If you’ve spent any time in the PHLu universe, you’ve probably bumped into a Worth by now. They’re not exactly easy to miss.

Dalton Worth is the reason the Portland Pioneers exist. An ex-hockey enforcer who surprised everyone — possibly including himself — by transitioning into pairs figure skating, he met Aspen on the ice and never really recovered from it. She was the figure skater. He was the large man learning very quickly that grace was harder than aggression and that impressing this particular woman was going to require genuine effort. Reader, she married him anyway. Together they built a family, a legacy, and a part-ownership of one of the PHLu’s expansion teams, and if their children are anything to go by, they did not do any of that by half measures.

Because the Worth children are a lot. I say this with enormous affection. I also say it as someone who spent a great deal of time living in their heads, and I can confirm it is never quiet in there.

Peregrine and Bergen arrived first, because of course the Worth family started with twins. They’re 28 when our story opens, identical in face and absolutely not in personality, and they are the Portland Pioneers’ first line. If you want to understand why the expansion team punches as far above its weight as it does, start with these two. They’ve been skating together since before they could walk, finishing each other’s sentences and each other’s plays, and the chemistry between them on the ice is something opponents find genuinely unsettling.

Deacon and Sorrenson came next, a pair in the looser sense — same age cohort, very different orbits. Deacon is Portland’s starting goalie, the backbone of the team, the kind of presence between the pipes that makes coaches sleep better at night. Sorrenson looked at the family business, decided a little thing like gender wasn’t going to keep her out of it, and is currently head choreographer and lead performer of the Portland Wheelers — the Pioneers’ cheer team. She didn’t inherit the enforcer’s build but she absolutely inherited the enforcer’s stubbornness, and the Wheelers under her direction are something else entirely.

Anton and Hudson are the family’s gentle plot twist. Neither of them can skate. Not for lack of opportunity — the ice was always there — but some things simply don’t take, and what took for these two was story. Anton is in front of the camera on one of Portland’s hit television productions; Hudson is behind the scenes, writing for that show and several others, and between them they are quietly building toward something bigger — their own production company, because when you’re a Worth you don’t just participate in industries, you eventually try to own a piece of them. Both of them are somewhere on the spectrum and both of them are exactly who they’re supposed to be, and I love them unreservedly for it.

And then there is Grayson.

Seventeen when our story opens. The only singleton in a family that otherwise arrived in matching sets. He’s young and he knows it and he is trying very hard not to let anyone see how much he already understands about the game — because what Grayson Worth has, underneath the youth and the quiet watching, is the capacity to be a better goalie than Deacon.

Deacon knows it too.

That particular dynamic is going to be very interesting.

The Worths are the kind of family that fills a room before they’ve finished arriving — loud and warm and complicated and fiercely, sometimes overwhelmingly, devoted to each other. Writing them has been one of the great joys of the PHLu universe. Getting to know each of them has been a privilege.

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One more thing about the Worths, because I feel it requires its own mention.

The shortest of the Worth children is Sorrenson. The girl. The one who choreographs and performs and has the kind of stage presence that makes audiences forget to breathe. Sorrie stands 5’11” and is, by some margin, the most compact member of her generation.

Her brothers range from 6’2″ to 6’7″. The tallest clears 6’8″.

Now. Here is where it gets interesting.

Dalton Worth — ex-enforcer, formidable human, the man who raised this small army of enormous children — is 5’11”. He and his tallest son see eye to eye only in the metaphorical sense. Aspen Worth, the woman whose genetics apparently decided to simply ignore the laws of probability, stands 5’4″.

Between them they have produced seven children, the shortest of whom matches Dad exactly and the tallest of whom could rest his chin on his mother’s head without technically trying.

I don’t have an explanation for this. Neither does anyone in the Worth family, though it has been the subject of considerable dinner table discussion over the years. Dalton maintains there must be someone tall in a previous generation somewhere. Aspen just looks at her children and laughs.

Grayson, who is seventeen and still growing, recently measured himself against Bergen and came away looking thoughtful.

Nobody mention it to Dalton. 🏒

— Bella