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The Boodram household smelled like jerk chicken and chaos, which was exactly the way Zane liked it.
Cassie had outdone herself. The dining table had been extended with a folding card table shoved against one end and covered with a tablecloth that almost matched, and every inch of surface was loaded with food. Rice and peas, coleslaw, grilled corn, plantain, two enormous salads that nobody would touch until Wyatt quietly started eating one, and enough chicken to feed a small country.
Players filled every available seat. Zane presided over the head of the table like a king surveying his court, Milo perched on his lap and already smeared with sauce from chin to eyebrows. Shane and Ilya sat across from each other near the middle because Ilya refused to sit next to Shane at team dinners on the grounds that Shane would silently judge how much he ate. Shane had not denied this.
Josh was mid-story about a gas station encounter in Saskatchewan that had somehow already taken four minutes and showed no signs of ending. Troy and Harris sat pressed together at the card-table extension, Harris's phone out as he scrolled through something while Troy absently stole bites off his plate. Nick ate steadily and without comment beside Evan, who was trying to show Tanner a fishing reel on his phone while Tanner pretended to care.
Angus had already told two dad jokes. Peter had said exactly one word since arriving, and it had been "no."
Luca sat near the end of the table between Max and Wyatt, working his way through a mountain of rice with the quiet focus of someone who took eating very seriously. His plate was pristine in its organisation — chicken in one section, rice in another, salad carefully segregated — and he ate with the kind of European table manners that made everyone around him look feral by comparison.
"Can someone pass me the salt?" Luca asked, glancing up.
The salt was closer to Ilya, who reached for it without looking away from whatever argument he was having with Josh about whether moose were dangerous.
"Moose will kill you," Josh said emphatically. "They don't care."
"I have seen moose," Ilya said. "They are just big ugly horse."
"Ilya, they weigh fifteen hundred pounds."
"Salt, please," Luca repeated politely.
Ilya passed it down the line. It travelled through Zane's hands, then Nick's, then Wyatt's, before arriving in front of Luca. He picked it up, examined his plate with great seriousness, and then said, in his soft Swiss-accented English, completely without inflection: "Thank you. This chicken is so good I would literally sell my ass for it."
The table didn't react for approximately one and a half seconds.
Then it detonated.
Zane choked on a piece of corn. Josh's story about Saskatchewan died mid-sentence and was never finished. Angus set his fork down very carefully, pressed both hands flat against the table, and stared at the ceiling. Tanner made a sound like a seal being stepped on. Troy turned to Harris with an expression of pure, unbridled delight, and Harris had already started typing something on his phone, probably documenting the moment for posterity.
Ilya's head swivelled toward Luca with the slow, horrified precision of an owl spotting prey.
"What," Ilya said, "did you just say?"
Luca blinked. He looked around the table at the various stages of collapse happening on every side. Max had his face buried in both hands and his shoulders were shaking. Wyatt, to his credit, was simply staring at Luca with the calm, measured expression of a man who had seen everything and was no longer surprised by anything.
"I said the chicken is very good," Luca offered.
"No," Shane said from across the table. His voice was level. His face was not. There was a crack in the composure, a tiny fracture around the mouth that suggested he was fighting something enormous. "No, you said something else."
"I said I would sell my—"
"Stop," Angus said, raising one hand. "Please. My children are not here, but I still feel like I need to cover someone's ears."
"Milo is here," Cassie called from the kitchen doorway, though she was grinning.
Milo looked up from Zane's lap, sauce-covered and unbothered. "Uncle Luca said a bad word?"
"Uncle Luca said a *spectacular* bad word," Zane wheezed.
Luca's brow furrowed. He looked at Max, who had finally lifted his face from his hands and was red from forehead to neck. "Is that not right? You said that is how you say something is very good."
Every head at the table turned toward Max.
Max raised both hands in immediate surrender. "I may have — okay, look, I might have given him some *casual expressions* when he first got here, but—"
"Max," Nick said quietly. Just the name. Nothing else. It carried the weight of a courtroom verdict.
"This is not the first time," Ilya announced, pointing at Luca with his fork. The accent thickened the way it always did when he was animated. "This kid — I am telling you, he is cursed. Every time he opens mouth, something terrible comes out. Beautiful, terrible thing."
"He's not cursed," Shane said.
"He told reporter last month that he was — what was word — *rock hard* for playoffs."
The table collapsed again. Josh physically pushed back from the table and bent over his knees laughing. Evan, who had been quietly eating through the entire event, finally cracked and let out a low, rumbling laugh that shook his shoulders.
