The Cocky Hockey Captain

Epilogue ● The Last Game

We didn't exactly keep to our promise.

The first couple of years were fairly rosy. I enrolled back into Trinity starting January and cheered on the Bears all the way from sunny Orlando. Dad allowed me to join him on a couple of business trips back to Silver Grove, and I took advantage of that as much as I could to see — and touch — Dean and hang out with the guys and Lena Lee. Things started to look up between Hunter and her, and I jokingly asked them to be their maid of honor in the future.

The Bears kept their promise to win the province games. They took a picture of the trophy next to the plaque that named me lifetime honorary member of the team. I printed it and framed it and showed it to everybody who cared to listen to the story, as though the accomplishment were mine. The team made it to Nationals, but halfway through was defeated by a team from Quebec that had a guy who rivaled Dean in talent. They'd been together in the Junior Canada team that had won gold the previous summer, and that had been the beginnings of a long term rivalry.

A big win Dean got over the guy was that he was the first pick for the NHL draft three years later. The catch was that he ended up going to one of the biggest rivals from the local team, and the other guy went to the local team. From what I heard from Lena Lee, everybody in town was torn between supporting their homegrown superstar in a rival team, or if to support the local one.

The funniest thing was that a couple of years later, I did end up becoming Hunter and Lena Lee's maid of honor, and Pace was the best man. I took some time off from my internship so that I could travel up to Silver Grove to help with the wedding planning. And the baby shower. Because it was a shotgun wedding.

That was about the time when Dean and I started to have trouble. My studies had sucked the life out of me, while at the same time he'd had to carve his way in the team and in the league. Between classes and later my internship, and his packed season schedule of travel, we barely had time to talk or see each other on FaceTime. When we did, we were too exhausted to have any semblance of a romantic chat.

The wedding was during the off season, so he and I were able to coincide in Silver Grove during that time, and it was wonderful. Like a small honeymoon of our own. But when we went back to our regular lives afterwards, things went back to what had become the usual silence between us.

Two more years later and I didn't even know where we stood. It hurt too much to think about him, or about letting him go, even though it was probably what was the best for me.

And then he did something wild. He moved to Tampa and joined the team there. As soon as he told me, I marched up into my mentor's office and asked her for a transfer to a Tampa hospital. But of course life had its own way of doing things, for reasons unknown, because when I asked there were no vacancies. I insisted for months, but nothing opened for my specialty. So I focused on my work with passion.

Some weekends I was able to travel to Tampa and see him, prolonging the sense of a honey moon for just a little longer. He tried to come to Orlando at least once per month, but that was harder, because his time off didn't necessarily coincide with mine. All I wanted was to be with him, but the lives that we chose — that suited us, were not leading us together.

So we went on a limbo again. Two more years later, his team was poised to win a Stanley Cup and I was poised to get an award for my ground breaking work on a new PTSD treatment by combining the traditional method of cognitive behavioral therapy with the study of the patient's ability to process the painful memories in their sleep. I was contacted by a journalist who wanted to find out about it, and I didn't hesitate to meet with her. It wasn't that I wanted people to know about me, since thanks to the revolution I started at St. Andrews I showed up in the Silver Grove Times for years. There was already far too much about me out there. For some reason they even mentioned me in the article where they talked about how Lena Lee O'Connor-Perry became the first female principal of St. Andrews.