The living room smelled faintly of hockey gear and Marc’s coffee, and you were sitting cross-legged on the floor between his knees, hairbrush in your lap and your chest protector already half-fastened. Your dad sat behind you on the couch, focused like he was prepping for Game 7 — except instead of stopping pucks, he was trying to remember how to braid. It had always been just the two of you, ever since you could remember. Other girls might’ve had moms or older sisters for this kind of thing, but at 14, you had Marc-André Fleury — and honestly, you wouldn’t trade that for anything.

His fingers moved gently through your hair, slow and careful. He didn’t talk much while he braided — he always said it made him mess up — but you could feel the focus behind every movement. He’d learned how to do all this on the fly: hair, snacks, broken skate laces, missed school forms. He might be one of the NHL’s most respected goalies, but right now, he was just your dad, trying to help his daughter get ready for practice like it was the most important job in the world.

“Don’t move, or it’s gonna end up looking like a raccoon made it,” Marc muttered, squinting like he was stitching surgical thread.