CHAPTER 1: TAPE

The first thing I do every morning is check my hands.

Not consciously. Not anymore. It is the body's own inventory, an automatic audit conducted before the brain is fully online, before the alarm, before the light through the blinds registers as anything other than white noise in visual form. My fingers curl into my palms. My knuckles crack — the left hand in a satisfying cascade, the right in a grinding, unhappy protest that starts at the index finger and dies somewhere around the ring finger, where the knuckle has been swollen since 2019 and will remain swollen for the rest of my life.

My hands work. This is the assessment. Not well. But they work.

I open my eyes.

5:07 AM. The ceiling of my apartment is popcorn textured, which is an aesthetic crime, but the rent is cheap and the building is three blocks from the rink and a hockey player who reads Cora Halverson and lives in a one-bedroom with mismatched furniture does not get to have opinions about ceiling texture. I stare at it. I count the tiny peaks and valleys the way I used to count stars as a kid lying in the bed of my father's truck in Scranton — one, two, three, forty, a hundred, too many, stop counting, just look — and for a moment, the ceiling is almost beautiful.

My right knee announces itself. Not a sharp pain. A deep, structural objection — the kind of pain that lives in bone, not muscle. Bone-on-bone. My orthopedist, Dr. Kessler, showed me the X-ray six months ago and pointed with his pen to the place where cartilage is supposed to be and said, "This is the absence of cartilage," and I said, "It looks like a weather system," and he said, "It looks like the end of your career," and we both stood there, two men looking at a picture of my knee on a screen, one of us devastated and one of us clinical, and I have not been back since.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The knee protests. I give it a moment. We have an agreement, the knee and I: I do not ask it to be what it was, and it does not give out entirely. So far the treaty holds. I am aware that treaties end.

The ibuprofen is on the nightstand. Four pills. I dry-swallow them with the practiced efficiency of a man who has been self-medicating joint pain for the better part of a decade. The bottle is almost empty. I will buy another. I will always buy another. This is the infrastructure of an enforcer's body at thirty-one: chemical, repetitive, quietly desperate.

I pick up my phone.

The text from Colleen is there, sent at 9:42 PM last night, after I told her I had to go because morning skate was at six:

Dad, in the book the dragon doesn't actually eat the village. He's PROTECTING it. The village doesn't know. They think he's the bad guy but he's actually the good guy the whole time. ISN'T THAT SO SAD???

I read it twice. Three times. I let the words settle into the place in my chest where Colleen lives, which is the largest room in the entire architecture of me, the room with the highest ceilings and the most light.

I type back: That IS sad. But it's also kind of beautiful? He protects them even though they're afraid of him.

I stare at what I've written.

I delete the second sentence.

I type: That IS sad. We'll talk about it at reading tonight. Chapter 14?

She'll have read ahead. She always reads ahead and then pretends she hasn't, and I always pretend I don't know, and this is the foundation of our relationship: two people who love each other enough to maintain small, beautiful deceptions.

I shower. The water pressure in this building is an insult to plumbing, but the heat is good, and I stand under it with my hands braced against the tile and my head bowed and let the water work its way into the knots in my shoulders, my traps, my lower back. Everything hurts. Everything has hurt for years. The difference between twenty-one and thirty-one is not the pain — it is the permanence. At twenty-one, pain was temporary. A signal. Something passing through. At thirty-one, pain has moved in, unpacked its bags, rearranged the furniture. Pain lives here now. We are roommates.

I step out. I wipe the mirror with my forearm and look at myself.

The body in the mirror is a document. Every scar is a sentence. Every tattoo is a paragraph. The anchor on my left shoulder — Scranton, my father, the weight of origin. The ship across my chest — movement, the years in the ECHL, the buses and the motels and the minor league towns that all smelled like ice and fast food. The roses climbing my right arm — Amanda. Our wedding. The fact that I got roses for a woman who liked orchids because I was too nervous to remember, and she married me anyway, and the roses outlasted the marriage by three years and counting.

And on my ribs, below the left arm, in script that follows the curve of bone:

Tell me — what will you hold precious in this one short astonishing life?

Two people have seen this tattoo. The artist who put it there, a woman in Wheeling, West Virginia, named Dot, who said, "Cora Halverson, huh? You don't look like a Cora Halverson guy." And Amanda, who read it on our wedding night, traced it with her finger, and said, "That's pretty." Not I love that. Not tell me what it means to you. Just: pretty. A word you use for wallpaper.

