Chapter 18
Thank fuck for losers.
After Calum’s frantic phone call, Dad makes a call of his own to someone he once gave the same label.
“Lancaster?” he booms, and for once I’m glad that his voice carries. It means that Harry booms straight back loudly enough I get to hear him solve a problem for me.
“Yes, skipper. Tell Valentin I’ve found his keys. I’ll get his boat back to the yard ASAP.”
An hour later, he keeps that promise by babying my boat all the way to Dad’s mooring.
I have no doubt that more sabotage is the reason she’s lower in the water than ever.
Harry is much more buoyant. He salutes my father.
“One boat as promised.” He passes over everything important I left aboard her.
“And yes, I’ll mind the yard for as long as you need me. ”
Dad salutes him back from the cab of a vehicle loaded with a six-figure speedboat. For once, it’s me who insists on keeping him close. “Because if you drive, I can work on solving my puzzle, can’t I?”
Sharing this cab with him isn’t how I ever thought I’d stage a rescue mission, but right now I do need Dad’s determination.
He bullies his way around the outskirts of London.
Lays his hand on the horn and doesn’t lift it until traffic on the M25 swerves out of his way, avoiding him like I used to.
I regret that after he puts his foot to the floor for me, all while checking on a third passenger between us.
“Is it warm enough?”
“The egg? Oui.” I’m pretty sure the duckling it holds is much tougher than the shell it is wrapped in.
I can’t say the same for me. I’m shattered like the contest entry that I’ve dismantled in the edit software on the laptop Harry also delivered.
No matter how I rearrange A-roll and B-roll, my storyboard refuses to piece together.
Because I’m still missing something.
Dad must notice my struggle. “Talk to me, Valentin.”
“I . . . I still can’t see . . .”
He rumbles a quiet-for-him reminder. “Did you go back to the beginning?”
I try doing that again, earbuds in to listen, and my breath catches.
“What is it?” Dad speaks over some audio I recorded when Calum was still a stranger to me. “You found a missing piece?”
“Maybe.” I drag a slider back to the start and listen again to what Calum once told me across the street from Penny’s. This time, I pay closer attention to something he’d almost immediately retracted. And almost immediately, I’m uncertain. “Maybe not.”
I’m no closer to slotting the right story together. I’m also not much closer to Calum—a crash brings traffic to an almost standstill.
Like me, vehicles are stuck and going nowhere in a hurry.
Dad isn’t done trying to get me over the line. “What do you need?”
His help used to come with strings attached. Now I grab the lifeline he offers. “I need a faster internet connection.”
He finds that for me in a service station where he sips coffee and I start over, but even his patience wears thin. “What are you reading?”
“This.”
I add him poring over pages of hockey gossip to my list of things I didn’t anticipate this December.
I couldn’t have predicted this concern either.
“A player was refused the surgery he needed?” He meets my gaze across this service station table.
“That doesn’t seem likely. Business owners know to protect their biggest assets.
” He nods towards the car park where the boat transporter is right where he can see it.
His gaze lands on me for even longer. “We’ll do anything to keep those safe. ”
It’s a strange time to picture a disabled water pump. Everything Dad did to hold my boat hostage slides into a different focus. A parental one, which brings me back to hockey.
I pull up another article. “Apparently, that player’s team did value him.
Because they didn’t completely say no.” I remember something else Calum told me.
“Hockey is another kind of family. Feels like home, especially to kids far away from their own for the first time. Young players grow up having decisions made for them when they’re rookies.
I guess that sometimes continues when it shouldn’t. ”
“How?”
“Like when this player’s club okayed a different surgery than the procedure he wanted.”
Dad squints like he used to over our Christmas jigsaws. “Teams must have expert medics. Was it just a difference of opinion?”
I mentally replay the times Calum cut himself off midway through conversations.
The most recent was outside a rink where he’d explored senses with a little girl who might lose one of hers soon.
I scroll down to another snippet of hockey gossip.
“It says here that the player got his own second opinion. And that’s what his club turned down.
” I open another article detailing the differences.
Dad reads again. “So one of those surgical options could have provided a long-term fix but was experimental. The club’s choice of surgery would get him back on the ice faster, but was more of a short-term fix.
” He looks up. “There were no guarantees that short-term fix option wouldn’t cut short his career, and the window for taking the longer-lasting option was closing? ”
“Yeah. His time was running out.”
That’s what I keep coming back to—Calum talking about how much time he had left.
I thought he meant until the New Year. I can’t help thinking a different clock was ticking for him the whole time I’ve known him.
I speak faster, screenshotting examples and inserting them into a different story than I ever thought I’d share with contest judges.
“That player went public. Got the fans on his side. There wasn’t anything in his contract to stop him talking about his own health. ”
“What happened?”
“To him? Eventually he was traded to another team that didn’t veto that second surgical option. It meant he had to leave his club to get what he needed.”
But he still got to play. That feels important.
“Now listen to this.” I offer an earbud to Dad, and he switches seats to take it. We eavesdrop shoulder to shoulder as another hockey player talks about his contract small print.
