Chapter 8
Jamie
The diner was called Rosie's. It had red vinyl booths and a counter with chrome stools. The coffee machine looked older than both of us combined. The menu was laminated and sticky.
The pancakes were exactly as mediocre as Theo had promised.
It started with hockey. It always started with hockey.
"What do you want the next five years to look like?" I asked. I was eating eggs, and the question felt safe. Careers and contracts and planning were things that two professionals in a volatile industry could discuss without it meaning much.
Abbott held his coffee cup with both hands.
The diner mug was white and institutional, nothing like the blue one on my shelf.
He looked out the window at the unfamiliar street.
I watched his profile and waited. Abbott's silences were never empty.
They were loading sequences. The words were coming; he was just choosing them carefully.
"I want to start," he said. "I want to be the guy—not the backup. Not the contingency plan. I want to play sixty games and know that the net is mine and that every game matters because I'm the one standing in it."
"You should have that."
"I know."
"You deserve that."
He looked at me. The morning light from the diner window caught his eyes. "What do you want the next five years to look like?"
I cut into my eggs. "I want to be on the first line permanently. I want a contract that reflects what I produce. I want another Cup run."
"And?"
"And what?"
"You started with team things." He took a sip of his coffee. He brought directness to a conversation that mattered. "Ice time. Contract. Team success. Nothing about the rest of your life."
My eggs were getting cold. I ate them, though, because having something to do with my hands was useful when Abbott was looking at me like that, so focused and intent. He'd decided to stop letting me deflect
"The rest of my life is good," I said.
"I didn't say it wasn't."
"Then what are you asking?"
He set his mug down. "I'm asking whether you've ever thought about what you want, that isn't about taking care of a team."
The diner was quiet enough that I could hear the coffee machine burbling. A bell chimed as someone came through the door. These were normal morning sounds. Nothing about this should have felt like the floor shifting under me.
"I like taking care of the team," I said.
"I know you do. You're the best at it of anyone I've ever met." He said this without emphasis, the way he stated things that were simply true. "But I'm asking about the rest."
"What rest?"
"Hayes." He set his mug down. "You organized rookie night.
You run the barbecue dinners. You coordinate the charity events.
The birthdays. You're the reason Mikkola isn't eating lunch alone.
You're the reason Morrison still has people willing to sit with him.
" He listed these not as accusations but as evidence.
"You take care of everyone. You're exceptional at it. I'm just asking who takes care of you?"
I opened my mouth to say I don't need taking care of but the words dissolved before they reached my tongue, because Abbott had asked the question in a way that made my standard deflection impossible. Not, Do you have people who care about you? I did, obviously—abundantly—but, Who takes care of you?
It was a fundamental distinction.
"The team takes care of me," I said.
"The team loves you. That's different."
It was different. He was right. Being loved by a team was real and sustaining, but it was spread across two dozen people. Being taken care of was something else.
Abbott looked at me for a long moment. "The part where someone takes care of you," he asked quietly.
The bell chimed again. The cook called an order. I sat in a vinyl booth in a diner in a city where nobody knew my name and felt something crack—a fine fracture line in a surface that had been bearing weight for a long time.
I didn't answer.
I couldn't answer—because honestly, no one took care of me. I had built my entire life around being the one who took care of other people. The only person who had ever come close was sitting across from me right now.
"Jamie." He said my first name so rarely that when he did, it always landed differently.
"I'm fine," I said. I smiled—the automatic one, the one that managed rooms of people and deflected attention. The one that kept people from looking too closely.
"I know." He picked up his coffee again. "That's not what I asked."
We finished breakfast. He got to the check first. Abbott did that sometimes, paying for breakfast without announcement—as if feeding me was a natural extension of his day.
We walked back to the hotel. There was a bite to the air—typical for a Midwestern city in October.
We walked close enough that our arms brushed.
Once. Twice. I stopped counting after five.
The rest of the day passed in the soft routine of a road trip off-day.
Some of the guys went to a movie. Theo dragged Luca to a bookstore.
I texted back and forth with Mikkola about the game plan for tomorrow.
Abbott read in the hotel room—an actual book, a paperback that he'd packed in his carry-on.
Because Abbott brought actual books on road trips.
I watched him read. He didn't notice—or if he did, he let me.
He sat in the desk chair with his legs stretched out and the book held at an angle that caught the afternoon light through the window.
He was relaxed. His face had the looseness of a man who had stopped processing the world and was just living in it.
That night in the hotel bathroom, I was brushing my teeth and staring at myself in the mirror, thinking about what Abbott said—the way he chose his words, not the part where someone else takes care of you but the part where someone takes care of you.
The first version was generic advice. The second version was an offer, disguised as a question.
Maybe I was reading too much into it. I was good at reading rooms and good at reading people.
The dangerous corollary was that sometimes you saw things that weren't there.
Sometimes the pattern recognition generated false positives.
Sometimes the person sitting across from you in a diner was just asking a normal question about your life and the only reason it hit so hard was because you were carrying something you were afraid to face.
I'd made peace with my life. I was thirty years old and a professional athlete—well-liked and well-connected. The team had become my family. I had a best friend who knew what coffee I drank and asked me questions that went more than surface deep.
What more could you want?
The answer came from my body itself, the way physical knowledge precedes conscious thought. What I wanted had a name and a face. He was in the next room, already in bed, probably reading something on his phone with his glasses on.
I hadn't known Abbott wore reading glasses until this road trip. He put them on at night to read. They were simple wire frames, and they changed his face in a way that made my hands unsteady.
I gripped the edge of the sink. The porcelain was cool under my palms. In the mirror, my expression was reorganizing itself, putting a mask on, preparing to walk into a room and be the version of me that didn't want anything it couldn't have.
Except.
This road trip—this room, the dark conversations and the shared bed and the diner. Abbott had said the part where someone takes care of you, not as an observation but as a statement of intent. He was telling me that someone existed who would do that job if I would stop pretending.
I was reading too much into it. The only reason it hit like a fissure opening was because my feelings were getting harder to suppress.
I rinsed my toothbrush and turned off the light. I walked into the room where Abbott was, in fact, already in bed with his glasses on, reading something on his phone.
"Goodnight, Abbott."
He looked up, over his glasses. "Goodnight, Hayes."
I got into my side of the bed.
The part where someone takes care of you.
I lay in the dark for a long time and listened to Abbott's breathing.