ログインThe away locker room in Helsinki smells of sweat and triumph.Danny moves through the room, still riding the clean high of a well-executed win. "Good work, gentlemen. Showers, then physio. Don't make the staff wait." He claps.Elias is already moving.The post-game fatigue is starting its slow infiltration, but underneath it something else is running, brighter and warmer, and he isn't ready to let it settle yet. The goal is still in his hands, if that makes any sense. The feel of the wrist snap, the red light, the noise.He showers fast, pulls on dry clothes, and has his phone out before his bag is fully zipped.Mia answers on the fourth ring."Hey." His voice comes out softer than he intends. "Why do you look like you're fleeing a crime scene?"Mia closes her bedroom door and leans back against it. He can see her chest rising and falling. "I turned the lights off on the way out. I'm afraid of the dark, obviously."She is not afraid of the dark. He has seen her navigate a pitch-black
The arena in Helsinki is still shaking when Ethan leans back into the sofa, watches the screen. "Remarkable composure. Under that kind of pressure, most people lose the thread entirely."On screen, Elias is being grabbed from three directions at once, Lucas's arm around his neck, the celebration loud and thoroughly uncontrolled.Alice is still recovering. She presses a hand to her chest. "I wasn't breathing for the last four minutes. I genuinely wasn't." She shakes her head, laughing at herself. "That was the most stressful thing I've watched since Mia's final year presentations."The broadcast cuts to a slow-motion replay—the collision, the lost balance, the wrist snap that shouldn't have worked and did."High hockey intelligence," Ethan says. "He made the decision in a fraction of a second and committed to it completely." A pause. "The luck was in the bounce. The shot itself was a choice."Mia exhales in a long, slow stream. The tension that's been living in her shoulders since the
The interval highlight reel plays.Ethan watches the replays with his tea cooling in his hand, "Elias's a good communicator on the ice.""Even when the team was running behind on energy, his composure didn't drop. And he keeps pulling the others forward with him. That's not easy to do."Mia feels something warm move through her chest."He's like that," she says before she entirely decides to. "The team responds to him. He doesn't have to do much, it's just how he carries himself."She realizes that she's given herself away slightly. The quiet certainty in her voice. The small, involuntary pride of it.Alice has noticed."He sounds like someone with a very agreeable personality," she says, pleasantly, watching her daughter. "Though watching him play—he's quite physical out there. Intense. I'd have assumed he was that way in person too.""He's not," Mia says. "He's—measured. Thoughtful, actually. He was very respectful of the medical team from the beginning." She pauses. "He took us all
Alice finally finds her breath, the initial rush of the game receding just enough for her mind to start connecting the dots. She finally remembers what had derailed her—what had made her forget to grill Mia about her supposed "beginner" skating lessons.It was the voice.In a video Mia had sent weeks ago, there had been a man's voice lingering just off-camera.Alice knew Ellie was dating the team's right winger, so she'd simply assumed the voice belonged to Ellie's boyfriend. But now, watching Elias Weston move on the massive screen, the truth hits her like a body check.Alice steals a subtle, measuring glance at her daughter. Mia is leaned forward, her eyes fixed on the screen. She isn't just watching a game, she's watching her man.Alice shakes her head with a soft, helpless sigh.But there's no time for a lecture. The second period opens before anyone has finished their tea.Elias and Lucas run a position switch that the commentators clearly weren't expecting—clean, fast, Elias pul
Mia has been holding her composure together with both hands for the better part of two days, and it is her mother who finally cracks it.The heat moves up her face before she can stop it. "He's fine," she says, to no one in particular, in a voice that convinces no one.Ethan looks at his wife. "You looked him up?""Yesterday, while you were parking." Alice is entirely unruffled. "Mia said the name and I had a free hand and a working phone. You'll see for yourself tonight.""Fine," Ethan says.Mia beams at them, a flash of satisfaction in her eyes as she wiggles her eyebrows. "Then it's a deal! Consider tonight's entertainment officially locked in."Her home media room is a sanctuary of high-end tech that usually only sees her as its sole inhabitant. Despite the state-of-the-art soundproofing and a screen that practically rivals a boutique cinema, Ethan and Alice rarely venture inside.Tonight, however, the air in the room feels different—thick with a hidden, electric anticipation.On
Mia doesn't say a word. She takes her mother's arm and walks them both into the store.After making a full circuit of the shop, she confirms everything she had been hoping for. No player photos, no campaign imagery, just the logo emblem on a few pieces of merchandise.She steers them back out with a mild shrug. "Just the logo. Not even a promo video."Alice is undeterred."Your phone," she says. "You must have photos. A group photo, at least."Mia opens her mouth."Don't tell me you've spent all this time with someone and you don't have a single picture together."The photos exist. That is the problem. The photos exist in significant quantity and in a variety of formats that Mia would sooner dissolve into the floor than scroll past on her mother's behalf.Elias has an inexplicable fondness for using her phone to take pictures she then hides in a locked album. The thought of her mother's thumb moving cheerfully through that gallery is enough to close the conversation immediately."His







