Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
the house he built
ROOK
Itold myself I was in the neighbourhood.
It wasn't entirely a lie. I'd had a meeting with Leroy that had ended twenty minutes earlier and left me sitting in my truck outside a diner trying to shake the weight of what I'd set in motion, and Soren's building was six blocks north. That counted as the neighbourhood. Technically.
What I didn't tell myself was that I'd been thinking about him all day.
So I drove six blocks north and parked badly and sat there for another three minutes arguing with myself about whether showing up unannounced at a man's apartment was reasonable behaviour for a person who had their life together.
I got out of the truck.
The building was three stories, worn brick, the kind of place that had been built to last and then mostly forgotten about.
The buzzer panel had a few labels missing and the lobby smelled like old carpet and somebody's dinner.
I took the stairs to the third floor and stood outside apartment 307 and knocked before I could think my way out of it.
Footsteps. A pause — probably the peephole. Then the door swung open and Soren stood there in a t-shirt and sweats with flour on his forearm and a dish towel over his shoulder, holding a grocery bag he was clearly in the process of unpacking.
He looked at me for a second. Then at the hallway behind me like he was checking I hadn't brought anyone with me.
“Rook.”
“Hey.”
He looked at the groceries, then back at me. “I didn't know you were coming.”
“I didn't know either until about ten minutes ago.” I kept my hands in my pockets because they were apparently the part of me most likely to do something stupid. “I can go.”
“I didn't say that.” He stepped back from the door and tilted his head toward the inside. “Come in. It's chaos, fair warning.”
It was chaos.
The apartment was small and warm and every surface in the kitchen was occupied by something.
Two pizza boxes on the counter, still warm — I could smell them from the doorway.
A box of donuts next to those, the good kind from the place on College Street with the long lineup.
A bag of the expensive dark chocolate with sea salt sitting next to what looked like a stack of textbooks.
From somewhere deeper in the apartment came the sound of two people arguing in the affectionate way that meant it wasn't a real argument, and a TV I couldn't see playing something with a laugh track.
Soren dropped the grocery bag onto the counter and turned to look at me with his arms crossed and one eyebrow up. “You want coffee?”
“If you're making it anyway.”
“I'm always making it.” He was already pulling the pot out. “Micah! Poppy! Come here a minute.”
A pause from the back of the apartment.
Then footsteps — two sets, one heavier than the other — and a young man appeared in the kitchen doorway followed closely by a girl who had Soren's eyes and an expression on her face that said she'd been interrupted mid-sentence and hadn't finished her point yet.
I'd last seen Micah when he was nine years old.
He'd been small and gap-toothed and had spent most of one team dinner hiding under a table because he was convinced the older kids would put ice down his shirt, which they absolutely would have.
Now he was taller than I'd expected and had the quiet watchfulness of someone who'd grown up in a house where paying attention mattered.
Poppy I barely remembered at all. She'd been four, maybe five, a small determined person who had climbed onto Soren's lap during that same dinner and stayed there like she'd staked a claim.
She looked like him around the jaw. She was also, judging by the way she walked into the kitchen and immediately clocked me and held the look, going to be an absolute problem for someone someday.
“This is Rook,” Soren said. “Rowan Kincaid. We went to high school together.”
“The hockey captain,” Micah said.
“Yeah.”
“Soren talked about you.” He said it flat, like noting the weather. He extended his hand and I shook it. Firm grip, good eye contact. “Micah.”
“I know. You used to hide under tables.”
Micah stared at me. Then he turned to look at Soren. “You told him that?”
“I didn't have to. You did it in front of everyone.”
“I was nine.”
“The table thing was real,” Soren said, entirely unapologetic, and opened the pizza boxes. “Poppy, this is Rook.”
Poppy was still looking at me. “You're bigger than I thought,” she said.
“Poppy,” Soren said.
“I'm just saying. He's tall.” She looked at the pizza and then back at me. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“He just got here,” Soren said.
“I know. I'm asking if he's staying.” She pulled a slice of pizza from the box without waiting for an answer and turned to Micah. “You owe me five dollars.”
“I haven't done anything,” I said.
