Chapter One

September

On the day of Ryan Sullivan's forty-fifth birthday he discovered that his wife had gotten him a divorce.

Embarrassingly, it took him until the afternoon to realize it.

He had left early in the morning to get to the game with his peewee hockey team. That kept him occupied for a few hours. It was his first coaching position and he'd been taking it really seriously. Sure, it was only peewee, but eleven- and twelve-year-olds were a real handful on the best of days. To make matters worse, Ryan had been mediating a season-long dispute between the parents of his 1C and the parents of a kid who thought he deserved to be the 1C. He'd kept their ice time pretty even, but that didn't matter to hockey parents who looked at the lines beforehand and kept track of matchups and deployments.

After the game, Paul, the father of Jaxon-the-2C, confronted Ryan outside of the locker room. Ryan had to talk the guy down, spinning a tale about PP1 time and reassuring him that really, no one was scouting this early, and it truly was not a knock on Jaxon's hockey skills that Wyatt had been taking more offensive-zone draws, but simply that Jaxon's defensive responsibility was stunningly well-developed for his age and—well. At least Paul hadn't punched the locker room wall this time.

Ryan had been so busy with the parents that by the time he got out to the parking lot, it was over an hour later than he normally would have been on his way home. He took a moment, alone in his car, to rub his eyes. When he was on the ice with the kids, he fucking loved every minute of it. He'd always considered himself a people person, but the parents...man, the parents were something else.

And holy shit, did Ryan know about parents . Ryan had four brothers who had all played pro hockey in some form or another, and their dad made Paul look like a family therapist in comparison.

By the time he had gotten out of the rink, stopped by Dunkin' to get his third cup of coffee, braved the shitty weekend traffic on the way home and narrowly avoided getting sideswiped by some asshole doing 80 mph with nowhere to go, the headache was building up behind his eyes. The news radio was still talking about the fact that yesterday the Boston Beacons, who'd already fired their general manager in the offseason, had fired their head coach in the middle of training camp , which didn't bode well for the season. If anything, the headache intensified.

It didn't get any better when he actually got home.

He parked in front of the house the same way he always did because the garage was where he'd set up all of his hockey equipment and the skate-sharpening machine and you could only fit Shannon's car in the other side anymore.

He keyed in the door code and the lock whirred uselessly in place.

Ryan frowned and tried it again. Another long, sad whirr. He waited for the lock mechanism to reset before trying again, slowly this time, to make sure he hadn't typed it wrong.

The combination didn't work.

Ryan tucked his coffee into his elbow as he shifted his bag around and fished for the cell phone in his pocket. "Shannon?"

"What do you want, Ryan?"

"Did you...change the locks?"

"What do you think?"

"It seems kinda like you changed the locks."

"Really? Wow, look at the brain trust we got over here today."

Ryan took the phone away from his ear and stared at it. This kind of venom in Shannon's voice wasn't entirely out of the blue, but he couldn't figure out what he'd done today. "Shannon, why did you change the locks?"

"Why didn't you stay at the rink so my fucking process server could find you?"

The pieces of the puzzle fit together with the sudden clarity of figuring out the right move on the ice ahead of anyone else. Except this time, he was trailing the play. "Shannon, are you divorcing me?"

"No shit, Sherlock. I've only been trying to talk to you about it for the last goddamn month."

Ryan stared at the phone again. "You have?"

Shannon hung up on him.

He thought, for a second, about all of the teammates and friends he'd known who had gotten divorced and how you probably weren't supposed to lock your spouse out of the house without warning. He thought about equitable distribution and how humiliating it would feel, telling a judge, well, she locked me out, so...

He had never really wanted to move to New Hampshire in the first place, but it was close to Shannon's family. The thing was, he'd never even been particularly fond of the house in the first place. It felt like more work than it had been worth, the constant negotiations with Shannon about how much of his awards and medals and memorabilia he could keep anywhere except the basement. About how much space in the garage he was allowed to use up for his workshop.

Maybe...he could just let her have the house.

Every time they fought, it was a reminder that they had started dating when they were eighteen years old and had just kept going, even though it became clear, the longer things went on, that they had really different priorities.

Shannon had wanted the big house in Newfields to be close to her family. And at the time, Ryan had wanted what Shannon wanted. She'd deserved it after years of living far away from her family and friends, in the kinds of places she never would've chosen if she hadn't married a hockey player.

It wasn't until later that Ryan had realized exactly how much he hated living in New Hampshire in a house that was far too goddamn big for two people.