"I meant excited!" Luca protested, a flush creeping up his neck. "In German, we say — it is similar, the feeling of being very—"
"It is not similar," Peter said. It was the second thing he'd said all evening and it was delivered with such flat certainty that it set off another wave.
Harris leaned over to Troy. "I had to write the correction press release for that one. Three paragraphs explaining what he actually meant."
"I remember," Troy said, grinning. "You texted me from your desk and just said 'I cannot do this anymore.'"
"Because I couldn't."
Luca looked down at his plate. The flush had reached his ears now, turning them pink, but there was something in his expression that wasn't quite embarrassment. If anything, he looked mildly frustrated, the way someone looks when they've been interrupted during something important. He picked up his fork and took another bite of chicken.
"Can I please finish eating," he said.
"Absolutely not," Zane said. "We're going through the whole list."
"There is list?" Ilya asked, delighted.
"There should be," Angus said. "I'll start. Second week of training camp. Luca walks up to Coach Wiebe — our head coach, the man who decides his career — looks him dead in the eye and says, 'Coach, I am ready to go down on this team.'"
The noise that left Josh's mouth was not human.
Brandon Wiebe was not present at the dinner, but his spirit hung over the table like a benevolent ghost. Everyone knew the story. Everyone also knew that Brandon had simply blinked twice, said "I appreciate the enthusiasm, Luca," and walked away without correcting him, because Brandon Wiebe was a saint.
"He told me my wife was a snack," Evan added, shaking his head slowly. "Right in front of Caitlin. Just walked up after a family skate and said, 'Your wife is a real snack, Evan.' Caitlin almost fell over."
"That one is actually correct," Tanner pointed out.
"It's correct but you don't *say* it to the husband!"
"Why not?" Luca asked, genuinely confused. "She brought very good cookies."
Another beat of silence. Then comprehension dawned across several faces simultaneously.
"He meant — oh my God," Josh said. "He meant she literally brought snacks."
"What else would I mean?"
Shane pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. Ilya watched him do it with visible joy.
"You see?" Ilya said. "Cursed. The boy is cursed. Everything he says has two meanings and he only knows one."
"That's not a curse," Wyatt said calmly. "That's just learning English."
"No," Ilya said, shaking his head with great authority. "I learn English too. I never told coach I want to go down on team."
"You told a referee to blow you once," Shane said without looking up.
Ilya paused. "That was different. I knew what I was saying."
The laughter rolled through the room like a wave, easy and warm, the kind that only happens when people know each other well enough to be ridiculous. Cassie appeared with a massive tray of brownies and set them in front of Luca first, which he accepted with visible relief.
"Finally," he murmured, reaching for the biggest one.
"Hold on," Zane said, leaning forward. "We're not done. There was also the time he told that equipment manager—"
"Let the kid eat his brownie," Nick said.
Nick's voice carried the quiet, inarguable weight it always did. Zane leaned back. Luca bit into the brownie and closed his eyes with an expression of genuine contentment.
The table settled into a gentler rhythm. Side conversations bloomed. Ilya started arguing with Josh about moose again. Troy fed Harris a piece of plantain and Harris pretended to be annoyed about it. Milo climbed down from Zane's lap and wandered over to Luca, who broke off a piece of brownie and handed it to him without being asked.
"Uncle Luca," Milo said, chocolate already smeared across his cheek, "you're funny."
"I am not trying to be funny," Luca said seriously. "That is the problem."
Angus, who had been watching from across the table, caught Wyatt's eye. They shared the kind of look that only years of friendship could produce — fond, amused, and underneath it all, quietly protective. The kid was twenty years old, thousands of miles from home, learning a new language in a new country while trying to establish himself in the hardest hockey league in the world. The fact that he sat at this table at all, comfortable enough to eat and complain and let himself be teased, meant they were doing something right.
"Luca," Angus called.
"Yes?"
"You're doing great, kid."
Luca looked at him. The flush had faded. The frustration had gone. What was left was something simpler — a young man surrounded by people who had decided, without discussion or ceremony, that he was theirs to look after.
"Thank you, Angus," Luca said. Then he paused, tilting his head. "Max told me the correct response is 'that's what she said.' Is that right?"
The table erupted for the third time. Max dove under it.
The brownies disappeared faster than Cassie could cut them, but the stories showed no signs of slowing down. The table had shifted into that loose, post-dinner energy where nobody was eating with any real purpose anymore but nobody wanted to leave, either. Plates had been pushed aside. Drinks were refilled. Milo had fallen asleep against Zane's shoulder with chocolate still drying on his chin.
