5. Evan
FIVE
EVAN
The house was quietest before six.
That was the window I'd started building my mornings around without consciously deciding to — the hour before the city fully woke up, before practice demands pulled at the edges of the day, before anything was required.
The light came in off the water differently at this hour, lower and slower, moving across the hardwood floor in a long diagonal that shifted angle as the sun climbed.
I'd noticed it the first week I was here and I'd kept noticing it, which was more attention than I'd given most things in the house since January.
I navigated most of this house rather than inhabited it. The morning light was the exception.
I sat up and looked at the bedroom. A bed — a good one, because eleven seasons of team hotels had given me firm opinions about mattresses.
A nightstand. A lamp. That was the full inventory, and even that felt more acquired than chosen.
The east-facing windows were the actual asset: they caught the early light in a way that made the room feel considered when it wasn't, the quality coming from the architecture rather than from anything I'd done with the space.
The water was visible from the pillow if I turned my head slightly left — the river, the far bank, the marina quiet at this hour with only a few boats out.
That sightline had been one of the reasons I'd bought the house.
It remained one of the only parts of the purchase I felt unambiguous about.
I checked the time. Six-twelve. Practice at nine.
I got up and went to make coffee, which meant entering the kitchen, which meant starting the daily negotiation I'd been having with this room since January.
—
The kitchen announced its problems before I reached the counter.
That was the thing about a layout that didn't work — you didn't have to look for the issue.
You felt it in your body first, in the small automatic adjustments you made without thinking.
Step to the left around the island corner.
Shift your weight. Reach slightly farther than felt natural to get to the prep counter.
I'd internalized the workaround so completely that I did it on autopilot now, the way you learned the particular give in a floorboard and stopped noticing it — except that I noticed it every morning, because the negotiation had a specific texture that never quite smoothed out.
The coffee maker was the one fixed thing. It lived on the counter to the right of the sink, and it always lived there, because I'd needed at least one thing in this kitchen to have a permanent address. I ran it through its cycle and stood at the island and looked at the room while it worked.
The island was in the wrong place. I'd thought it a hundred times and never been able to explain exactly why in terms I could hand to someone else.
I knew it the way I knew when my positioning was slightly off during a neutral zone sequence — not through analysis, but through low-grade friction — something that didn't quite fit the system it was supposed to serve.
The island blocked something. The workflow moved against itself.
There was a gap between two upper cabinets on the far wall that was too narrow to be useful and too wide to ignore, a detail that caught my eye every morning and resolved nothing.
The coffee finished. I poured a cup, set it on the counter, and started on breakfast.
Eggs were the default — quick, high-protein, something I could make without giving the kitchen my full attention because the kitchen didn't earn my full attention.
I found the pan in the cabinet to the left of the range, which was where it lived because that was where there was space, not because it made any ergonomic sense.
Eggs from the refrigerator. The bread was on the counter near the toaster.
Eight minutes, start to finish, if I moved through the sequence I'd built by trial and error over the first weeks.
The prep area was the specific problem this morning.
I was cutting the toast and realized I'd unconsciously shifted my body to the left to avoid the shadow that fell across the cutting board from the cabinet above.
The south light came in through the window behind the range and hit the countertop directly until sometime around eight, when it dropped below the window frame and the prep area went dim.
No undercabinet lighting to compensate. Just the shadow, every morning, requiring the sideways step I'd stopped noticing.
I noticed it.
She has notes on the kitchen.
Natalie's text was still sitting at the back of my mind the way her messages tended to sit — not because I dwelled on them, but because she was usually right about things, and being right about things made her words stick.
The designer had already reviewed the architectural plans.
She already had observations. She was coming Wednesday — four days away — and was going to walk into this kitchen and name every single thing I'd been navigating around without being able to articulate it.
That was either going to be useful or insufferable.
I ate standing at the island, which I did more often than I sat at the table — a table that currently held two pieces of unopened mail, a water bottle, and no particular function beyond surface.
The view from the island was good. The river was fully lit now, the morning haze burning off the far bank, the water going from grey to blue as the sun climbed.
A heron was working the waterline downstream, doing the patient thing herons did.
I rinsed my plate and went to look at the living room.
—
The living room was the honest version of the problem.
I stood in the doorway and made myself look at it directly, without the usual habit of registering it peripherally and moving past. One couch, positioned roughly in the center of the room because somewhere had to be the center and I hadn't had a better answer in three months.
The television mounted on the wall above where a fireplace would have gone if the house had been built thirty years ago.
A lamp on the floor because I hadn't found a side table I liked enough to buy — that had been my standard for most of the furniture decisions here, which was why the furniture situation was what it was.
Three boxes near the far wall. Moved from the entryway two weeks ago. Unopened.
Two hockey sticks leaning against the wall by the front door. A gym bag. The jacket from Thursday's game-day skate still draped over the chair near the entry that had become the jacket chair by default rather than intention.
I stood there and had the thought I'd been circling since January: Natalie was right.
I didn't want her to be right about this.
I'd bought this house because something about it felt correct in a way I couldn't fully articulate — the proportions, the orientation, the way the water was present from almost every room if you stood in the right position.
The bones were good. I'd known that from the first walk-through, before I'd made an offer, before I'd talked myself into and out of it twice in the same week and then done it anyway. Good bones. This place has good bones.
It also had empty walls, hard surfaces that sent sound bouncing back at you, a living room that ignored its own best asset. The couch faced the center of the room. The view was behind it. I'd bought the house for the view.
In the apartments I'd kept in previous cities — Detroit, then Vancouver, then Boston, two seasons each before the trades came — I'd lived with the same impermanence.
Furnished leases. Short-term arrangements.
The deliberate mobility of a player who didn't know if any given city was the last one.
I'd told myself it was practical. It was also easier than committing to something without knowing how it would resolve.
Jacksonville was supposed to be different. I'd bought here because the franchise felt like it was building something real, because the ownership group was serious, because I'd looked at this house and thought: this is the version where I stop moving.
The decision was right. The execution wasn't.
I went out to the deck.
—
The river was moving slow in the early light, the current visible near the center of the channel, the surface catching the sun at angles that shifted every few minutes as the morning developed.
I stood at the railing and drank my coffee and let the outside do what the inside couldn't quite manage, which was make me feel like I was somewhere rather than just somewhere to sleep.
Two weeks to the playoffs.
That was always the undercurrent now — the awareness running beneath every morning, every drive to the arena, every conversation in the locker room that was ostensibly about something else.
The expansion team's first season was ending in a specific way that hadn't been expected by anyone outside the building and maybe not by everyone inside it either.
We'd built something that worked. The question that would get answered in two weeks was whether it worked when the margin for error disappeared entirely.
I'd been in playoff pushes with three other franchises.
I knew the compression of the final weeks — the way the air changed in a locker room, the way small mistakes stopped being small, the way you either had the habits locked in by then or you didn't. You couldn't build them during the playoffs.
You could only find out which ones you'd already built.