Page 87 of Breakaway Daddies

Coach’s jaw clenches. “I didn’t think… I thought she just needed space. I didn’t think we’d lose her.”

No one speaks. The truth hangs there like smoke, thick and choking.

Then Coach’s tone shifts, softens just a little. “Listen. I know you’re hurting. I do. But we’ve got a championship game in a week. Seven days. That’s it. No more maybes. No more distractions. I need you here.”

His voice sharpens again, eyes hard as steel. “You want to fall apart? Fine. But not on my ice. You show up like this again, heads half in the game, I’ll bench every one of you. I don’t care how much the press screams.”

Thomas’s head snaps up. “You’d bench us? All three of us?”

“If I have to,” Coach says, dead serious. “Because the way you’re playing? You’re already gone.”

I swallow hard. My heart pounds like a drum in my throat. “We’re trying.”

Coach levels his gaze at me. “Try harder.”

Bruno curses under his breath, low and bitter. Thomas exhales through his nose like he’s trying not to explode. I just stare at the floor again, every muscle locked up tight.

Coach softens, just slightly. “I didn’t want it to go like this. But we’ve got one shot. One week. You pull yourselves together, or we lose it all. Not just the title. Everything we’ve built this year.”

His voice drops, quieter but no less heavy. “I’m not asking you to stop hurting. I’m asking you to play through it. Can you do that?”

We all nod. Slowly. Quietly. Like soldiers in a war they didn’t sign up for.

Coach leans back again, finally looking like the weight’s getting to him, too. “Alright. Go get cleaned up. And figure it out. Because when that puck drops next week? You either show up as the team you were, or you don’t bother showing up at all.”

We file out in silence. Nothing feels fixed.

But now we know just how close we are to losing everything.

And how fast it’s slipping away.

We walk out of Coach’s office in silence, our footsteps echoing down the concrete tunnel like a countdown clock we can’t stop. The air between us is thick, weighed down by everything we didn’t say. Everything we can’t fix.

It feels like we’re walking away from more than a conversation. Like we just left a funeral we didn’t know we were attending.

Bruno breaks the silence first, his voice low and rough. “Well. That’s that, huh?”

Thomas lets out a humorless laugh, sharp and brittle. “No more checking our phones every five seconds. No more late-night what-ifs. No more hoping she’ll just… show up.”

I drag a hand down my face. “It’s hockey now. That’s all we’ve got left.”

Bruno nods, jaw clenched like he’s trying not to spit glass. “Back to basics. Wake up. Work. Bleed if you have to. Just… grind.”

Thomas swipes a hand through his hair, restless, angry. “We lost her. And maybe we deserved to. But I’m not losing this season, too. I won’t.”

We stop at the end of the tunnel, just short of the light pouring in from the empty rink beyond. The ice is quiet. Pristine. Waiting.

I look at it like it might give something back. Like it might fill the space she left behind.

But it doesn’t.

There’s no miracle. No fix. Just three guys standing in the wreckage of something they didn’t know how to hold onto.

We all nod. Quiet, grim, resigned.

Jinx is gone. Whatever strange, bright, chaotic thing we had with her… It’s over.

So we do the only thing left to do.

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