Ilya leaned back in his chair and spread his hands wide. "Okay. We are doing this properly. From beginning. The interview."
"Oh God," Harris said, setting his phone face-down on the table like he was bracing for impact. "The interview."
"Which interview?" Luca asked, reaching for another brownie.
"The one where you told a national television audience that you were rock hard for the playoffs," Ilya said. "That interview."
"I already explained this. In German—"
"Luca," Troy said gently, "there is no version of that phrase in English that means what you think it means."
Luca chewed his brownie and looked unconvinced.
Harris pinched the bridge of his nose in a gesture that mirrored Shane's from earlier. "I was standing right behind the camera. The reporter — Danielle, lovely woman, absolute professional — she asked him how the team was feeling going into the first round. Standard question. Softball. The kind of thing where you say 'we're excited' or 'we're focused' and move on with your life."
"And instead," Troy continued, because they clearly told this story as a unit, "Luca looks directly into the camera, gives that little serious nod he does—"
"I do not do a nod."
"You absolutely do a nod," Josh said. "It's like this." He tucked his chin and gave a single, solemn dip of his head. Several people confirmed this was accurate.
"—and he says, 'I am rock hard for these playoffs. The whole team is rock hard.'" Harris closed his eyes. "The *whole team*, Luca. You made it worse by including everyone."
Angus was shaking silently, both hands covering his mouth.
"Danielle didn't even blink," Harris continued. "True professional. She just said 'great to hear' and moved to the next question. But the cameraman — you could see the camera shake. Just slightly. Just enough."
"It aired," Troy added. "It aired and it trended."
"For two days," Harris said. "I had to draft a clarification statement. My supervisor called me and said, 'Harris, what does your rookie mean by rock hard?' and I had to explain, with a straight face, that he meant excited and determined. My supervisor said, 'Are you sure?' I was not sure."
Luca set his brownie down. "But the reporter understood me. She said 'great to hear.' So what is the problem?"
"The problem is context," Shane said. He'd been quiet through most of the retelling, but now he leaned forward with the patient tone of someone who had spent years translating the world for Ilya and had developed a very specific skill set. "Some words mean different things depending on the situation. 'Rock hard' can mean determined, yes. But in English, it almost always means something... physical."
"Physical," Luca repeated.
"Physical," Shane confirmed, and left it there.
Luca's eyes moved sideways as he processed this. Then the pink came back to his ears. "Oh."
"There it is," Zane whispered.
Ilya clapped once, loudly enough that Milo stirred on Zane's shoulder before settling again. "Now. The referee. This one is my favourite."
"It's everyone's favourite," Tanner said. He'd given up pretending to be above the conversation twenty minutes ago and was now fully invested, chair angled toward the centre of the table.
Luca groaned softly and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "It was one time."
"One time is enough when you proposition official during nationally televised game," Ilya said, grinning enormously.
Nick, who had been eating his brownie with methodical calm, looked up. "To be fair, the ref laughed."
"The ref laughed *after*," Evan corrected. "During, he looked like someone had thrown cold water on him."
Angus cleared his throat and straightened in his chair, adopting the posture of a man about to deliver testimony. "I was on the bench. I heard the whole thing. Luca gets called for a soft hooking penalty — and it *was* soft, the replay proved it. He skates to the box, and on the way he passes the ref and says—" Angus paused and looked at Luca. "You want to tell it?"
"No."
"He said, 'Come on, ref. I'll do you one better next time. Blow me.'" Angus delivered this with the careful diction of a courtroom witness and then folded his hands on the table.
The noise that followed was extraordinary. Josh slid halfway off his chair. Tanner dropped his head to the table and left it there. Even Peter made a sound — brief, almost inaudible, but definitely a laugh, which was so rare that Evan turned to look at him as if witnessing a solar eclipse.
Wyatt, still sitting beside Luca, placed one steady hand on Luca's shoulder. "He meant 'blow the whistle.' He was asking the ref to make a better call."
"Obviously," Luca said, muffled behind his hands.
"It was not obvious," Ilya said. "It was opposite of obvious. The ref's face — Shane, you remember his face?"
"I remember," Shane said, and the tiny crack was back at the corner of his mouth. "He went completely blank. Like his brain shut down and rebooted."
"Reset," Ilya confirmed, tapping his temple. "Full reset. Beautiful."
