Page 4 of Fake Shot

I stop pucks from going into a net, and he saves lives.

I power off my phone so I won’t be inundated with his messages—once he gets started, the texts just roll in. Drew’s watching me with interest, but this isn’t a conversation I want to have. So I close my eyes and turn my head away from him. Maybe I can catch a few minutes of sleep before we land.

“You sure you don’t want to come to breakfast with us?” Zach Reid asks as we’re wheeling our suitcases across the tarmac toward the parking lot at the private airport we flew into.

“Yeah,” I say. “Positive. The only thing I want to do right now is sleep.”

“You didn’t sleep at all on the plane, did you?” Drew asks.

“Not a wink.”

“You’re too old to pull all-nighters,” Ronan McCabe, our team captain, says.

“No shit, Cap.” I glance over at McCabe, and his lips are pressed into a thin line. I know he worries about how many years I have left in me. We’ve played together for a decade already, but I’ve got five years on him. I’ve never played anywhere but Boston, and I count myself lucky.

There are guys like Drew who have moved around at the end of every contract—though Boston just signed him for another six years, so he should be here for a while. Which isgood, since he lives with and has a kid with Jameson’s other sister, Audrey.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” McCabe says. As always, his voice is a low growl.

This is an old argument, so I say the same thing I do every time. “Why? You’re our captain.”

He side-eyes me. “So are you.”

I’m not technically a captain, because the NHL’s rules don’t allow goaltenders to hold that role for logistical reasons—there would be too many delays if the goalie had to leave the crease every time he wanted to talk to the refs about a call.

So instead, McCabe took on that distinction, while I settled for the very unofficial title of “off-ice captain.” Sure, the guys generally look up to me because I’ve been here longer than anyone else, but McCabe is the one whose grumpy ass gets to lead this team officially.

He never treats me as anything less than an equal, but it still sucks sometimes knowing that I’ll never see that “C” on my jersey. Of all the things I’ve accomplished in my years in the league, I’m not sure anything would mean more than knowing my teammates, coaching staff, and the organization felt I was worthy of the title.

I roll my eyes and press the button on my key fob to open the trunk of my Porsche Cayenne. It’s rained while we’ve been gone, and my baby needs to be washed. I’ll drop her off with the valet in my building when I get home so she can get detailed.

Once I sling my suitcase into the trunk, I shut the liftgate and say goodbye to my teammates. As good as breakfast sounds right now, I need sleep more than anything.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m exiting the tunnel onto the surface roads leading to the Seaport, having navigated what would normally be a much longer drive in a short time thanks to the early Sunday morning lack of traffic. And that’s when I realize I never turned my phone back on. While waiting for a light, I power it up and set it on the charger. As it syncs up with my car, I see that I have 42 text notifications and 2 missed calls, which is not normal for 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Most of the texts are from my brother, so I ignore those for now. But both calls are from the head of maintenance at my building, and that can’t be good.

“How could it possibly be this bad?” I ask Andy as I walk down the hallway from my front door toward my living room.

On the right, the entire ceiling above my kitchen has collapsed—drywall, plaster, insulation, and water cover every surface. Through what used to be a ceiling, you can see broken, soaked wood flooring, and the corner of either my washing machine or dryer is poking through, but is held in place by the splintered floor and the steel beams that support it. The walls of the kitchen are soaking wet, and the top cabinets look like they might fall off at any moment. As it is, we’re standing in at least an inch of water that’s spread down the hallway.

“It’s hard to know how long the water ran after the washing machine hose burst. But based on the damage, it seems like maybe it’s been running for days.”

We stop walking when we reach the wide stairs that lead to my sunken living room, which appears to have served as a waterfall area for the water to collect there. My couches are soaked, and the wooden table that normally sits between them is floating like a boat in several inches of water.

“Is it even safe to be standing here?” I ask him. “Given that the ceiling of my second floor collapsed, what’s stopping this area from collapsing into the condo below us?”

“Luckily, not enough water has soaked through this floor to cause that kind of collapse,” he says as he stands next to me in the blue uniform of our building’s maintenance crew.

“Just enough for my downstairs neighbor to notice water leaking?”

“Exactly. Thankfully, they noticed when they did, or it could have been a whole lot worse. We probably should get out of here,” he says. “I just wanted you to see what we’re into. The power’s off indefinitely, and the cleanup crew is on their way here. But ...”

“But what?” I ask when he doesn’t finish the sentence.

“When I’ve seen damage this extensive before, it takes a long time to repair.”

“How long?”

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