He called her again.

" What , Ryan?"

"Shannon. Just to be clear. You're really divorcing me? Really, completely, seriously divorcing me?"

"Yes, Ryan."

"But...what about all of my stuff?"

"We can figure out a time for you to come and pick it up. But I'm over this. I told you I didn't want you to start coaching. I've waited years to have a life without fucking hockey —"

"But that is my life, Shan. It's always been my life."

"Not like this. Not like you get. Or did you forget that I made birthday brunch reservations for today—"

"You knew I had a game!"

"You couldn't have gotten the assistant coach to do it, Ryan? It's your forty-fifth birthday . It's peewee fucking hockey! I'm sick of always being reminded where I stand in your priorities and how as long as it's something hockey related, I'm at the bottom! And it's clear you don't understand this at all. We don't have anything else to talk about right now. I'll text you times and dates if you want to pick up your stuff."

Ryan thought about asking her to throw down a bag of clothes to him or something, but the back of his neck felt hot and sweaty. He hadn't fought much on the ice when he was a player, but the few times he'd gotten angry enough to do it, he'd felt like this. Like a teapot whose lid was about to explode with the force of the pressure built up under it.

Instead, he said, "Okay," and hung up again.

He stood there in the driveway—not his driveway anymore—and looked at the house. It was an ugly McMansion, and he could admit that now that Shannon had kicked him out. He couldn't quite figure out what he was feeling. It wasn't sad and it wasn't angry. Maybe resigned was the closest word for it. Maybe this is what it felt like to not care about losing anymore. He'd never felt like that in his life.

Ryan walked back to the car, slung his bag of hockey gear back into it and sat down in the driver's seat. He wasn't sure how long he sat there, but it was long enough that he could see Shannon peeking out at him through the curtains, probably wondering what the hell was going on and worrying that maybe he'd try to call her again.

His phone rang, and he almost threw it across the cab. No, Shannon, you don't have anything else you could say to me. It wasn't Shannon's number, though. He didn't have it saved as a contact and didn't recognize it at all. It was a Boston area code, though, which didn't bode well.

"Hello?"

"Ryan Sullivan?"

"Uh, yeah? I'm Sully."

"This is Joe Conroy, the general manager of the Boston Beacons."

Ryan blinked.

Joe Conroy was a legend. Ryan had grown up wearing his jersey. Conroy had played for Boston for years. Had his jersey retired at the Spectrum. Had been hired after Boston's last general manager was unceremoniously fired in the dumpster fire of the last season. Ryan knew him socially, but not enough for a phone call like this.

"Hello?" Conroy asked, and Ryan realized he had probably been silent too long.

"Sorry. Sorry, I was just—surprised."

"Well, you're going to be a hell of a lot more surprised than that by the time we're done. Do you have some time to talk?"

When he looked up at the house, Shannon glared at him from the upstairs window. Ryan pressed the ignition and said, "All the time in the world."

At six a.m. on the dot, Eric Aronson's phone rang, the same way it did every morning.

Usually, he was awake already and just getting out of the shower of his tiny South End apartment. Today, he'd woken up even earlier than usual. It had been three days since Joe Conroy fired Harrison Leclerc, the Boston Beacons' twenty-ninth head coach.

Eric had worked with Leclerc for three long years, and he wasn't expecting to be given his ex-boss's job...but the fact was, he'd earned it. He'd earned it for no other reason than he'd bitten his fucking tongue and hadn't decked that fuck right in his prissy mouth every time he'd wanted to, which was often.

His phone screen said Mameleh , which wasn't a surprise, because his eighty-two-year-old mother was the only person who would ever call him at six in the morning, even on days when he was half-expecting the most important job offer of his life.

"Good morning, Maman."

"Good morning, éric," she said, her voice a little wheezy.

The weirdest fucking thing about being in his forties—the age Maman and Papa had been when they'd had him—was realizing that his parents were aging and that they weren't going to live forever. It had been a really rude awakening. A smack in the face when his father got sick two years ago and Eric had moved home in the offseason to help his mother take care of him until his death.

With his father gone, now it was the insidious little reminders, like how breathless his mother sounded when she'd been going up and down the stairs. That instead of the tall, sturdy woman who had terrified him and his friends when they'd been teenaged hooligans, she was now wizened and weak. Knowing that when he spoke to her, he was speaking to an old lady. Eric still felt as rootless and immature as he ever had, but the fact that his dad was gone, and his mom was old —it didn't feel real no matter how often he saw the evidence right in front of him.

