Chapter 6
NICO
The first time it happened, it was an accident.
Insomnia wasn't new, it was the oldest relationship I had. My body listened politely to the therapist's suggestions—the box breathing, the progressive muscle relaxation, the rigid bedtime rituals that were supposed to retrain my circadian rhythm. Then it stayed awake until my eyes burned.
Walsh was already there.
He sat at the counter in the near-dark, silhouetted by the dim glow of the stove hood light. A book lay open beside his mug, one of those airport thrillers that promised a body on every page. He wore a faded T-shirt and sweatpants, bare feet arched against the cold tile.
He looked up when I appeared in the doorway. No surprise. Only a quiet acknowledgment, the way you'd nod at someone you expected to see eventually.
"Kettle's still hot," he said, going back to his book.
I poured my green tea, light, what my grandmother called the only civilized option after midnight, and took a seat at the far end of the counter. Six feet of marble between us. I wrapped both hands around the mug and felt the heat seep into my palms.
We didn't speak for twenty minutes.
The apartment expanded around us the way spaces do in the dead of night, turning small sounds massive. The refrigerator cycled with a low hum. Heat ticked through the vents. Wind rattled the windows in their frames, the building shrugging in its sleep. Walsh turned a page, the paper rasping.
I drank my tea.
The silence wasn't uncomfortable. It was the kind of quiet I hadn't experienced since—I couldn't actually remember.
Before Minnesota, maybe. Before every silence got loaded with suspicion and subtext, with the question of what I was hiding or who was listening.
This silence was just two men sharing a kitchen at 3 AM because neither of them could sleep and neither of them felt compelled to pretend otherwise.
"This is terrible," Walsh said.
I looked up. He tilted the book so I could see the cover, a shadowy figure on a bridge, a city skyline in flames behind him. The Lazarus Protocol.
"How terrible?" I asked.
"The detective just fell in love with his partner's widow. They've known each other for six days."
"That's efficient."
"They've also survived two car bombs and a boat chase. On day four."
"Relationship-building activities."
Walsh's mouth quirked. Not a smile, not yet. A shift, a tectonic movement at the corner that hinted at the possibility of a smile the way a tremor hints at an earthquake. Small. But significant.
"I keep reading," he said, "because I need to know if the Russian arms dealer is actually her long-lost brother."
"Is that a possibility?"
"Everything is a possibility in this book. Logic left around page forty."
I took a sip of tea and set the mug down. "My grandmother reads the Kalevala to me over the phone. The Finnish national epic. Monsters get defeated with songs and riddles. A man builds a boat out of a spindle. A woman gives birth to a king while floating in the ocean."
Walsh considered this with a seriousness it didn't deserve. "That's actually better than the boat chase."
"It's also three thousand years old, so it had time to workshop."
That got him. Not a laugh. Walsh didn't seem like a man who laughed easily or often, but a sound. A surprised exhalation through his nose, almost involuntary.
"Can't sleep either?" he asked after a few minutes. "Or just a really dedicated tea drinker?"
"Light sleeper. Always have been."
"Same. Goalies. The watchfulness doesn't shut off."
"It doesn't shut off for forwards either." I turned the mug between my palms. "You replay every goal against you, don't you? Every mistake."
He looked at me. The stove light caught his eyes. "Every single one."
"Even the ones that aren't your fault?"
"Especially those."
I nodded slowly. "I do the same thing. Except mine's turnovers. Every pass I should have made, every shot I should have taken." The next part came out before I could stop it, propelled by the 3 AM honesty that stripped away my usual filters. "Every choice that blew up in my face."
The weight in those words settled between us. I hadn't meant to say that much.
Walsh didn't push. He held the silence without filling it, giving me room to decide whether to continue.
"Worst save you ever blew?" he asked instead.
I looked up, startled by the redirect. This was safe ground. Hockey, not the wreckage around it. He was offering me a door out of the room I'd accidentally walked into.
I took it.
"Junior playoffs," I said. "Game seven. Saginaw.
I was playing center then — I didn't move to wing until the OHL.
Kid from the other team had a wrist shot that looked like nothing.
No power, bad angle. I should have been in the passing lane but I'd cheated toward the net.
Puck went right through where I should have been standing.
Five-hole on our goalie. Lost the series. "
"How old were you?"
"Eighteen."
"That's brutal."
"My dad didn't talk to me for a week." My voice went flat. I heard it happen and couldn't stop it. "Said I'd embarrassed the family name."
Walsh's grip tightened on his mug. A small thing, the knuckles going white for half a second, but I noticed because noticing was what I did. "Your dad sounds like he had his priorities wrong."
Careful phrasing. Not your dad sounds like an asshole. Close enough to mean it, polite enough to let me decide how to hear it.
"Yeah, well." I shrugged. The gesture felt hollow. "What about you? Worst save?"
"Two years ago. Conference finals. Montreal had this kid, fast as hell, who came down on a breakaway in overtime. I read him wrong. Committed too early, the exact thing Luca was drilling me on the night Park called. He roofed it glove-side and I wasn't even close."
"I remember that game."
He looked at me.
"You played out of your mind for sixty minutes," I said. "You made saves that should have been physically impossible. Your defense hung you out to dry all period and you just kept stopping everything. That goal wasn't on you."
The certainty in my own voice surprised me.
I'd watched that game in my apartment in Minneapolis, alone on the couch at eleven at night, and I'd been angry on Walsh's behalf.
Angry that his team had let him down, angry that the highlight reels would show the breakaway goal and not the thirty-eight saves that preceded it.
Walsh blinked. "You watched Storm playoff games?"
"I watch a lot of hockey." I let the corner of my mouth lift. "And you're kind of hard to miss. Six-four in the crease, making highlight-reel saves like it's effortless."
