Chapter 11 #3
“I don’t know if you know this, but my mom has MS.” He sighs.
“The treatment is expensive. It’s not fully covered, and it adds up.
” He hooks his elbows around his knees and keeps going, his confession pouring out like water.
“Last year, I started to get that feeling, like I was about to get cut.” He lifts a shoulder.
“My game time was shrinking. Conversations started stopping when I walked in. I’m just a third-line grinder.
Useful but replaceable.” He laughs, no humor in it.
“So one night, I’m out at the bar, and this guy mentions how he made some cash on betting—it sounded ridiculous, shady, I know.
But he let me in on the next bet. I put next to nothing on the line; I was just…
curious. And then I won. And I won again.
And pretty soon, it was covering medical bills and medication. ”
The picture assembles before me—a desperate man just trying to provide for someone he loves. I can relate. I can see myself standing exactly where he is, desperate to alleviate my mom’s long hours and sleepless nights.
“It worked for a while. Small bets. Then it stopped working. And the hole got bigger. And the men stopped being friendly. Fifty thousand turned into a hundred, into three hundred. They wanted games thrown. And I couldn’t do that, not without—”
“Someone to take the fall.”
He looks at me. Not the Teflon-coated Cole from press conferences. Or the cheery goof from the ice. No, I see the man underneath. Stripped of his confidence. Wrecked.
“I’m sorry. I knew your history,” he whispers. “And I knew if I tampered with a test, the organization would see a pattern instead of a setup.”
I want to be angry—I am. But I also understand.
I took steroid enhancers because I was terrified of being average. Because my mom worked double shifts at the hospital and whatever else she could find, and Coach gave me free ice time, and I couldn’t be the kid who let everyone down. So I cheated. To be enough.
Cole gambled because he was terrified of being cut. Because his mom has MS and the treatments cost more than his salary covers, and he couldn’t be the son who let her care fall apart. So he cheated. To be enough.
Different drug. Same disease.
“I get why you did it,” I say.
Cole looks at me, eyes wide with surprise.
“I don’t forgive the framing. I’m not there yet.” I hold his gaze. “But I understand why you did it. I know that feeling—the feeling like you have to cheat to matter, like if the numbers dropped, you’d disappear. So yeah. I get it.”
His eyes fill silently. “I’m sorry,” he says. Two words. Stripped of everything.
“I know.” I turn toward the front of the store, back on sentry duty. “Get some sleep, Cole. I’ll wake you up when it’s your turn to watch.”
Within minutes, his breathing deepens, and a weight slips from my shoulders. Maybe we really aren’t as alone as we believe.
I move to the snowmobile because the tent is small and my thoughts are large. The polar bear watches me from its fake snow, my companion for the night.
I’m tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. Bone deep. Identity deep. Twenty-three years of performing—strong for Mom, grateful for Coach, untouchable for the team, clean for the organization. One night in the dark, and I feel more seen than I have in years.
I don’t know how much time goes by before she shows up. An hour or two.
I don’t hear her come out. But I feel her. The way I’ve felt her all night.
“Mind if I join you?” Everly says.
I scoot over, making room for her on the snowmobile.
She sits. Pulls her blanket tight around herself. Her breath is visible, small silver clouds.
“It’s too bad about Cole’s mom,” she says.
“You heard all that?”
She leans into me just slightly, her shoulder brushing mine. “It’s a familiar story, the lie beneath it all.”
“What lie?”
“That you’re only worth what you produce.
” She says it simply. “Cole gambles because he’s terrified of being cut.
You took enhancers because you were terrified of being average.
I build pen names because I’m terrified of being seen.
” She pauses. “Different costumes. Same lie. If I’m not performing, I’m not valuable. ”
It’s a truth so precise it almost hurts—having something you’ve carried for twenty years named by someone who’s been carrying it too.
“My mom used to say something.” The words surface the way deep things do when the filters are dissolved.
“After my dad died. I’d come home from practice, wrecked, convinced I wasn’t good enough.
She’d be doing dishes, and she’d say, ‘Beckett, stop worrying about your performance and just be yourself. That’s enough. ’”
Everly goes still.
“She had this hymn that my dad loved. Something about the vain things that charm me most. I was eight. I didn’t really know what it meant at the time.”
Something shifts in her face—recognition so sudden it’s almost physical.
“My dad has that hymn,” she says. “He had it hung up in his home office.”
“Your dad has that hymn?”
“He started going to church after he and Mom split up. I guess it was his way of finding ground.” She pulls a knee up. “What are vain things, anyway?”
“Maybe the things we think make us valuable—the books, the brands, the performance—are the vain things.”
“And if we could let them go…”
“What’s left?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s the point. You have to let go before you find out.” She pauses. “I’m not great at faith. I’m a plotter—I’ve got to get the whole story lined up before my pen hits the page. Letting go of control is not really in my skill set.”
“Oh, I know.” I give her shoulder a nudge, but I don’t pull back.
She chuckles, leaning back into me. Her head rests on my shoulder, her hair brushing my neck.
“Your mom and my dad,” she says. “Giving us the same verse.”
“Different houses. Same hymn.”
“Think they planned that?”
“I think some things find you whether you plan them or not.”
“That sounds dangerously close to faith, Benson.”
I laugh, glancing down at her. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Something tells me it might be an upgrade to your reputation.”
“Ouch.”
She laughs, the sound traveling through my shoulder straight to my heart. Everly Hart, you have no idea what you do to me.
The polar bear stands watch. Cole snores. And the verse—my mother’s, her father’s—hangs between us like a bridge being built from both sides, the two halves reaching across the gap that’s been there seventeen years and is finally closing.
She tilts her head up to look at me, her green eyes catching the dim light. “You should sleep.”
Not exactly what I was thinking…but probably a good idea.
“I’ll keep watch,” she adds.
I glance toward the tent, toward Cole’s snoozing outline, then back at her. “I think I’m okay out here.”
Everly rolls her eyes. “Just go, Benson. It’s late—you’ve got to be tired. And I need some time to get my brain turned off for the night. Call it the writer’s curse.”
I look toward the darkness in the distance. “All right, I’ll go. But”—I turn back to her—“only if you keep watch from the tent. I don’t want to wake up in a few hours to find you frozen into a solid block of ice.”
“Tactical adjacency. For warmth.”
“Strictly thermal.”
She stands. Looks back at me on the snowmobile. “All right, then. Let’s go.”
She ducks into the tent. I sit on the snowmobile a minute longer, looking at the picturesque camp—completely ideal and completely fake.
All the vain things that charm me most.
I honestly don’t know what comes after you let them go. Who I’d be without the jersey.
The building shakes as the wind crashes against it. From the dark echoes, I can almost hear my answer. Who am I if I’m not the best?
Unworthy.
I cross the camp, picking up the flashlight as I go by the plastic fire. I duck into the tent and drop onto the sleeping bag, next to Everly. She’s waiting for me, her eyes warm, strands of hair tracing her cheekbones.
“Wake me up if you hear anything,” I say, handing her the flashlight.
“I will. Now, Go. To. Sleep.” She pronounces each word with a stern look. It does something to me, that scrunched nose pushing her glasses up. Heat surges through my chest.
“All right, all right already. I’m going.” I lie down and close my eyes.
And miraculously, I sleep.