Chapter 15 #2
The reporters close in. The cameras roll.
The sky is golden, spilling over the Northwoods Mall.
The building stands—damaged, flooded, smoking slightly from the west end, but standing.
And somewhere in the wreckage of the rink where two lonely kids grew up to save each other in the dark, a new chapter was started.
Turns out, knowing what comes next doesn’t mean it’s any easier to accept. I don’t know if the conversation will happen or if life will swallow us.
If this has, in fact, been fiction all along.
BECKETT
My phone is alive.
This is the first small surprise of the morning—the small, mundane surprise that arrives after twelve hours of large, existential ones.
The moment we stepped through the open arena doors, the moment the cell towers shook off the storm, my phone received twelve hours of missed communications simultaneously and vibrated with the sustained, aggressive urgency of a device that has a lot to say and has been saving it.
Seven missed calls. A dozen texts. The screen scrolls like a stock ticker during a crash—fragments of a world I forgot existed.
Oh, and the seven calls? Yes, all from the same number. Rick Castellano. My agent. The man who negotiated my rookie contract and has spent six months managing the doping narrative.
Rick, who doesn’t panic.
Rick, who has called seven times in ten minutes.
Rick is panicking.
Call eight comes in. I gesture to the reporters—I gotta take this—and step away. I pick up the phone.
“Beckett.” Rick’s voice comes through so far from calm, it’s on another continent. “Tell me what I’m seeing isn’t what I think it is.”
“I don’t know. What are you seeing?”
“I’m seeing WCCO running footage of you walking out of a burning building with Coach Hart’s daughter.
I’m seeing your name—the name I have spent six months rehabilitating—in the same sentence as ‘gambling ring’ and ‘overnight’ and ‘Coach’s daughter.
’ So please, tell me I’ve gotta go get my vision checked. ”
“Get your vision checked, Rick. Whatever headline you’re reading, it’s not telling the whole story.”
“I don’t care about the whole story, Beckett.
I care about the optics.” Rick’s voice takes on an oily quality.
“The contract renewal is in less than three weeks. And what the board is seeing right now is their problem player walking out of a burning building with Coach’s daughter, soaking wet, at seven thirty a.m, after an overnight situation involving criminals and the kind of chaos that makes sponsors very nervous. ”
Across the parking lot, Everly still sits in her foil blanket on the open end of an ambulance.
A few cameras have headed her direction, clearly having figured out her identity.
Eyes wide, cheeks flushed, she looks terrified.
Not of the thugs—they’re done. Of the camera.
Of the anonymity she’s spent years building to protect herself being stripped away on live television—Everly Hart. E.J. Hartley, sans the wig.
I want to go to her, my question Can we talk? still in my head.
But I’m surrounded by a pack of journalists myself. I take another few steps back, putting distance between me and the mics as Rick shouts in my ear. “Beckett. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Just…don’t say anything stupid. Don’t talk to the press until we’ve got this sorted out.
I don’t know what happened between you and Coach Hart’s daughter, but whatever it is, when the question comes out—and it will—your answer is, repeat after me: nothing.
There is nothing going on between you. There is no more to it than that. Got it?”
Everything about it is a lie. Even at its base level, it’s a lie. There has never, at any point in my life, been nothing going on between me and Everly Hart.
“Rick, I don’t—”
“I’m trying to help you here, Beckett.” His voice softens just slightly, taking me back to our first few months together my rookie year.
He’d meet me at the local diner and buy me dinner, stay a while.
He knew me back when I didn’t have two pennies to rub together.
“That career your mother worked so hard to build for you. All the long hours. All the night shifts and treatment center weekends. All the heating bills she didn’t pay so you could have time on the ice.
The car she couldn’t fix. Your father’s legacy.
It’s all in jeopardy. Wasted if your renewal falls through. ”
The words hit a place that has no armor. No wall. No blue line. The place where I’m a living debt—an obligation that compounds daily, the interest calculated in ice time and performance.
Dad died for hockey. Mom gave everything for hockey. If I choose Everly, I’m saying their sacrifice didn’t matter.
“Nothing’s going to scare the board more than the potential of a scandal between a player and the coach’s daughter,” Rick says. “Keep it professional, Beckett.”
I look at Everly. Thirty feet away. The woman who ran into a fire for my name.
I look at the cameras.
I put the phone down. Walk toward the media cluster.
“Mr. Benson, Mr. Benson, police just arrested four unnamed men and your teammate Cole Thompson. What can you tell us about that?” Karen Lindstrom, WCCO.
“Cole made a mistake, got in over his head, and needed help. That’s what I’ll keep doing—showing up for people when they’re in over their heads. You’ll have to wait for the police reports for further questions on that.”
“Is it true you got trapped in the mall overnight?”
“That’s correct.”
“Were you and Everly Hart there together when you got trapped?”
“No.” Not a lie. I was there. She was there. But we came separately. You were there—you saw it.
“But you two were found together when emergency personnel arrived on the scene. Can you clarify your relationship with Miss Hart?”
I open my mouth. And the words that come out don’t belong to the same man who spent a night with Everly Hart. Because no man who’s spent even a decent amount of time with her could walk away and act like it never happened.
But…well, there’s Rick in my head, and in this very moment, I’ve sort of convinced myself that if Everly can lie, I can too. And maybe this is for the best—to protect her.
Besides, we’ll talk about it later. I’ll fix it.
“Everly Hart and I are not now, nor have we ever been together.”
Smooth. Clean. Professional. And I’m protecting her too—you can see that, right?
“We were trapped during the blizzard when the building locked down, and we got caught up in the situation. That’s all this is. Wrong place, wrong time.”
The reporters wait. They smell blood in the water.
“Look.” The truth is pushing, trying to break out.
But the wall holds, because that’s what it’s meant to do.
That’s what I built it for. “The only reason we were even on that ice this morning was because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got wrapped up in something she didn’t belong in.
” A beat, the reporters still waiting. Still smelling it.
Rick’s voice whispers through my head. Your mother’s sacrifices, your father’s legacy, it’s all in jeopardy. And there it is. The bomb.
And here comes the shrapnel. I laugh. “She should have stuck to the stands, if you know what I mean.”
“So she’s not your girlfriend?”
“No. She’s nothing.”
The words leave my mouth and cross the thirty feet of parking lot like a puck fired at the wrong net, traveling at speed toward a target I didn’t mean to hit, with a force I can’t recall.
Should have stuck to the stands. Of all the things I could have said…
The crowd of reporters shifts. Breaks. And my eyes lift, find her in an instant.
And for one horrible, terrible, split second, her face crumples. That persona she’s built, the one who writes strong women worth rooting for, it cracks, just enough for a glimpse of the scared little girl in the stands. Abandoned. Unwanted.
Oh no, she heard me.
Everly—wait—
But I can’t move—too many people between us. And I couldn’t run to her anyway, not without being called a liar in the press. So I stand there, my throat closing.
She doesn’t cry. She’s past crying. Her face just…closes. The light goes out.
She pulls the foil blanket tighter. Adjusts the cracked glasses. The EMT says something, helps her onto a gurney. A moment later, they load her into the back of the ambulance.
The doors close. The ambulance pulls away.
I stand in the parking lot, microphones boxing me in.
“No more questions.” I’m done. It’s over.
Like it never even happened.