"The ref gave him an extra two minutes," Tanner said, lifting his head from the table.
"He did not," Luca protested.
"He absolutely did. Unsportsmanlike conduct. I saw the scoresheet."
"Coach Wiebe had to go talk to the officials after the period," Angus said. "I don't know what he said to them, but he came back with that expression he gets — the one where you can tell he's used every ounce of his patience and there's nothing left."
"He told me afterward that it was handled," Luca said quietly. "He was very kind about it. He said, 'Luca, next time you disagree with a call, just say you disagree with the call.'"
"Good advice," Nick said.
"I thought so."
The table settled for a moment. Cassie came by to collect plates, squeezing Luca's shoulder as she passed. Luca looked up at her with something grateful in his expression, the kind of wordless acknowledgment that passed between people who understood each other.
Josh, who had been visibly building toward something for the past several minutes, finally leaned forward. "Okay but we're skipping the best one. The trash talk."
Luca's head came up. "That was not my fault."
"It was *entirely* your fault."
"Max told me—" Luca stopped. He looked down the table to where Max was sitting very still, like a man who had realized the spotlight was swinging back in his direction.
Every pair of eyes followed Luca's gaze.
Max swallowed. "So—"
"Explain," Ilya said.
"It's — okay, so Luca came to me before the Montreal game and said he wanted to learn some trash talk because the guys on the other team kept chirping him and he didn't know how to respond. Which is a legitimate concern! That's a real problem!"
"What did you teach him?" Shane asked. His voice was very level.
Max ran a hand through his hair. "I might have told him that 'I'll ride you all night' was a common hockey phrase meaning 'I'll outplay you.'"
The silence lasted three full seconds.
"Maxwell," Angus said.
"It sounds bad when you say it out loud—"
"Because it *is* bad," Nick said.
"In my defence, I didn't think he'd actually say it to anyone."
Luca's expression was remarkably composed for someone at the centre of a detonation. "I said it to their captain. During a faceoff. He looked at me very strangely and then scored twice."
Tanner made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan. "He told Marchetti — *Antoine Marchetti* — that he was going to ride him all night. Marchetti told the press after the game that Ottawa's rookie was 'an interesting young man.'"
"Interesting," Peter repeated, and somehow made the single word devastating.
Max had his face in his hands again. "I said I was sorry."
"You said sorry while you were crying from laughing," Luca said, and there was something sharp underneath the softness of his accent. Not angry. Not even annoyed, really. Just precise. "You were on the floor of the locker room."
"I contain multitudes."
"Max," Wyatt said. He didn't raise his voice. He never raised his voice. But the way he said the name carried a kind of gravity that made Max sit up straighter. "How many phrases did you teach him?"
Max opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I don't remember the exact number."
"Approximate," Shane said.
"Maybe... a few?"
"How many is a few?" Nick asked.
"I gave him a... reference sheet."
Another silence. This one had texture.
"A reference sheet," Angus repeated.
"Like a study guide. For common expressions."
Ilya turned to Shane with an expression of pure wonder. "He made *textbook*. He made textbook of terrible things and gave to baby."
"I'm twenty," Luca said.
"You are baby," Ilya said firmly.
Luca looked at Ilya with an expression of mild tolerance that suggested he'd accepted this designation a long time ago and no longer had the energy to fight it.
"So every single thing this kid has said," Tanner said slowly, "every phrase that's made a reporter question their career choices, every line that's made a referee reconsider the meaning of life — all of it traces back to *you*."
Max sank lower in his chair. "When you frame it like that—"
"There is no other way to frame it," Shane said.
Evan, who had been quietly observing with the steady patience of a man accustomed to waiting for fish, turned to Luca. "Do you still have this reference sheet?"
Luca paused. He picked up his second brownie and took a careful bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
"Yes," he said.
The table leaned forward collectively.
"Where?" Josh asked.
"In my apartment. He told me it was a book of common Canadian slang." Luca said this without particular emotion, the way someone might describe the weather. "I have been studying it."
"Studying it," Wyatt repeated.
"Every day," Luca confirmed. "My English is very important to me."
Angus pressed both palms flat on the table for the second time that evening. He looked at Max with an expression that managed to be both deeply amused and genuinely threatening. "Maxwell Young. You gave a twenty-year-old Swiss kid a prank phrase book and told him it was *Canadian slang*, and he has been *studying it every day*."
Max appeared to be considering whether the floor might swallow him.
"I thought he'd figure it out after the first one," Max said weakly.
