant the one outside, with Lars's face. I had walked under it all my adult life.

Nolan followed us in with his old limp, worse tonight because of the rain.

The control room sat high above the seats, behind a window of dark glass.

A technician's screen glowed in the corner. Brent's wife sat down and clicked through three folders until she found it.

"Family Night Tribute, final cut."

She pressed play.

The scoreboard above the empty ice, forty feet wide, woke up with a hum.

It began with Lars as a boy in a borrowed jersey, hugging a trophy bigger than his chest.

Then the wedding. Me in white, laughing, with my hand in his.

I watched myself at twenty-four, forty feet wide.

Then came the years: him with the cup, him with sick kids at the hospital.

Him with a hand on my back at a charity gala.

Then a black screen with white letters.

The next chapter of my life, the letters said.

An ultrasound image faded in, and across it Lars's slanted handwriting.

Family comes first. #CaptainDad

Nobody spoke.

Belinda's photo came after it, smiling in a cream dress, and under that, the last frame.

It was the picture from our tenth-anniversary dinner, cropped to me alone.

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