Calum huffs in my ear and in Dad’s. “Tried negotiating through my agent but she got nowhere.” He huffs again, and I could be back in that alley where a first kiss surprised me.
Dad’s shoulder pressing against mine is equally out of the blue.
And needed. I lean on him as Calum continues, “I thought that was it until I remembered a player on another team.”
I tap the still-open page of hockey gossip on my laptop screen, and Dad nods.
He gets it.
We’re on exactly the same wavelength while Calum sighs in our ears. “He got released.”
Dad tapping the article detailing a trade proves he heard that.
I sit very still then, straining to hear what I hadn’t realised was most important about that conversation—a clue that Calum let slip the very first day that I met him.
It’s only now that I hear his next sigh as a distress signal. As an SOS for someone to come save him.
“Forget about him,” he tells me through a shared pair of earbuds. “My club insisted on us signing extra NDAs since then.”
Dad shifts in his seat. His concerned gaze is a reminder of when we stood together in a sales booth with Calum frozen on his phone screen.
“You think your Trelawney has the same problem?” He lowers his voice.
“He disagrees with his club about a health decision? Wants to take a different option?” Dad’s realisation could be my mirror.
“But he’s not allowed to publicise their difference of opinion, maybe? And his club gets the final say?”
I repeat what I say at the end of every upload to my channel.
“I won’t stop until I find the real truth.”
That’s what I get busy chasing while traffic snarls the motorway outside this service station with what turns out to be perfect timing.
It gives me the hour I need to hunt through footage and rearrange my contest content, and I don’t do it alone.
Dad helps me click pieces together, and just like Père Noel always promised, I finally do see the whole picture after I open a map of London and zoom in on a building.
Dad studies this Street View image. “What’s that?”
“A hospital. Part of one, anyway. No. This entrance is for . . .” I squint at blurry signage. “Does that say ‘research centre’?”
He googles to find out for me. Finds a phone number too.
He taps it into his handset, passes it to me, and when that call is answered, I have to work hard to speak clearly in only one language.
“Do I have the right number to ask about sports injury treatments?” I pluck a word from the air that I’ve heard a few times lately. “About a trial running this week?”
The answer I get snaps another puzzle piece into place.
“No? The only research trials currently running are for neuro-ophthalmology? For candidates at risk of total sight loss. Okay, thank you. Sorry for the mix-up.” And I am sorry then.
So sorry that I didn’t join these dots sooner.
They cast a different light on how Calum crossed paths with a little girl with vision issues.
He didn’t deliver a Christmas dinner to little Violet.
I find more audio to confirm that, and this time Dad and I listen to a worried mother.
“Maybe things are finally looking up.” Her voice is an echoey reminder of an ice rink. “First this, then getting a call back for the trial.”
We both hear my voice echo. “Trial?”
“For a last-chance intervention.”
Dad says, “Look.” He’s found details of the trial Calum and Violet both got called back for this morning.
“It’s for people with a congenital issue.
The one trial anywhere in the world testing a pioneering surgical intervention.
” He reads aloud as I edit. “Most people don’t find out about the pressure building here until it’s too late.
” He rubs at the back of his neck. “Their optic nerves are already damaged. But sometimes . . .”
“Sometimes what?”
“But sometimes it’s discovered before that permanent damage happens. During other investigations, like—”
I know this answer. “CT scans after a concussion.”
I get busy then with recording a final voiceover that will have to include service station background chatter. I can’t let myself care if it doesn’t meet contest-level production standards. At least it’s finished.
“What are you doing now?”
“Rendering the video so it’s ready to upload.”
Dad checks his watch. “When is your cutoff?”
“This evening.”
It’s mid-afternoon. We’re four hours from Cornwall. That should be plenty of time to make my deadline. He scans the gridlocked traffic through a café window, maybe not so certain. “What if you can’t show it to Trelawney in time to get his agreement?”
I don’t need Calum’s permission. He’s already on tape stating I’m the owner of this content. I can do whatever the fuck I want with it. My head knows that. Tell it to what has already flown ahead to Cornwall to leave my chest empty.
People talk about falling head over heels for knights in shining armour.
I don’t know when I fell hand over heart for Calum, but I guess Dad has watched it happen.
Before today, I’m not sure I would have believed he could be this softly spoken.
“Will the contest entries be made public in time to make his club rethink? One of those articles said that other clubs sometimes involve a third party to hash out this kind of stalemate. Is there enough time left for that to happen. Or for it to make a difference?”
To Calum’s long-term outcome?
It slays me that I can’t answer his question.
“Regardless,” Dad tells me, “if you’re right, I can’t see how you won’t win. What you’ve put together is explosive.” He swallows thickly. “Wish your mother could see it.”
Not every wish gets granted. I know that. But mon père didn’t ever wish to be a salesman, did he?
Speed was his first vocation.
It’s still his best skill set.
When the motorway clears, there’s no one else on the planet who could get me to Cornwall faster.