Page 5 of Home Ice Advantage

He hadsomepride.

Strangely, he didn’t feel nervous at all. If Joe Conroy had called him like this, they’d already made up their minds. Really, all he had to do was make sure that it was the kind of position he’d actually want, that he’d have the freedom to run the team the way he wanted to run it without too much front office interference. What Ryan had planned wouldn’t work if he wouldn’t be allowed free rein.

The traffic, expectedly, was terrible. Everyone complained about Boston drivers, but New Hampshire was way, way worse, and the combination of the two was just asking for a headache. By the time he parked his car at the Spectrum, he wasn’t the half hour early he generally preferred, but he did have time to swing by the Dunkin’ near the front gates. Shannon had always teased him about it, but Ryan liked his coffee sweet, and the Dunkin’s in New Hampshire just weren’t the same.

He’d been in the Spectrum—the old one across the street—many times as a kid, watching games, even playing mites on ice exhibition matches during the intermissions. He’d pounded the ice in the new Spectrum many times during his long career. He’d looked up at the blue glass and red brick above North Station more times than he could remember. The halls and the seats and the stands were so familiar. He knew his way around the warren of hallways around the locker rooms.

But it was different now, walking into it and heading for the office, knowing that he might have a chance to do something really innovative here.

It was stupid, but he reached out and pinched the skin and tendon on his own wrist. The sharp pain of it a reminder that yes: he was, actually, here.

After all of the internal buildup the actual interview was almost anticlimactic. In the room were Joe Conroy, Gilbert Underhill, the president of hockey operations, and Andy Chernoff, the team’s owner. It was pretty funny to find that Ryan had been right from the beginning. The whole interview was more their sales pitch to him rather than the other way around.

“Do I get to pick my own staff?” Ryan asked, halfway through.

“We have assistant coaches under contract for the next year and we would like to finish out their contracts so that the team isn’t paying treble, but if you absolutely can’t work with them or if they don’t fit your vision, you have carte blanche.”

Ryan had done his research before heading in. The staff was a strange one: the assistant coach responsible for the forwards was Eric Aronson, a guy who, like Ryan, had also gone undrafted. Aronson had had a long and relatively successful career, but he’d never won the Cup in Calgary. Even though he’d set all kinds of franchise records for the Stampede, most of them were for games played and penalty minutes; he’d been suspended multiple times and had at least two separate biting scandals.

The assistant coach on defense wasn’t much better. Peter McCaskill was one of the last of the old breed, a stay-at-home defenseman who was lucky to crack twenty points a season, a man who’d done more of his work with his fists than on his feet.

“Is it going to be an issue that none of them were offered the job?” Ryan asked.

“It won’t be if they want to stay in our employ,” Underhill said, with a shrug.

Ryan thought about everything he knew about Aronson and thought maybe this was a little optimistic.

By the time the hour finished, Ryan had a new job, a handshake promise that he’d have free rein in that new job and alotof shit he needed to get done before reporting to training camp the next day.

His mind raced through all of it: hotel reservations and apartment tours and cheap furniture and lists of personnel and tape from the training camp days he’d missed and what he was going to say to a new team who had no idea what to expect both from him and from the season in general and what he was going to say to the guys whose job he’d snatched right out from under their noses. The vague guilt that he was leaving behind the boys on the peewee team mingling with the faint relief that he wasn’t going to have to finesse their parents anymore.

In the back of his head, he could hear Dad’s derisive, booming laugh.You?You’rethe one they picked for this?

Ryan had spent a lot of his forty-five years proving people wrong. Not least among them his family. This was no different. For the first time in a long time, Ryan felt the prickly-skinned feeling of excitement before a big game, the eagerness to compete that fizzed through his bloodstream.

Hewasthe one they’d picked for this. And he was going to work damn hard to show them they’d made the right choice, the same way he’d done his entire life.

Still, it felt weird to accept it. To know that all of this was weird and that it was going to happen and that he and the Beacons’ front office were the only ones who knew about it. In the past, he would’ve called Shannon to tell her. But hockey was the last thing she probably wanted to hear about, and Ryan was the last person she probably wanted to hear it from. She had already had him served with the divorce papers, when he was coming out of the hotel in the morning, and had followed up with a curt text message,Fill out the forms the process server had for you. Send them back to me immediately.

He had done it, because he wasn’t an asshole, but it had stung a little.

Once he was back in his car, he buckled his seat belt, slipped his phone into its holder, called Murph.

“Hello?” Murph asked, picking up on the second ring.

Ryan could hear the sounds of a rink in the background: the scrape of skates on ice, kids and parents yelling. Of course Murph was probably out with his family. “Hey, bud. Bad time?”

“Nah, it’s cool. Tara and I are at Sophia’s game. And then Mason’s playing after. But I have a minute if you have the time.”

Somehow, he felt better just hearing Murph’s voice. The two of them had known each other for years. First in the general way you knew everyone who played hockey, growing up in Boston, even though Murph had gone to the expensive Catholic prep school with its own varsity team and Ryan had gone to public school in Southie. They’d played against each other in tournaments and Ryan had always been both annoyed and impressed by him. Murph’s size and strength and skill in comparison to Ryan’s sheer bloody-minded fucking willpower. Back then, Murphhadbeen a whole foot taller.

It didn’t mean anything until what should have been their draft year. That was when he’d really gotten toknowSean Murphy, beyond the vague outline of a gigantic redheaded menace with more freckles than skin.

Ryan went undrafted and went to college; Murph was picked third overall by the Desperadoes and went to college. The Desperadoes had let Murph do his time in school and grow into his body while Ryan left school early with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. And then, when Ryan was really starting to consider whether or not he should hang up his skates after a couple seasons of grinding along in the minors, the Desperadoes’ general manager took a flyer on him.

From the time he’d made it down to Dallas, they’d been inseparable. Practically lived out of each other’s pockets for months. Were referred to by their teammates asSullyandMurph, an inseparable unit.Were the best men at each other’s weddings. They’d won a Cup together. Had their jerseys retired together. They still talked almost every week.

Everything that had happened to him—Shannon kicking him out, the job offer—had happened so fast Ryan hadn’t even had time to think about it. As soon as Murph started talking, everything felt easier.

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