Second Shot: Home Game - Lake Haven Series Book 5

The cold hits like a warning shot. Five thirty in the morning, early December, and the floodlights turn everything outside their reach into black nothing. Snow falls steady and thick, the kind that piles up fast and makes you rethink every decision you have ever made about living in northern Michigan. I love it out here. Always have. The rink is the one place where my head goes quiet and my body remembers what it was built for.

I blow my whistle and the sound cracks across the ice like a starter pistol. “Passing drill, five lines, heads up.”

The boys filter onto the rink. Brady Torres leads them out, helmet strapped, eyes already sharp. Kid has been like that since freshman year, locked in before anyone else has finished yawning. Behind him, Eli Nguyen moves with that strange goalie grace, like his skeleton operates on a different set of instructions from the rest of the human race. The others follow. Eighteen kids who showed up in the dark because they want something bad enough to earn it in the cold.

Tank skates up beside me, stick across his knees, breath pluming in the floodlights. He looks like a bear someone taught hockey. A very large, very opinionated bear.

“Torres is flying,” he says.

“Saw it.”

“Kid could go D-one if he keeps his grades where they need to be.”

“Working on it.”

Tank gives me the look. Not the hockey look, the other one. The one that says he is about to bring up something I do not want to discuss.

“Don’t,” I say.

“Didn’t say anything.”

“You’re building up to it. I can hear you thinking.”

He grins and pushes off, gliding back toward the defensive end. “Just wondering if Charlie’s coming out tonight. That’s all.”

I do not answer. I blow the whistle again and watch Brady execute a give-and-go so clean it makes my chest hurt a little. Not from pride, though there is that. From the ghost of what my own hands used to do, before time and a shattered knee turned me into the guy with the clipboard instead of the guy with the puck.

Dave appears at the boards around six, folding himself into some position that cannot be good for his spine. The man has been filming me for three years and I still do not understand how his joints work. He is part pretzel, part shadow. He catches my eye and gives me the small nod that means the camera is rolling, and I do what I always do, forget about it and coach.

Melissa materializes fifteen minutes later. Clipboard in hand. Color-coded tabs fluttering in the wind like tiny bureaucratic prayer flags. She has her hipster glasses on and a puffy jacket that probably cost more than my first truck. Behind her, Amber hovers with her tablet, thumbs flying, probably cataloging “authentic winter energy” or whatever phrase she is obsessed with this week.

“Wyatt.” Melissa’s producer voice. Calm, measured, relentless. “When you get a second.”

“Busy.”

“I can see that. It’s about the network call.”

I let Brady’s line run the drill twice more before I skate to the boards. The cold has made my right knee stiff, and I take the last few strides carefully, the way you handle something that might break if you push it wrong.

“Talk,” I say.

Melissa flips to a yellow tab. Yellow is network. Pink is schedule. Red is Stephen is unhappy. I have learned her system over the years, the way you learn the habits of someone you cannot quite get rid of.

“Programming loved the hockey footage. Ranch stuff is testing well. But they want more personal texture for the winter arc.”

“Texture.”

“Community. Home life. They specifically mentioned Charlie.”

There it is. The thing I have been waiting for and dreading since the show started pulling numbers. A tight knot pulls under my rib, not pain exactly, more like a rope being tested.

“Charlie is not part of this.”

“She’s part of your life. And your life is the show.”

“My coaching life. My ranch life.”

“Wyatt, the audience already knows she exists. They see her at games, at Henderson’s. They are curious. And curious is why those kids out there have gear and ice time and buses to away games.”

She is not wrong. That is the worst part. The money the show brings in pays for equipment, travel, training facilities. It funds camps and scholarships. It is why we have the best program in the region instead of just another small-town team hoping the booster club can cover gas money.

“I’ll think about it.”

“That’s what you said last month.”

“And I am still thinking. Slowly. Like a glacier. Very deliberate.”

She makes a note. Probably in red. “Just consider some low-key domestic content. Henderson’s, a school event, something normal couples do. It does not have to be invasive.”

“Everything you film is invasive by definition.”

“Fair.” She caps her pen. “But it is also the reason those lights are on every morning.”

