Page 128 of Goal Line

“Renaud and his snarky comments.”

“You used to be the snarky teammate, too,” McCabe reminds him.

“And now I’m a ray of fucking sunshine,” Colt says with a goofy grin, and we all laugh.

“It’ll be an adjustment having him back...for him most of all,” McCabe says, and I can’t tell how he’s feeling about his best friend’s return to the team.

“Is he as much of a dick in person as he seems on the ice?” Drew asks.

“No, Renaud’s not a dick,” McCabe says. “But he’s also not in the NHL to make friends.”

“Well, training camp ought to be fun then,” Zach says, his tone sarcastic.

Again, I wonder what Renaud’s return to the team will bring. He’s an all-star player, but I’m curious—and honestly a little worried about—how his presence might change the tenor of our team.

“We’re not the same team we were when he left,” McCabe says. While our team didn’t undergo the kind of major shake-up that sometimes happens around the trade deadline, the fact that three of the six of us standing here didn’t play for this team before last season says a lot. “He’ll need to adjust.”

Walsh huffs out an ironic laugh. “Riiiight, because Renaud is so flexible.”

“Coming back from injury is humbling, especially whenyou missed a whole season,” McCabe says. “Let’s just give him some grace as he re-acclimates.”

“Listen to you,” I say with a laugh. “You’re such a wise old man now.”

“Never thought I’d see the day,” Walsh says to McCabe. “Seems like AJ and fatherhood have softened you up.”

McCabe lets out a chuckle. “Don’t I know it. Now, can you stop relaxing on the fucking glider so we can finish setting this nursery up?”

There’sthe grumpy captain we all know and love.

“Do you have a chair or a step stool somewhere?” Colt asks, as Zach hands him a mobile with padded white clouds and stars hanging from wooden arches. “I want to hang this above the crib.”

I grab a dining chair from the other room, and when I return, Walsh is telling Colt that he should let someone else hang it. “I’m not going to fuck up my knee standing on a chair, and none of you assholes are tall enough,” Colt grumbles, taking the chair from me and stepping up on it.

He’s leaning over the crib, one hand on the wall and the other reaching up to loop the mobile chain over the ceiling hook, when we hear AJ behind us. “Get your ass off that chair before I have to put you back on the IR, Colt.”

I turn to see Jules laughing next to our GM. Colt ignores her and hangs the mobile, before using his injured leg—with the knee sleeve visible below the hem of his shorts—to step down.

“I’m already cleared to skate, AJ,” he says, once he’s firmly on the ground.

“Yeah, well, you don’t need to take any unnecessary risks.”

“You realize they have me doing basically this exact thingat PT, right? We’re moving to box jumps next week. I’m not broken.”

“Sure you’re not, old man,” Jules says as she crosses the room to give him a kiss.

It’s funny to think that at the beginning of the season, Colt was the wild one—the NHL fuckboy who no one thought would ever settle down. Now, headed into his final season in the NHL, he’s engaged to his agent’s little sister and is as whipped as the rest of us.

“You guys made great progress while we were at the hospital,” Audrey says as she surveys the room.

She and Jules were invaluable in helping me get this room ready for our baby. I’d shared the Pinterest board of nursery ideas that Eva had made, and they’d ordered everything and put us guys to work building it.

Between Audrey’s design skills and Jules’s carpentry knowledge, which she graciously shared all the way from her vacation in Bali, the two of them have created what I hope will be the nursery of Eva’s dreams—a soothing palette of cream, sage, and peach, wooden furniture, and a fun chandelier hanging from the high ceiling.

I can’t wait to surprise her when she and our baby come home from the hospital.

My phone rings, and the whole room grows silent as all eyes turn to me. Since our phones are almost always on silent mode, hearing a ringtone is always a little jarring, especially since mine has been on the loudest setting since Eva’s been in the hospital.

I slide it out, and sure enough, it’s Eva. I make sure our friends keep quiet so Eva has no reason to question whyeveryone’s at our condo, and then answer. “Hey, baby, what’s up?”