14. Elias
ELIAS
Sloane gives me a date and a warning in the same breath, which is how I know the warning is the real message.
“March first,” she says. She doesn’t sit and she doesn’t offer me a chair; this is a standing meeting, the kind she does when she wants it short and remembered.
“He’s on the ice in a real capacity by March first, or we have a different conversation.
And Elias—” She lets my name sit there. “The board’s started asking.
A first-line forward, eighteen months left on a very large contract, out longer than anyone projected, and the medical explanation is coming from one clinician they didn’t hire and don’t know.
I’ve been covering that with my own credibility. I can’t do it past March.”
So now there’s a clock I didn’t set, ticking against the clock I did.
I hold her eyes and I give her the only thing that works on Sloane, which is calm.
“March first,” I agree, as if it costs me nothing, as if I’m not at this moment scheduling the exact protocol delays that will make March first impossible.
“He’ll be ready. And I understand about the board.
Send anyone with questions to me directly.
I’d rather they hear it from the person managing the case than play telephone through the front office.
” Generous. Transparent. The offer of a man with nothing to hide, which is the single most effective thing a man with everything to hide can say.
She nods, mollified. I walk out having promised a date I will spend the next six weeks quietly ensuring we miss.
I do the arithmetic in the elevator, and the arithmetic tells me I’m running out of the one thing I’ve always had more of than anyone, which is time.
That’s the variable I’ve never had to solve for before.
In the other cities, with the other ones, time was infinite, or near enough; no one was waiting on a slight young man with no contract and no audience to perform for on a Tuesday in March.
Sam had nowhere to be. That was half of why I chose him.
But I chose Roman because he was the opposite—public, valuable—and I let the wanting override the obvious operational truth, which is that you cannot quietly disappear into the slow ruin of a man the whole city is waiting to see skate.
The thing that makes him intoxicating, that an entire organization needs his body back, is the thing that will end me, because the world keeps the receipts on a man like Roman in a way it never bothered to for Sam.
I knew that going in. I did it anyway, which is new, which frightens the part of me that has stayed free for all these years by never once choosing appetite over cover.
This time I chose appetite. I file the fear where I file all the threats, in the cold drawer that’s never full, and I start planning, because planning is the only prayer I have.
—
The first thing I plan around is a reporter.
It comes to me secondhand, which is itself useful, a forwarded email from the PR office with a tired note attached, Can you advise on a response?
The reporter is Erin Vasquez. Local sports desk, but good, better than local usually runs, the kind who files a story and then keeps pulling the thread after everyone else has moved on.
Her email is three polite sentences asking for comment on Roman Vane’s unusually extended recovery timeline, whether there are complications the public should know about, whether the organization stands by the original prognosis.
Nothing accusatory. Just a smart person noticing the same gap Sloane noticed, from the outside, with a byline.
I draft PR’s response for them, because of course I do, that’s why it came to me.
I make it warm and boring and final. Roman’s recovery is progressing well; the club is prioritizing his long-term health over an artificial timeline; we won’t be commenting on specifics of an athlete’s medical care, as is our policy.
Unimpeachable. Caring, even. It says nothing.
It closes the door politely. It gives her no thread to pull.
I send it back to PR with a note suggesting they keep all Vane medical inquiries routed through me so the messaging stays consistent.
They’re grateful. One less thing on their desk.
And just like that, every question about Roman Vane’s body now runs across the desk of the man hiding what’s being done to it, and I’ve made that look like media discipline.
Erin Vasquez will get her boring answer and move on, probably. People usually do.
Probably. I write her name down, though, the same as I wrote Blake’s. The ones who keep pulling threads are the ones who end me, if anyone does, and I’ve learned to mark them early.
What I can’t do is make her go away like I’ll make Blake go away, and I sit with that limitation, because it’s instructive.
The reporter is a different kind of problem entirely, and a new kind of problem is the closest thing to excitement I own.