“Not you.” She was already heading back toward the hallway. “Micah said Soren hadn't told you about us. I said he had because Soren can't shut up about things he cares about.” She looked at her brother with a grin that was so much his grin it was slightly uncanny. “Five dollars, Micah.”
Micah dug a crumpled bill out of his pocket with the expression of a man who had accepted defeat before the battle started and handed it over. She disappeared down the hallway.
Soren poured two coffees and put one in front of me without asking how I took it, which meant he remembered from years ago that I took it black, and I wasn't going to think too hard about what that meant.
“College Street donuts,” I said, nodding toward the box. “You went early or waited in the line?”
“They had a rough week.” He pushed the box toward Micah. “Chocolate glazed, before you ask.”
“You're the best.” Micah was already opening the box. He took two without ceremony, put them on a plate, and headed back toward the hallway with the textbook tucked under his arm. “Nice to meet you, Rook.”
“You too.”
Then it was just Soren and me in the kitchen, both of us standing on opposite sides of the counter with our coffees, and the pizza getting slightly less warm between us.
“Sometimes pizza and donuts is just the clearest way to say I see you,” he said, pulling a slice out for himself and leaning against the counter.
He shrugged, like it was nothing, like loading up on all the right things and carrying them up three flights of stairs was just what you did on a Thursday evening.
“Chocolate's for Talia but she's working late.”
“She's not here?”
“Back around nine.” He looked at me over the rim of his mug. “So what's the actual reason you're in the neighbourhood?”
I'd had a version of an answer ready in the truck.
The meeting ran long, I was passing through, I wanted to check in.
All of it technically accurate, none of it entirely true.
I looked at the pizza boxes and the donuts and the chocolate bars and the stack of textbooks and said, “I wanted to see you.”
Soren was quiet for a second.
“Okay,” he said, and his expression settled into something easier. “Help yourself to pizza. I need to check on Micah's flashcards.”
I'd helped myself to pizza, found a stool at the counter, and spent the interim listening to the apartment — the low sound of a TV, Poppy's voice carrying from somewhere down the hall with the particular rhythm of someone talking through a problem, the creak of the building doing what old buildings did.
It was louder than my house and smaller and the furniture didn't match and there were three different sizes of shoes by the front door.
Soren came back into the kitchen, checked the coffee pot, and refilled his mug. “Micah's study system is a disaster. He colour-codes by topic but then loses half the cards and has to recopy them. I've been trying to get him to just use an app for two years.”
“He's tactile,” I said. “Some people retain better by writing.”
Soren looked at me. “How do you know that?”
“University of Toronto. Engineering degree.” I took a drink of coffee. “You do a lot of memorisation-heavy coursework — figure out pretty fast what works.”
He stared at me. “You have an engineering degree.”
“Graduated before the league drafted me.”
“You never mentioned that.”
“It didn't come up.”
“Rook.” He set his mug down. “You graduated from U of T and you're saying it like a footnote.”
“It is a footnote. The hockey paid better.”
He laughed, genuine and slightly disbelieving, shaking his head. “I always figured you were smart. I didn't figure that smart.”
“You didn't figure I'd go to university?”
“I figured you'd go straight to the league.” He was quiet for a second, and his voice shifted register just slightly. “I wanted to go,” he said. “Had a partial scholarship from Ryerson. Music program. Deferred it twice before I finally had to let it go.”
The pizza was good. I didn't taste it.
“The kids,” I said.
“Yeah. The kids.” He didn't say it with resentment. Just with the flatness of a fact he'd made his peace with a long time ago. “Timing doesn't always care what you want.”
I didn't say anything to that. There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't land wrong, and I'd learned early enough that Soren didn't need people trying to fix the things he'd already survived.
But I filed it away — set it somewhere specific and quiet in the back of my mind where I kept things I intended to come back to.
“Soren!” Poppy's voice came from down the hall with the particular pitch that meant she was addressing the apartment generally and expecting the right person to respond. “I need a second opinion on this thesis statement.”
“In a minute,” he called back.
“It's time-sensitive.”
“History is not time-sensitive, Poppy.”
“The assignment is due tomorrow, so actually—”
He pushed off the counter with a sigh that was entirely performative, the sigh of a man who would absolutely go look at the thesis statement and had already decided to while he was still sighing about it. He looked at me. “You don't have to—”