"Are you getting enough sleep?" she demanded.

Eric thought about reminding her that she asked him the same question every time she called, but instead, he said, "Yes, 'Man."

"Why are you up so early?"

"Because you called me at six a.m., 'Man."

"You were awake before that. I can tell."

"Can't get anything by you," Eric said, smiling as he poured his coffee. Probably to an outsider, it would have sounded short, annoyed. Impatient with a meddling old woman. He couldn't accurately convey how far from the truth that was.

"What happened with that shande?" She slipped out of the French they usually used and into the Yiddish that emerged when she had particularly strong feelings about something. Today, it was her disapproval of Harrison Leclerc. "They fired him, didn't they? So how is training camp still running?"

"They fired him. The rest of the coaching staff have been sharing the responsibilities until they hire a new head coach, which they'll have to do soon, because the season's right around the corner."

"Why haven't they offered you the job?" She sounded annoyed, more annoyed than she usually did these days.

"I don't know, 'Man. I mean...they're not obligated to give me the job."

"You've been there for four years. You're good at your job, tateleh. You're better than that man ever was."

Eric thought about Harrison Leclerc—so sure of himself, so serious about implementing his system, about making sure that everyone played the right way—and the way things had come to a head in such an abrupt manner.

Leclerc hadn't just gotten himself fired. He'd gotten into a screaming match with Caleb Cook, the Beacons' hotshot sophomore who wasn't such a hotshot after he'd had a disappointing rookie year yo-yoing between the big leagues and the Beacons' minor league affiliate. At one point, it had looked like they were going to come to blows before Eric and another player got in between them.

"Well," he said, "that man is a prick, unfortunately. But so am I."

"You are not a prick. The boys like you."

She was stubborn, and she was loyal, he had to give her that much. "I know, 'Man. But that's not enough to get the job. Hey—are you okay? You need anything?"

"No, I'm fine."

She wouldn't have told him anyway, even if she did need something. It had been hard for her after his father died, alone in the too-big house in C?te Saint-Luc. Eric did what he could. He had hired a caretaker to look in on her a few times a week, but his mother was wily and would pretend that she had gone out for errands when Cecile arrived.

When it was too much for her to make it to the grocery store, she would accept the deliveries he scheduled through an app, but that was about it. There wasn't much he could do this far away, and as ever, he wondered whether he was doing the right thing, working a job that took him all over the continent but so rarely home to her.

"Okay, well, you just let me know if you change your mind," Eric said, making a mental note to order her a Sunday delivery with some cupboard and fridge staples.

"And you let me know what's going on with your job. I'll come down there and give them a piece of my mind if I have to."

He laughed at the mental image, all five foot seven of Rosa Aronson, showing up at the Spectrum to give Joe Conroy a piece of her mind. "I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself, but your support is appreciated. Love you, 'Man. Hang in there, okay?"

"Yes, yes," she said, and he could picture her dismissively waving her hand at him. "I love you too, éric."

Eric poured his coffee into the thermos. He had lived in Boston during the season for three years and he had never understood the local obsession with Dunkin' Donuts. It tasted like sugary, watered-down milk.

If it was up to Eric, he would have walked to work every day. As it was, he'd had to buy a car so that he could make it to the practice facility on time. Sometimes he walked it anyway, just to be stubborn, but on days like this he couldn't really afford to be late.

It was stupid, to be so concerned about it when he probably wasn't even going to get it. If they were going to give him the fucking job, he probably would have had a hint of it beforehand. They would have called him in for interviews, given him some kind of an idea, anything. His mother's faith in him aside, Eric was starting to feel less hopeful and more frustrated.

Sure, the Beacons hadn't had a great record over the last three seasons, but that wasn't surprising given that their stars were aging or injured, their goalie had knee and hip issues and they hadn't drafted particularly high or well for the last ten seasons.

That wasn't anything that Eric could help. He'd done his job as best he could. Showed up to work every day. Argued with Leclerc when he felt that the man had overstepped. Done his best to soothe the ruffled feathers of the young players on the team.

He paused outside of the facility to take a picture of the letters emblazoned over the door: Beacons Ice Arena. It was stupid and almost sentimental, marking a moment that might even be insignificant. But he did it anyway.

Inside, Eric was pleased to find that a lot of the guys were already there and either on the ice warming up, or in the locker rooms getting dressed. Whatever else you had to say about the team's record last year, Eric had made sure they had a good culture. Everyone showed up and did the work. If Conroy didn't name a head coach soon, though, they were going to start running into issues.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he fished it out. The screen said Conroy . Eric swallowed down his nerves, swiped and answered. "Yeah?"