Luca set his brownie down and folded his hands neatly on the table. He looked around the room at the people who had spent the evening cataloguing his greatest linguistic disasters with the patience of archivists and the glee of children.
Then something shifted in his expression. It was subtle — a change in the eyes, a slight tilt at the corner of his mouth. The pink was gone from his ears. The frustration had evaporated. What remained was something quieter, something that looked almost like the beginning of a smile.
"I have a question," he said.
The table waited.
"If these phrases are so bad, why did nobody correct me until now?"
The silence that followed was different from the others. It wasn't comedic. It was the sound of fifteen adults realizing simultaneously that they might have made an enormous oversight.
Angus opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at Wyatt. Wyatt looked at Nick. Nick looked at Shane. Shane looked at the ceiling.
"That," Ilya said slowly, "is very good question."
The question hung over the table like a slow-motion replay nobody wanted to review.
Angus recovered first, because Angus always recovered first. "In my defence," he said carefully, "every time you said something wild, something else immediately happened. A goal, a penalty, a cameraman having a breakdown. There was never a good moment."
"There were many good moments," Luca said.
"He's right," Nick said. He'd finished his brownie and was sitting with his arms crossed, wearing the expression of a man who had arrived at a conclusion he wasn't entirely comfortable with. "We laughed. Every single time, we laughed first. And then we moved on."
"I told him he was doing great," Angus said, and even as the words left his mouth he seemed to hear how insufficient they were. "I said 'you're doing great, kid.' That's — that's not a correction. That's a participation ribbon."
Shane exhaled through his nose. "I should have caught it earlier. I know what it's like to navigate a second language in a locker room. I had Ilya saying things to reporters for two full seasons before I started reviewing his quotes."
"My quotes were beautiful," Ilya said.
"You told a reporter that our goaltender had 'huge sacks' and meant saves."
"This is different situation."
"It is exactly the same situation."
Luca watched this exchange with his hands still folded on the table. His posture hadn't changed, but something about him had — a stillness that didn't match the flustered kid from twenty minutes ago. Wyatt noticed. Wyatt always noticed.
"Luca," Wyatt said quietly. "How long have you known?"
The table went still.
Luca picked up his brownie. He took a small, deliberate bite. He chewed with the unhurried calm of someone who understood, perhaps better than anyone had given him credit for, that timing mattered.
"The interview," he said. "After the interview, I searched the phrase online. I found... many results. None of them were about hockey."
Josh's mouth fell open. "That was in *October*."
"Yes."
"It's *March*."
"Also yes."
The math rippled outward across the table. Five months. Five months of phrases, five months of locker room disasters, five months of Luca Haas walking into rooms and detonating conversations with the serene confidence of someone who had absolutely no idea what he was saying — except he *did*.
"Wait," Tanner said, and he was sitting fully upright now. "Wait. The referee. You *knew*?"
Luca's expression didn't change. "The referee was rude to me. The penalty was soft. Everyone agreed."
"So you told him to blow you *on purpose*?"
"I told him to make a better call. If he heard something else..." Luca lifted one shoulder in the smallest shrug the table had ever witnessed. "That is his interpretation."
The noise that erupted was unlike anything that had come before. It wasn't shock anymore. It was something closer to awe. Josh actually stood up from his chair and then sat back down because he had nowhere to go. Tanner dropped his head to the table again, but this time he was laughing so hard his shoulders shook. Evan turned to Nick with wide eyes, and Nick just nodded slowly, like a man watching a chess grandmaster reveal the final move.
Ilya pointed at Luca with both hands. "I *knew*. I said this. I said baby is dangerous."
"You said nothing of the kind," Shane said.
"I was thinking it. In Russian it counts."
Max, who had been frozen in his chair for the duration of this revelation, finally found his voice. "Hold on. If you knew the phrases were wrong, why did you keep using them?"
Luca turned to look at Max with an expression so patient, so measured, that it could have come from Nick or Wyatt or any of the veterans who had spent years mastering the art of saying everything with very little.
"Because it was funny," Luca said.
The simplicity of it landed like a perfectly placed wrist shot. No wind-up. No warning. Just accuracy.
"Because—" Max started.
"You gave me a prank book and told me it was real. I believed you for one week. After that, I had a choice." Luca set his brownie down and dusted crumbs from his fingers. "I could be embarrassed, or I could use it. So I used it."
"The kid weaponized your prank," Angus said to Max, and the admiration in his voice was unmistakable. "He turned your joke into his entire personality and rode it for five months."