Blake is inside the building; I can move the pieces she watches, reroute the supply, drown her in a plausible taper, use the institution’s own deference to me against her.
Erin Vasquez is outside it, and you can’t reroute a journalist’s curiosity, you can only starve it, give it nothing, make the story boring enough to die of neglect.
The danger of the outside ones is that they have no career inside my walls for me to threaten, no protocol for me to falsify.
They answer to an editor, a deadline, their own appetite for the thread, none of which I control.
So I do the only thing that works on the outside ones, which is to make the inside so seamless that there’s nothing for the outside to catch on.
A perfect official record. A caring boilerplate quote.
A franchise that closes ranks because closing ranks is what franchises do.
If I keep the inside clean enough, Erin Vasquez writes one tepid follow-up and her editor reassigns her to something with a pulse, and the thread goes slack for lack of anything to pull.
That’s the plan. It’s a good plan. It has one flaw, which is that it depends on Roman staying alive, and that is the one part of all this I’ve stopped being able to guarantee.
—
Blake doesn’t email. Blake brings paper.
She finds me in my office at the end of the day and shuts the door behind her without asking, which tells me before she’s said a word that this isn’t the hallway conversation anymore.
She puts a printout on my desk. Pharmacy logs.
Roman’s refills, dates and quantities, weeks of them, and she’s highlighted the pattern in yellow, the climb, the intervals shrinking, the totals that don’t reconcile with any protocol a healing knee should need.
“I’m not doing the gentle version again,” she says.
Her voice is steady but there’s something underneath it, fear maybe, the fear of a junior person who’s decided to do the right thing against a senior one.
“These numbers are wrong, Elias. This isn’t pain management for a recovering ACL.
This is a dependency being fed, and either you can’t see it, which I don’t believe, or you’re the one feeding it.
So here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to explain this to me in a way that makes medical sense, right now, or I’m taking it to the physicians’ board.
I’ve already scanned the pages. I will do it.
I like you, or I did, but I’m not going down with you and I’m not letting a patient die so you can keep your secret, whatever it is. ”
It’s the bravest thing anyone in this building has done, and I feel the cold thing in me recognize her fully, the recognition you give a worthy opponent across a board.
She has me. On paper, she has me. And I sit back and I do the only thing that’s ever saved me, which is to become, instantly, the reasonable man hearing a serious concern.
“You’re right to bring this,” I tell her, and I watch it knock her half a step off balance, the agreement she braced against an argument for.
“The numbers look exactly like you say. I should have flagged it to you myself.” I let regret into my face, dosed to the gram.
“Here’s what you don’t have, because it’s not in the pharmacy system: he’s been on a tapering schedule for nine days.
The high refills are the old protocol; the taper started after his last imaging.
I’ve been managing it closely because of the very risk profile you’re describing, family history, the psychology, all of it.
You’ve caught the peak of a curve that’s already coming down.
” I meet her eyes, open, grateful. “Give me three weeks. If the numbers aren’t down by then, you take the whole file to the board and I’ll walk in with you.
But don’t blow up a man’s career and mine on the upslope of a taper I’m already running. ”
It’s a good lie. It’s a good lie because most of it is structure she can’t check against anything except my word, and I’ve spent a career making my word the most trusted instrument in any room.
I watch her want to believe it, because believing it means she doesn’t have to detonate her own career on a hunch, and I watch the wanting do half my work for me.
She doesn’t fully buy it. But she takes the three weeks, because three weeks is reasonable and she’s a reasonable person and that’s the lever I pulled.
“Three weeks,” she says. “I’m keeping the logs.
And I’m watching.” She leaves the highlighted printout on my desk, on purpose, a copy she doesn’t need back, so I know she has others.
I sit with it after she’s gone. Three weeks. She’s bought me less time than Sloane and she’s far more dangerous, because Sloane wants to be reassured and Blake wants to be right.
—