"Aronson, can I talk to you in the office?" Conroy asked briskly. Even though his name was synonymous with Boston now, he still sounded like he'd rolled off of the fields in Sudbury, Ontario.

"Sure. Be right up."

"The office" was located up the stairs from the ice level, a space the coaches and general manager shared in the practice facility. It served its purpose of demarcating the line between the public and the staff, particularly when they needed to talk to players alone after practice.

Or, in this case, talk to an assistant coach who was hoping that he would be a head coach before practice.

"Sit down," Conroy said, when he opened the door.

Eric didn't want to. He'd always hated sitting in the chair across from the desk and not behind it. It felt a little like being back at school in Boisbriand, getting chewed out by a teacher because he'd gotten into another fight or had been slacking too much on his studies in favor of hockey.

He did it anyway. Sat silent without fidgeting, just raised an eyebrow and waited for Conroy to break it to him.

"I want to preface this by saying that this isn't a reflection on your work performance or the trust that the organization has in you at all," Conroy said, and all of the tension in Eric's body released at once, like his strings had been cut. Here it was. "We're just thinking of going in a different direction."

"I understand," Eric said, like someone else was using his tongue. "Is the new hire already under contract?"

"We're still in the preliminary stages of negotiating the deal; it's not set in stone yet. But we wanted to talk to you about it so you could be prepared to work with him, because it's looking likely that he will accept, and we can get things really started before training camp is over."

"Who?" Eric asked. It was blunt, and he couldn't quite keep the annoyance from his voice, but he was justified in that, he felt.

Conroy was in his sixties now, but he was still a handsome man, lean and distinguished looking. His steel-gray hair was carefully cut and maintained; he wore clothes that looked like his wife had picked them out for him. He'd made the graduation from the ice to the front office without looking back, while Eric was still hanging in the middle, not quite a player, not quite more, no matter how hard he worked.

Conroy said, "Ryan Sullivan."

Eric said, "Tabarnak."

If anyone else had tried to process the last twenty-four hours of Ryan's life, they probably would have been confused as hell, too. In slightly less than one day, he had turned forty-five, his wife had locked him out of the house, and he was driving to Boston to formally interview for a job as the thirtieth head coach of his childhood Original Six hockey team. It was a lot to wrap his head around and not solely because of the fact that he hadn't even coached his peewee team for a full season.

The logical thing to do would be to say yes to the offer. It was insane to even consider turning down an opportunity with only thirty-two positions available, positions that only opened every now and then and were often more like a game of musical chairs played by the same rotating cast than actual hiring opportunities. He probably wouldn't have the ability to do this again, if ever, and if he did, it would likely be years in the future. He'd probably have to put his time in in juniors, maybe jump straight to the minors if he was lucky. There wouldn't be a head coach's chair gift wrapped and waiting for him.

And the thing was...it was Boston . He'd grown up loving the Beacons. He'd grown up dreaming of playing for them. He'd had the jerseys, the pajamas, the ticket stubs, the binders full of hockey cards, the whole nine yards.

Still. There was a reason he'd left home and hadn't come back, and there was a reason he felt bad about it. Ryan had grown up in Southie. Ryan's dad and four older brothers and their families all still lived there. Ryan had let Shannon talk him into moving to New Hampshire because of her family, but to a lesser extent, he'd agreed because of his family. Newfields was only three hours away, but three hours was enough when none of the Sullivans ever left the Boston city limits.

He shouldn't let them prevent him from taking a huge opportunity. And this was the Beacons. This was—if the interview went well, anyway—the chance to take the Beacons and make them into something better . Something amazing.

Ryan had played hockey for a long time, and by the end of his career, he was basically coaching already. The younger guys coming up were so different from him, from the way he'd had to learn to play. He could see the benefits they'd had, with the newfangled training regimes and parents who understood the importance of skating clinics as early as possible, but he could also see the blind spots.

The opportunity to put all of his ideas together, to make a team that was his and that really focused on development...it was tempting. It was really tempting, no matter how close to his family he'd have to live.

In his gut, Ryan knew he would accept the job. He was a ship at sea otherwise. The rest of his life was going to involve hockey, somehow. It had been his single-minded obsession to the exclusion of almost everything else from the time he'd first gotten onto skates. And at his age the options were basically coaching, a front office position or nothing.