"It's not effortless."
"I know. That's what makes it impressive."
The words hung between us, unexpected and strangely intimate. Walsh didn't seem to know what to do with them. His hand came up and rubbed the back of his neck, the first unguarded gesture I'd seen from him. The kind of thing a controlled man does when control briefly slips.
"Any superstitions?" he asked, the redirect almost audible in its desperation.
I let him have it. "I tape my sticks the same way every game. Right to left, four wraps at the top, three at the blade."
"What happens if you go left to right?"
"The universe implodes."
Walsh grinned. An actual grin, brief and real.
The sharp lines of his face rearranged into something warmer and younger.
For a disorienting half-second, he looked like someone I could have known before all of this.
Someone I could have been friends with in a different life, where the word friend didn't feel like a weapon other people aimed at you before pulling the trigger.
"I put my left pad on first," he said. "Always. If someone hands me the right pad, I have to set it down and start over."
"That's weirdly specific."
"Says the guy with a tape ritual."
"Fair point." I grabbed the throw blanket off the back of the couch and wrapped it around my shoulders without thinking about it. The fabric was soft and worn, the kind of blanket that had been washed a hundred times. "You tap the posts before faceoffs?"
"Every single one. Three times."
"Why three?"
"No idea. Started doing it in juniors and couldn't stop."
"I tap my stick twice on the ice before every shift." I demonstrated with my hand, two quick taps against the marble counter. "Drives the equipment guys crazy during warm-ups."
"Eriksson won't get on the ice unless he's the last one out of the tunnel."
"Hayes eats the same meal before every game, right? Chicken and rice?"
"With hot sauce. Specific brand. He brings bottles on road trips."
I laughed. The sound came out before I could catch it, brief and surprised—a reflex I'd thought I'd trained out of myself. It felt wrong and right at the same time, like a muscle stretching after months of disuse.
"We're all insane," I said.
"Completely."
The conversation loosened after that, the way ice loosens in a river when the current underneath finally wins.
We traded stories, favorite saves, worst losses, the bizarre habits of teammates past and present.
I did an impression of my Minnesota coach's pre-game speeches, a monotone, dead-eyed delivery of clichés so profound in their emptiness that you could feel your IQ drop in real time.
Walsh actually laughed. A real laugh, brief and startled, the sound foreign in the quiet apartment.
Somewhere around 4:30, we'd settled into the couch cushions.
My legs were tucked under me. The throw blanket pooled in my lap.
I was comfortable, not the manufactured comfort of a man pretending, but the real thing.
The muscles in my shoulders had unknotted.
My jaw had unclenched. My hands, which had been in fists or wrapped around ceramic for two and a half weeks, were resting open on my thighs.
Walsh had noticed too. I saw him clock it, his goalie's eye tracking the change in my posture the way it read a shooter's weight shift. He didn't comment. He just sat in the armchair across from me with his empty mug balanced on the arm and let the silence settle.
"My mummu," I said. The word slipped out in Finnish before I caught it.
"My grandmother. She's the one who reads me the Kalevala.
She lives outside Helsinki. Tiny house in the forest, wood-burning sauna out back.
" I stared into my empty mug. "She'd hate Chicago.
Too flat. She says land without hills is land that hasn't made up its mind. "
"She sounds opinionated."
"She's Finnish. It comes standard."
"When did you last see her?"
"Fourteen months ago." The number sat in my chest like a stone. "Before the investigation went public. I haven't—I can't call her. She'll hear it in my voice and she'll worry, and she's eighty-three and she's already lost too much to worry about me too."
I didn't know why I was telling him this.
The hour, maybe. The dark room, the empty mugs, the strange safety of a space occupied by someone who hadn't decided I was guilty yet.
Walsh sat very still, the kind of stillness that goalies learn, the patience that lets the play come to you instead of chasing it.
"What would she say?" he asked. "If you called."
"Rakas." I swallowed. "Darling. She'd say rakas and then she'd ask if I was eating and then she'd tell me a story about V?in?moinen, he's the hero of the Kalevala, and I'd feel like I was eight years old on her kitchen floor, listening to her voice while the snow came down outside."
I stopped talking. I'd gone further than I'd meant to, into a place I usually kept locked.
Walsh was looking at me with an expression I couldn't place—not pity, not curiosity, something quieter.
Recognition, maybe. The look of a man who understood what it was like to carry something alone and not realize how heavy it had gotten until someone asked you to describe it.
"You should call her," he said.
"Yeah."
"I mean it."
"I know."
Outside, the sky was starting to lighten.
Not dawn yet, but the deep black was fading to charcoal at the edges.
We'd been talking for close to two hours.
In the morning, this would feel different, the daylight would reassert the boundaries, and we'd go back to being the goalie and the liability, the monitor and the monitored.
But right now, at the tail end of the darkest part of the night, we were just two men who couldn't sleep, run out of reasons to pretend we didn't need the company.
"I should try to get a couple hours," I said, standing.
Walsh nodded. He didn't move from the armchair, and I understood, he needed time to power down too. The goalie's wind-down. You couldn't just turn off the vigilance. You had to let it unspool.
"Walsh," I said from the hallway.
He looked up.
"Thanks."
"For what?"
I thought about it. For the silence. For not pushing. For asking about superstitions instead of scandals. For sitting with me in the dark and treating me like a person instead of a problem to be managed.
"The tea," I said.
His mouth twitched. "Anytime."
I went to the guest room and closed the door. I arranged the blanket on the floor and lay down in the dark with the Kalevala on the nightstand above me and the sound of the kettle boiling again from down the hall. Walsh was making himself one more cup before he attempted sleep.
The ceiling looked the same as every other ceiling I'd stared at for the past year.
But the quiet felt different.