David doesn’t know what he’d do without hockey. He’s tried not to think about it, and if he does, he thinks of it as a far-off eventuality, something he won’t have to face until his late thirties, his forties if he takes care of himself. Petersen was drafted only a year ahead of David, and now he’s left with nothing. Or maybe not. David doesn’t know him.

David wouldn’t have anything at all.

ok, he gets back, then nothing, not when he checks it ten minutes later, not an hour later, not at all.

*

good game, he does get three days later, after a two-point night. Maybe not another hat trick, but it was a good game, a win against Boston, which is rare for them. He had a textbook five-hole goal and one he set up for Kurmazov to tap in while David took the flak around the net. Jake had sent him those kinds of texts earlier in the season, only when David actually had a good game, not just when he got a point or a goal, and David had sent back Thanks., or nothing at all, because he wasn’t exactly sure what to say.

This time he sends back You were really good last night., because he watched a few highlights, and it’s the truth. He’s sure Jake’s been told that by plenty of people already, that he knows exactly how good he was, but when Jake’s name flashed in his messages David’s heart had been his throat, and it’s an unpleasant feeling, there’s nothing good about it, but he likes the alternative less. He wants to keep feeling it if he can.

David tries his best to have good games. Not that he doesn’t do that by default — he can’t try harder, because you can’t try harder than 100 percent, no matter how many idiots talk about putting in 110. But he tries to have good games, and for once he wants Jake to have them too, to play well every game, because then David can text him and it isn’t weird.

David spends Christmas in New York. It’s been snowing all week, and the airports are busy, and it wouldn’t make sense to go back to Ottawa just for two days, not if there’s a delay on the way there, maybe no flights out at all, Ottawa under even more snow than New York is. He could miss a game, and that’d be a disaster.

So he stays there, finds a nearby church that offers midnight mass. He hasn’t gone since he was a young, so young his father was still around, the last Prime Minister still in office, and they had to go because that was part of his mom’s job too.