GOOD WORK, YOUNG HAWK, the oak tree outside his building booms once the season’s over, and Patrick smiles sleepily in its direction. He's never been sure how the trees of Chicago know about hockey—trees hear a lot, but it's not like he's ever stopped in a public park to ask one about it.

Patrick had a letter written on his wrist when he was born, small and even in black pen-print. Well, technically it started to show up a day after he was born, like a bruise that takes time to settle in. Patrick doesn’t remember, obviously, but his parents will tell him whenever he asks, how small it was and how it just... faded in, a little ‘J’.

Sidney’s wedding day doesn’t go quite as he’d planned. When he’d bothered to imagine it at all, he’d thought of a nice June wedding in Nova Scotia, outdoors with the sun streaming down. He hadn’t imagined this hurried affair on the tarmac on a rainy and unseasonably cool day in early September, a month after his twenty-fifth birthday.

Sid didn’t introduce himself in the hallway, and he certainly doesn’t assume that people know who he is. So it would only be polite to thank Malkin again, this time more personally. He could write him a letter. An email? No, a letter.

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