"Phrasing," Harris murmured, and Troy pressed his face into Harris's shoulder to muffle his laughter.
Peter, who had said almost nothing all evening, looked at Luca from across the table. He held the gaze for a long moment. Then he gave a single, definitive nod — the kind of nod that from Peter meant more than a standing ovation from anyone else.
Luca nodded back.
"I need a minute," Max said. He pushed back from the table and stood up, running both hands through his hair. "I need to — you're telling me this whole time, every time I was on the floor laughing, you were just... letting me think I got you?"
"You were happy," Luca said. "Everyone was happy. The locker room laughed. Josh said it was the best season for morale in three years."
Josh opened his mouth, then closed it, because he had absolutely said that.
"So I kept the book," Luca continued. "And I kept studying. But not because I needed to learn the words. I already knew what they meant. I studied so I could use them at the right time."
"Strategic deployment," Nick said, and there was something warm underneath the words.
"Exactly."
Zane shifted Milo gently against his shoulder and leaned forward. "Luca. Brother. You're telling me the salt thing earlier — 'I'd sell my ass for this chicken' — that was *calculated*?"
Luca looked at Zane with genuine sincerity. "Cassie's chicken is very good. I meant the compliment. I chose the words on purpose."
Cassie, who had returned from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder, pressed one hand to her chest. "Baby, you can say whatever you want in this house. That chicken recipe is yours whenever you need it."
"Thank you, Cassie."
"You're welcome, sweetheart."
The table was still processing. Ilya had turned to Shane with an expression that was half delight and half something deeper — the look of someone recognizing a quality he valued.
"He is like you," Ilya said to Shane.
"He is not like me."
"Quiet. Patient. Watches everything. Then—" Ilya made a small explosion gesture with his fingers. "Destroys everyone."
Shane considered this. He looked at Luca. Luca looked back with a calm, even gaze that did, in fact, bear a certain resemblance.
"Maybe a little," Shane conceded.
Angus leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. The laughter had settled into something gentler now — the easy warmth of people who had stumbled onto something they hadn't expected and were better for it. He studied Luca the way he studied his own kids sometimes, searching for the thing underneath the thing.
"You could have told us," Angus said. Not a criticism. An observation.
"I know," Luca said. "But I liked that you were looking out for me. Even when you forgot to correct me. You were still—" He paused, searching for the word. For the first time all evening, the pause felt genuinely linguistic rather than performative. "You were still paying attention. To me. That is not small."
The table got quiet in a different way. Not the comedic silence of a punchline landing, or the stunned silence of a revelation. Something softer. The kind of quiet that settles over a room when someone young says something that the older people in the room needed to hear.
Wyatt's hand was still on Luca's shoulder. He gave one firm squeeze and didn't move it.
Nick picked up his water glass and raised it an inch off the table. "To Luca. Who played every single one of us and somehow made us feel good about it."
Glasses went up around the table — water, beer, the last of the juice Cassie had put out for Milo. The clink was mismatched and imperfect, and nobody cared.
"To Luca," the table echoed.
Luca picked up his glass with both hands, took a sip, and set it down. Then he turned to Max with the same serene expression he'd worn all evening.
"Max."
"Yeah?"
"I forgive you for the book."
Max blinked. "Thanks, man."
"But I'm keeping it."
Max opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked around the table for support and found absolutely none.
"Fair," he said.
Luca pulled the brownie tray closer to himself with both hands and selected one from the centre with the careful attention of someone choosing something precious. Milo stirred against Zane's shoulder, opened one eye, spotted Luca, and mumbled something incoherent that ended with "Uncle Luca" before falling back asleep.
Luca smiled — small, private, real — and bit into his brownie.
Outside, the Ottawa evening had gone dark and cold, but inside Zane and Cassie's dining room the noise was building again. Josh was already constructing a retrospective ranking of Luca's greatest hits. Ilya was arguing that the referee incident deserved the top spot. Tanner was insisting the Marchetti trash talk was objectively funnier. Evan had finally gotten Tanner to look at the fishing reel on his phone, though Tanner appeared to be humoring him. Troy and Harris sat pressed together at the end of the table, Troy's arm along the back of Harris's chair, both of them watching the chaos with the comfortable ease of people who had found exactly where they belonged.
Angus caught Luca's eye across the table and pointed at him. "You're going to be just fine, kid."
Luca gave him the nod — the chin tuck, the single solemn dip — and this time, everyone saw it.
"I know," he said.