She walks away. I stand at the boards and watch the boys run the next drill, and I tell myself I am thinking about hockey. I am not thinking about Charlie’s face when she finds out the network wants to put her in the show. I am not thinking about the quiet fury she does so well, the kind where she gets more precise instead of louder, and every word lands like a scalpel.

I am definitely thinking about hockey.

*

Practice ends at seven thirty. The boys drag themselves off the ice, steaming in the cold air like a herd of exhausted horses. Tank stays behind to check the boards on the far side where someone took a bad angle last week and cracked the plexiglass.

My phone buzzes as I climb the stairs to the house. My knees remind me I am not twenty-five anymore. Jack would have laughed at me for that. He was still splitting wood at seventy, still moving like time owed him a favor.

Charlie’s text: Survived another staff meeting. How was practice?

I type back: Cold. Good. Kids looked sharp.

Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. I watch them while I push through the kitchen door and shed layers. Jack’s old barn jacket still hangs on the hook by the door. I cannot bring myself to move it. His coffee mug, chipped, faded, some joke about fishing that stopped being funny twenty years ago, sits on the shelf above the stove. I reach past it for my own.

Her reply comes through: You coming into town tonight?

I should. I know I should. But there is the plow situation, and the calves that need checking, and Melissa’s network conversation sitting in my head like a stone I swallowed.

Tomorrow might work better. Things piled up here.

The dots again. Then: Ok.

One word. I know what that word means after twenty years of knowing Charlie Brooks. It means she is not okay. It means she is tired of being okay about things that are not okay. It means I am screwing something up but she is too worn out to explain it again, and honestly, she should not have to.

I am staring at the phone when I hear Tank’s truck pull up outside. A minute later the kitchen door opens and he comes in stamping snow off his boots, reaching for the coffee pot like it is a life preserver.

“Boards are fine,” he says. “Just the seal. I’ll fix it Thursday.”

“Thanks.”

He pours coffee and leans against the counter. For a second everything is normal. Then his phone rings.

I watch his face change. Not a lot, Tank is not a man who gives much away unless he wants to. But something shifts behind his eyes. The jaw tightens. He turns toward the window and says three or four words I cannot make out, then ends the call and pockets the phone.

“Everything good?” I ask.

“Yeah.” He takes a long drink of coffee. “Just some town stuff.”

“Town stuff.”

“Nothing worth getting into right now.”

Here is the thing about Tank Thompson. The man once ran through a plate glass window during a bar fight in Duluth and finished his beer after. He does not rattle. Whatever that call was, it rattled him. And the fact that he will not tell me what it is means it is either about Kat, which he would say, or about something he thinks I cannot handle right now, which is worse.

I let it go. I should not let it go. But I am already carrying Melissa’s pitch and Charlie’s “Ok” and the weight of Jack’s empty chair in the corner, and there is only so much a man can hold before he starts dropping things.

Tank leaves after one cup. I drink mine standing at the window, watching the snow cover his tire tracks in the drive. The barn is out there. The calves need checking. There are fences to walk and a plow truck that may or may not have gas in it. A hundred small tasks that have kept this place running since before I was born.

My phone buzzes again. Charlie.

We can’t keep trading homes like this forever, Cowboy.

I read it twice. Three times. She is right. I know she is right. The ranch is not just a house, though. It is Jack’s life, and the team’s future, and the only solid ground I have ever really known. The idea of leaving it, even part-time, feels like letting go of something I cannot get back.

I know. We’ll talk about it. Soon.

Her reply comes fast: Define soon.

After the holidays. Things are crazy right now.

Nothing for a minute. Then: Sure. Talk tomorrow.

I pocket the phone and pour the rest of my coffee down the sink. Through the window I can see the barn, the snow piling on the roof, the faint steam rising from the vents. Out past the barn, the rink lights are still on, glowing in the snowfall like something from a painting. Jack built that rink. I built it into something that matters. Every morning those lights come on and eighteen kids show up because they believe in what we are doing here.

I pull my coat back on and step outside. The cold hits my face and I let it. Easier to feel that than to sit with the text still burning in my pocket, the question I keep finding ways not to answer.

The calves need checking.

The rest of it can wait.