Chapter 2
NICO
She recognized me. I saw it happen in real time, the glance, the double-take, the slight widening of her eyes before she schooled her face into something neutral.
Then the phone came out. She angled it toward me, trying to be casual, thumbs moving across the screen.
Texting someone. Guess who's on my flight.
Maybe posting it. The twenty-first-century version of pointing and whispering, and I'd been on the receiving end often enough to recognize the choreography.
I turned toward the window and pressed my forehead against the cold plastic. Below, the farmland of southern Wisconsin stretched out in squares of brown and green.
My phone vibrated in my pocket at the gate. My lawyer, Sarah.
"Nico. Did you land?"
"Just taxiing."
"Good. Listen, I talked to the league's office this morning. The investigation is still active, but the trade doesn't change the timeline. You cooperate, you keep your head down, and we let the process work."
"I've been cooperating for eleven months, Sarah."
"I know." Her voice carried the patience of someone who'd said as much many times. "But you're in a new market now. New media. New scrutiny. Chicago's press corps is aggressive. They're not going to give you a honeymoon period."
"Minnesota didn't give me one either."
"Minnesota buried you. Chicago's going to dig you up." She paused. "The front office has arranged housing with a teammate. I'm told it's the starting goalie. Kieran Walsh."
"I know who he is."
"What do you know?"
"He's been out for three years. Never had a problem with the team or the league. He's steady, he's respected, and management trusts him to spy on me without calling it spying."
Sarah was quiet for a moment. "He's also the person you'll be living with. Try not to antagonize him."
"When have I ever antagonized anyone?"
She didn't dignify that with a response. "Call me if anything comes up. Anything at all."
I ended the call and collected my bag from the carousel. One duffel, black with no team logos. Everything I owned that mattered fit inside it. A year of upheaval had a way of teaching you what you actually needed versus what you thought you did.
O'Hare was O'Hare, massive, loud, and full of people moving with the purposeful chaos that Chicago seemed to breed. A car waited at the curb, arranged by the front office. A black sedan with tinted windows. Anonymous. I climbed in and gave the driver the address.
I stared out the window as the city blurred past. Chicago in late October was grey and windblown, the trees along the expressway stripped down to their bones. Lake Michigan appeared between buildings in flashes. Flat and grey and enormous.
My grandmother would have hated it. She liked forests and mountains, the kind of landscape where the earth rose up to meet you.
Helsinki in winter, the silence of the countryside north of the city where she'd taken me as a kid to watch the northern lights.
Revontulet. Fox fires. That's what the Finns called them.
I hadn't seen my grandmother in fourteen months.
She was eighty-three and her English was limited to pleasantries and endearments, and I was afraid that if I called her, she'd hear what I couldn't say.
That I was tired. That I was scared. That her grandson, who she'd watched skate before he could read, had been reduced to a headline and a hashtag.
Rakas, she'd say. Darling. And I'd break apart.
The driver turned onto a tree-lined street in Lincoln Park. A glass-and-brick high-rise with a clean lobby, and a doorman who checked my ID against a list and pointed me toward the elevator.
Fourteenth floor. Apartment 1407.
I stood outside the door for ten seconds before I knocked.
Ten seconds of cataloging exit routes and hallway dimensions and the way sound carried in the corridor.
Every new space got assessed before I entered it.
Sight lines, noise levels, the distance to the nearest door.
My therapist had called it hypervigilance. I called it keeping my eyes open.
The door opened.
Kieran Walsh was taller than I expected from his film.
Six-three, maybe six-four, with the broad shoulders and long arms that made goalies look like they were built specifically to fill a net.
Dark hair and sharp features, with grey-blue eyes that tracked over me once, fast and thorough.
The way a goalie reads a shooter. Assessing angles, measuring threat.
"Varis."
"Walsh."
He stepped back. I walked in.
The apartment was what I expected from what little I knew about him.
Minimal. Ordered. Clean in a way that suggested not just tidiness but intent.
Every object occupied its correct position.
The bookshelves were organized. The kitchen counters were bare except for a tea kettle and a small wooden tray holding a row of glass jars, loose-leaf teas—eight or nine varieties.
No photographs on the walls. No mess. A man who controlled his environment the way he controlled his crease.
"Guest room is down the hall," Walsh said. "Second door on the left."
"Okay."
"Kitchen's open. Help yourself to whatever. There's a list on the fridge of team meal times and facility hours."
"Okay."
Walsh paused. He studied me with those assessing eyes, and I watched him decide how much to say. "Look, I'm not going to pretend this is a normal situation. Park asked me to do this, and I said yes. We don't have to be friends. We just have to coexist without making each other's lives harder."
Direct. I appreciated that. People who danced around things usually did it because they had something to hide.
"I can do that," I said.
"Good."
He turned and went back to whatever he'd been doing before I arrived. I carried my duffel down the hall and pushed open the guest room door.
Queen bed. Grey sheets. Nightstand with a lamp. Empty closet.
He wasn't expecting me to stay.
I set my bag on the floor and stood in the center of the room, letting my eyes adjust. The light from the window was pale and cold. Traffic noise filtered up from the street, muffled by fourteen floors of glass and concrete.
For a year, I'd been in rooms like this.
Hotel rooms in cities where I was sent for meetings.
Temporary apartments arranged by lawyers and front offices.
The spare bedroom at my agent's house in St. Paul, before he'd dropped me as a client.
They all looked the same. Functional. Temporary. A place to wait for whatever came next.
I unzipped my duffel and pulled out the things I needed.
Phone charger plugged in beside the bed.
And a worn paperback copy of The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, that my grandmother had given me when I was twelve.
The spine was cracked and the pages were soft from years of handling.
The cover was taped along one edge where it had split during a move three teams ago.
I set the book on the nightstand. It looked small and absurd in the empty room.
Then I pulled the blanket off the bed, took the pillow, and arranged them on the floor between the bed and the wall.
The carpet was thin. My back would ache in the morning the way it always did, a dull complaint I'd learned to ignore.
With my back against the wall, I had a clear line of sight to the door, the bulk of the bed between me and the window.
Low and protected. It was the way I'd slept in every temporary room for the past eleven months.
The bed was fine. The bed was perfectly good.
I just couldn't make myself lie in something that could be taken away tomorrow.
I pulled the blanket to my chin and stared at the ceiling until the patterns in the plaster blurred and my breathing slowed. From somewhere down the hall, I heard the faint sound of a kettle boiling. Then silence.
My phone glowed on the nightstand above me.
No messages. No one checking in. My former teammates in Minnesota had stopped texting one by one, like lights going out down a hallway.
First the guys I'd only known casually, the newer players, the call-ups.
Then the ones I'd eaten dinners with, whose kids I'd held at team barbecues.
Last to go was Jennings, who'd been my linemate for two seasons and who sent a single text the day the trade was announced: Good luck out there. Nothing since.
I closed my eyes.
Chicago. New team. New city. New man down the hall who would report everything I did to the people who held my career in their hands.
My fingers found the edge of the blanket and gripped it.
Tomorrow I would walk into a locker room full of men who'd already decided what I was.
I would lace up my skates and play the game that was the only language I'd ever been fluent in besides Finnish, and I would do it under the gaze of twenty thousand strangers who wanted me to fail and one stranger down the hall whose job was to watch me try.
Sleep came in fragments. Two hours, maybe less. Enough to function. Never enough to dream.