I pull on jeans. A flannel — green and black, soft from years of washing. Boots. I am a large man who dresses like a lumberjack, and I am aware of this, and I do not care, because dressing for attention requires wanting attention, and I have spent my entire life trying to take up less space.

The Cora Halverson collection is on the nightstand, next to the ibuprofen. Long Light. The spine is broken in four places. I pick it up. It fits in my back pocket — barely. I have carried a book in my back pocket since I was fourteen, when my high school English teacher, Mrs. Ellison, handed me a copy of The Old Man and the Sea and said, "You look like a young man who needs a portable world," and she was so exactly right that I have not been without one since.

I drive to the rink.

The Allegheny Ice Center looks different in April. The parking lot that was patchy with ice and salt in January is clean now, almost green at the edges where the grass pushes through the cracks. The mural on the east wall — Wren's mural, the one that started as a side project and became the visual soul of the Save the Rink campaign — glows in the early light. A goalie in full stance. The town reflected in the mask. It is beautiful and defiant and exactly the thing that makes you believe a community can fight for what matters.

I park. I am the second car in the lot. Beckett's truck is already here. Beckett is always first. This is not dedication. This is pathology. But it is also the reason I trust him — a man who shows up before the sun is a man who is not leaving.

The locker room smells like Zamboni fumes and rubber and the specific, ineradicable funk of hockey equipment that has been accumulating humanity for decades. I love this smell. I will miss this smell. This thought arrives without permission, and I set it on the shelf where I keep the things I am not ready to examine.

I sit in my stall. My stall is in the corner, which is not assigned but understood — the enforcer takes the corner because the enforcer needs space, needs the wall at his back, needs the room to see the whole room without turning his head. I have sat in corners my entire life. When you are the biggest person in every room, you learn to give yourself walls.

I start taping my hands.

This is the ritual. The roll of white athletic tape. The slow, careful wrapping — around the wrist, across the palm, between the fingers. Each hand takes four minutes. I have timed it. I have been taping my hands before skate and before games for nineteen years, and the rhythm of it is as close to meditation as I get. The tape goes on and the world narrows to the width of the roll. Left hand: wrap, pull, smooth, wrap. Right hand: slower, gentler, the knuckles protesting, the scar tissue catching on the adhesive.

These hands have broken noses. Orbital bones. A jaw, once, in Elmira, a fight I did not want against a man I did not hate, because the coach pointed at me and pointed at the other team's enforcer and the transaction was understood. These hands have held my daughter. Have turned the pages of books that saved my life. Have traced the words of poets on paper so thin the ink bled through. Have been gentle and have been weapons, and the world has only ever wanted the weapons.

Beckett walks past my stall. He is in his base layer, his hair still wet, moving with the quiet, contained energy of a man who has finally learned that he does not have to carry the building on his back. He nods. I nod. We have a relationship built on nods and the mutual understanding that some men communicate through the economy of gestures rather than the extravagance of words.

Harper is with him — not physically, but in the way he moves now. Lighter. Less coiled. There was a version of Beckett before Harper that was a closed fist, and the version after is an open hand, and I noticed the difference before anyone else because I spend my life watching hands.

The team filters in. Mars, loud, laughing, his pre-game energy filling the room like weather. Theo, steady now, his hands holding steady, the panic attacks managed but not gone, a work in progress that I respect more than I can say. Asher, silent, AirPods in, a presence more than a person. Donnie Voss, who talks too much and means well. Hank Koller, the coach, who watches everything and says the right thing at the right time and nothing at the wrong time.

Playoffs. Round One. The building is electric with it. I can feel it in the floorboards, in the hum of the ancient HVAC system, in the way every stick tap and equipment adjustment carries a different weight than the regular season. This is the part that matters. The part the whole year builds toward.

And somewhere underneath the electricity, underneath the adrenaline, underneath the tape on my hands and the ibuprofen in my blood and the Cora Halverson in my back pocket, there is this:

This might be my last season.

Not might. Will. My body is telling me, in the language of bone and cartilage and swollen knuckles and a knee that sounds like gravel when I bend it. Thirty-one is ancient for an enforcer. I am playing on borrowed time with borrowed joints, and the bank is calling.

I finish taping my hands. I flex them. The tape is tight and white and clean, and for a few hours, my hands will be tools instead of ruins, and I will go out on the ice and do the one thing the world has ever asked of me: be big, be violent, be useful.

I pick up my stick. I head for the tunnel.

In my back pocket, Cora Halverson asks her question, and I do not have an answer.