He didn't have to ever work again, but if he didn't, what was he going to do, go home to Newfields and beg Shannon to take him back?

He had some pride.

Strangely, he didn't feel nervous at all. If Joe Conroy had called him like this, they'd already made up their minds. Really, all he had to do was make sure that it was the kind of position he'd actually want, that he'd have the freedom to run the team the way he wanted to run it without too much front office interference. What Ryan had planned wouldn't work if he wouldn't be allowed free rein.

The traffic, expectedly, was terrible. Everyone complained about Boston drivers, but New Hampshire was way, way worse, and the combination of the two was just asking for a headache. By the time he parked his car at the Spectrum, he wasn't the half hour early he generally preferred, but he did have time to swing by the Dunkin' near the front gates. Shannon had always teased him about it, but Ryan liked his coffee sweet, and the Dunkin's in New Hampshire just weren't the same.

He'd been in the Spectrum—the old one across the street—many times as a kid, watching games, even playing mites on ice exhibition matches during the intermissions. He'd pounded the ice in the new Spectrum many times during his long career. He'd looked up at the blue glass and red brick above North Station more times than he could remember. The halls and the seats and the stands were so familiar. He knew his way around the warren of hallways around the locker rooms.

But it was different now, walking into it and heading for the office, knowing that he might have a chance to do something really innovative here.

It was stupid, but he reached out and pinched the skin and tendon on his own wrist. The sharp pain of it a reminder that yes: he was, actually, here.

After all of the internal buildup the actual interview was almost anticlimactic. In the room were Joe Conroy, Gilbert Underhill, the president of hockey operations, and Andy Chernoff, the team's owner. It was pretty funny to find that Ryan had been right from the beginning. The whole interview was more their sales pitch to him rather than the other way around.

"Do I get to pick my own staff?" Ryan asked, halfway through.

"We have assistant coaches under contract for the next year and we would like to finish out their contracts so that the team isn't paying treble, but if you absolutely can't work with them or if they don't fit your vision, you have carte blanche."

Ryan had done his research before heading in. The staff was a strange one: the assistant coach responsible for the forwards was Eric Aronson, a guy who, like Ryan, had also gone undrafted. Aronson had had a long and relatively successful career, but he'd never won the Cup in Calgary. Even though he'd set all kinds of franchise records for the Stampede, most of them were for games played and penalty minutes; he'd been suspended multiple times and had at least two separate biting scandals.

The assistant coach on defense wasn't much better. Peter McCaskill was one of the last of the old breed, a stay-at-home defenseman who was lucky to crack twenty points a season, a man who'd done more of his work with his fists than on his feet.

"Is it going to be an issue that none of them were offered the job?" Ryan asked.

"It won't be if they want to stay in our employ," Underhill said, with a shrug.

Ryan thought about everything he knew about Aronson and thought maybe this was a little optimistic.

By the time the hour finished, Ryan had a new job, a handshake promise that he'd have free rein in that new job and a lot of shit he needed to get done before reporting to training camp the next day.

His mind raced through all of it: hotel reservations and apartment tours and cheap furniture and lists of personnel and tape from the training camp days he'd missed and what he was going to say to a new team who had no idea what to expect both from him and from the season in general and what he was going to say to the guys whose job he'd snatched right out from under their noses. The vague guilt that he was leaving behind the boys on the peewee team mingling with the faint relief that he wasn't going to have to finesse their parents anymore.

In the back of his head, he could hear Dad's derisive, booming laugh. You? You're the one they picked for this?

Ryan had spent a lot of his forty-five years proving people wrong. Not least among them his family. This was no different. For the first time in a long time, Ryan felt the prickly-skinned feeling of excitement before a big game, the eagerness to compete that fizzed through his bloodstream.

He was the one they'd picked for this. And he was going to work damn hard to show them they'd made the right choice, the same way he'd done his entire life.

Still, it felt weird to accept it. To know that all of this was weird and that it was going to happen and that he and the Beacons' front office were the only ones who knew about it. In the past, he would've called Shannon to tell her. But hockey was the last thing she probably wanted to hear about, and Ryan was the last person she probably wanted to hear it from. She had already had him served with the divorce papers, when he was coming out of the hotel in the morning, and had followed up with a curt text message, Fill out the forms the process server had for you. Send them back to me immediately.

He had done it, because he wasn't an asshole, but it had stung a little.

Once he was back in his car, he buckled his seat belt, slipped his phone into its holder, called Murph.

