My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Ninety-Eight

Draft day fell on a Saturday in late June, and the whole family gathered at the house — the real house, the one with the maple tree — because nobody, Richard included, could imagine watching this particular moment unfold anywhere else.

They'd set up a television in the living room angled so everyone could see it from the couch, the armchairs, the overflow of folding chairs Kai had hauled in from the garage, and by early afternoon the room held four generations: Mara and Adrian on the couch, Richard Sr. in his favorite armchair with Eleanor beside him, her hand resting light on his knee, Amparo and Kai perched on the arm of the loveseat, Talia sitting close beside Richard on the floor in front of the television because neither of them could stand the idea of watching this seated more than a few feet apart.

"You don't have to sit on the floor," Mara said, for the third time that afternoon. "There's a whole ottoman going unused."

"I like the floor," Richard said, which wasn't entirely true — his legs had gone half-numb an hour ago — but moving now, breaking whatever fragile equilibrium had settled over the room, felt like tempting fate in a way he wasn't willing to risk.

The draft coverage droned on in the particular slow, ceremonial way these broadcasts always did — commentary, highlight packages, long pauses between selections while cameras panned across war rooms in cities Richard had never visited, trying to read outcomes in the faces of strangers holding phones.

He'd been told, unofficially, by more than one source close to the process, that he was a likely second-round selection — solid, not spectacular, the kind of prospect teams valued for steadiness rather than flash. He'd made peace with that ranking weeks ago, mostly, the same way he'd made peace with being benched at development camp: real information, not a referendum on his worth. Still, sitting on the floor with Talia's hand laced through his, watching the first round tick past name after name that wasn't his, he felt his chest tighten in a way peace hadn't quite reached yet.

"Breathe," Talia murmured, not looking away from the screen.

"I am breathing."

"You're doing the thing where you forget to exhale between breaths. I can hear it."

He exhaled, deliberately, and felt her thumb trace once across his knuckles, grounding in the specific unhurried way she'd gotten good at over the past year.

The second round began, and somewhere around the eighth selection, the broadcast cut to a shot of the Thunderbolts' table — their general manager leaning toward a microphone, a graphic flashing the team's logo across the bottom of the screen — and Richard felt the entire room go still around him before the name had even been spoken, as though everyone else had clocked something in the broadcast's rhythm that he was too tangled in his own nerves to catch.

"With the forty-first overall selection," the commentator said, "the Thunderbolts are proud to select — right wing, Ashford University — Richard Cole."

The room exploded.

He would try, later, to reconstruct the exact sequence of what happened next, and never quite manage it — it arrived all at once, a blur of noise and motion. Talia was on her feet first, pulling him up with her, his grandmother's arms around him before he'd even fully processed the sound of his own name on national television, his father's hand gripping the back of his neck the way it had when Richard was small and had scored his first-ever goal in a backyard scrimmage, Amparo crying openly and not bothering to hide it, Kai clapping him on the back hard enough to nearly stagger him, his grandfather rising slowly from the armchair with Eleanor's help to embrace him properly, both of them murmuring words Richard only half-caught through the general roar of the room.

"Forty-first," Adrian kept saying, half to Richard and half to no one in particular, his voice thick. "Forty-first overall. Richie. You did it."

"We did it," Richard corrected, though he wasn't entirely sure who he meant by we — the whole sprawling, hard-won shape of this family, probably, all of them, going back decades, to a stairwell promise and a maple tree planted for a loss that had, somehow, across all these years, grown into this.

Later, once the initial noise had settled into something calmer — everyone still talking over each other, but softer now, punctuated by laughter instead of shouting — Mara found a quiet moment to pull Richard aside, out onto the back porch, just the two of them for the first time all day.

"I want to tell you something," she said, "and I want to tell you now, before the phone starts ringing off the hook with reporters and well-wishers and the whole circus that's about to descend on this family for the next little while."

"Okay."

"I never once, in thirty-some years of writing about this family — first as a journalist, then as whatever you'd call what I do now — imagined I'd get to write a chapter with this in it. A grandson, drafted, on the same afternoon his great-grandmother sat in that armchair holding his great-grandfather's hand." Her eyes were bright, and she didn't bother blinking it away. "I used to think the biggest miracle in this family's whole story was that your grandfather and I found our way back to each other. I don't think that's true anymore. I think the biggest miracle is that it kept going. That it just — kept growing, past us, into you, into whatever you're about to build with Talia. That's the part I never could have written, back at the beginning. I didn't have the imagination for it."

Richard put his arm around her, feeling, not for the first time, how small she'd gotten in recent years, how the woman who'd once run through woods in the dark to save a stranger's life now needed his arm to steady the porch railing beneath her hand.

"You wrote the whole thing that made this possible, though," he said. "All of it. Every book. I don't think I'd be standing here without everything you and Grandpa built first."

"Maybe," Mara said, smiling, wiping at her eyes with the back of her free hand. "Or maybe you'd have found your own way here regardless, and we just got the good fortune of watching it happen. I like to think it's a little of both. Keeps me humble, believing that."

Inside, the celebration had settled into its next phase — Kai already on the phone with a Thunderbolts contact confirming logistics, Amparo pulling up photos from her own memory to compare against Richard's moment, the particular blur of family joy that would, Richard suspected, become one of those stories retold at every future gathering, smoothed and polished the way the coffee-cup story had been, until it became simply part of the family's permanent architecture.

Talia found him on the porch before he went back in, wrapping her arms around him from behind, chin resting on his shoulder.

"Forty-first overall," she said softly. "How does it feel, now that it's actually happened instead of just a letter in your inbox?"

Richard thought about it honestly before answering, the way he'd learned to do with the big questions this whole strange, transformative year had kept asking him.

"Smaller than I expected," he admitted, "and bigger, both at once. Smaller because it's just one afternoon, one name called out of a list of names, and the world keeps turning exactly the same as it did an hour ago. Bigger because—" he gestured back toward the house, toward the sound of his family's laughter drifting out through the open door, "—because of all that. Because it means something to all of them, not just to me. I think that's the part I didn't understand until right now. It was never just going to be my moment alone."

"It never was," Talia agreed. "Not from the coffee cup on. Not from the first time you told your family about the scouting letter. You built a whole crowd of people who were always going to feel this exact thing the second your name got called. That's not smaller than you expected, Richard. That's the whole point."