"Hello?" Murph asked, picking up on the second ring.

Ryan could hear the sounds of a rink in the background: the scrape of skates on ice, kids and parents yelling. Of course Murph was probably out with his family. "Hey, bud. Bad time?"

"Nah, it's cool. Tara and I are at Sophia's game. And then Mason's playing after. But I have a minute if you have the time."

Somehow, he felt better just hearing Murph's voice. The two of them had known each other for years. First in the general way you knew everyone who played hockey, growing up in Boston, even though Murph had gone to the expensive Catholic prep school with its own varsity team and Ryan had gone to public school in Southie. They'd played against each other in tournaments and Ryan had always been both annoyed and impressed by him. Murph's size and strength and skill in comparison to Ryan's sheer bloody-minded fucking willpower. Back then, Murph had been a whole foot taller.

It didn't mean anything until what should have been their draft year. That was when he'd really gotten to know Sean Murphy, beyond the vague outline of a gigantic redheaded menace with more freckles than skin.

Ryan went undrafted and went to college; Murph was picked third overall by the Desperadoes and went to college. The Desperadoes had let Murph do his time in school and grow into his body while Ryan left school early with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. And then, when Ryan was really starting to consider whether or not he should hang up his skates after a couple seasons of grinding along in the minors, the Desperadoes' general manager took a flyer on him.

From the time he'd made it down to Dallas, they'd been inseparable. Practically lived out of each other's pockets for months. Were referred to by their teammates as SullyandMurph , an inseparable unit. Were the best men at each other's weddings. They'd won a Cup together. Had their jerseys retired together. They still talked almost every week.

Everything that had happened to him—Shannon kicking him out, the job offer—had happened so fast Ryan hadn't even had time to think about it. As soon as Murph started talking, everything felt easier.

"You wanna sit down?"

He could almost see Murph's expression, the way his eyebrows would have crawled up his forehead to his hairline. "Maybe I should find somewhere a little quieter. Sounds like you got some big news."

"I can wait."

Ryan listened to the noise recede a little into the distance. Murph and his family still lived in Dallas. His kids played peewee hockey in the rink Murph and Ryan had helped open together. That had been their thing, growing the game down south. Sometimes Ryan wondered what his life would've been like if he'd stayed in Texas after all instead of buying the offseason home in Newfields as soon as Shannon had asked.

Maybe less lonely. Maybe not.

"Joe Conroy called me yesterday."

Murph let out an ear-splitting whoop, and said, "You're shitting me, Sully. You're gonna coach the Beacons?"

"I didn't even say what Conroy called about!"

"Sully, come on. Why the hell else would Joe Conroy be calling you? After firing his head coach?"

"Well, you were right. I'm gonna be the new head coach of the Beacons."

"Holy shit, brother, that's incredible . You're going to be great. I can't wait to—wait." Ryan could hear the excitement in Murph's voice, and he could almost see the smile. But then the good mood faded. "Hang on. What'd Shannon say? She can't have been very happy about that."

Ryan was relieved, for a second, that he hadn't started the car yet. "Well...about that. She kicked me out. We're getting divorced."

For once, he had shocked Murph into silence. For once, he couldn't imagine what his facial expression looked like, whether he was pitying or sympathetic or just plain disbelieving. They sat like that for a while until Murph finally said, "Well, shit. I'm sorry."

"It's...okay." Ryan was surprised to find that it was true. He had been in survival mode from the beginning, but now that things had started to slot into place, he still wasn't—as upset as he probably should have been. It was like they'd been building toward it for so long that when Shannon actually ripped the Band-Aid off, all Ryan felt was a numb sense of relief. "It actually happened before I got the job offer, if you can believe it."

"Hey," Murph said apologetically, "we have a lot to talk about, but this ain't the place for it, and I really do have to get back to Sophia's game. Can I call you back tonight?"

Ryan looked out at the parking lot. A woman was getting out of her car to scream at the guy who'd hit her from behind backing out. That was Boston for you. "Yeah, of course. Tell Mason to keep his head up."

"No advice for Sophia?"

"Man, you know I can't tell goalies shit."

He hung up to the sound of Murph's familiar laugh.

Ryan thought about McCaskill and Aronson, about whether Murph would've moved back home if he'd asked for help with the coaching staff. But that was stupid: Murph had his family and a life in Dallas, and Ryan was more than capable of managing this minefield on his own.

Without another pause, he pressed the ignition and backed up out of the space, looping a safe distance around the screaming.