23. Nova
Chapter twenty-three
Nova
Isee it on the third goal.
Half an inch. The kind of flinch that doesn’t show on tape unless you’ve been watching the man for four months and know what his stillness looks like.
The press box doesn’t catch it. The lead is already written for the morning — Cyclones drop opener, Mercer shaky in third — and none of those guys are in the building four hours before puck drop watching him retape his blocker like the tape job is a question he’s still answering.
A total occupational hazard.
I sat in a press box two seasons ago, watched the same flinch on a screen, and called it a liability.
Put a colder name on someone else’s pain and called it reporting.
Six hundred words on a goalie’s mechanical hesitation, written under a name that wasn’t mine, fed to me by a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
I was wrong then. I knew I was wrong. And if I sit up here now, I’m wrong again. I put the camera in my bag and go down without it. That gets my stomach first.
I leave it alone.
The tunnel is quiet.
He’s on the bench outside the locker room.
Gear minus the helmet. Tape on his hands.
Stick across his knees. The way he sits when a game is still sitting on him — not defeated, not finished, just doing the thing he does where his whole body keeps the score in the room until he’s ready to put it down.
I sit next to him.
Not across. Next to.
He doesn’t look up. I don’t say anything. We sit there long enough that the sounds from the locker room start coming through the wall — Brody’s voice, somebody laughing, the particular silence of a team that just lost.
“That wasn’t the goal,” I say.
“I know.”
“The third one. The hand.”
He turns his head a fraction.
“You retape the blocker before every game.” I keep my eyes forward because if I look at him I’ll lose the thread. “Every stoppage tonight you got more deliberate. I could see you recalibrating. Third period, every single one.”
He doesn’t move.
“That was the ghost.”
The tunnel goes very still.
He turns and looks at me. I look back. The recorder is in my bag. The bag is at my feet. He sees where it is. He sees what it means that it’s there and not in my hand.
“No recorder.”
“No.”
He nods once and looks back at his hands.
The silence goes long. I let it.
“Thanks for coming down,” he says finally.
My throat does something stupid.
“Yeah,” I say.
We sit there until people start coming through. Then I stand up. I don’t look back when I leave. If I look back I’ll do something with the expression on his face and I don’t have a place to put that yet.
Katarina’s at the glass when I come up.
Not waiting. Just there. Two coffees in her hands the way there are always two coffees in her hands, like the woman has a supply chain.
She holds one out. I take it.
We watch the ice get resurfaced.
“You went down without your camera,” she says.
“I know.”
“Brave.”
“Questionable.”
“Could go either way.” She drinks her coffee. “I’d lean brave.”
I don’t say anything. She doesn’t push. That’s the thing about Katarina — she just waits and somehow the waiting is worse than questions.
She leaves first.
I stand at the glass with her coffee in my hand and watch the Zamboni do its lap and try not to think about a man who said okay in a tunnel like he was filing it for later.
I drink the coffee.
This is bad.
Like, specifically for me.
Game 2.
Everything is different and I don’t try to explain it to anyone because the only person I’d want to explain it to is the reason it’s different and I can’t say it to him until I’ve said the other thing first.
I do my job.
Camera up. Recorder on. File clean copy. Brody scores in the second and I get the shot. Liam wins a battle along the boards I also get. I am professional. I am working.
My chest is doing all kinds of bullshit. Every shot that comes at him does something ugly to my chest until he gets there.
He always gets there.
The wall holds for forty-four shots and I count every one, which is not the job. The job is goals. I count them anyway because apparently this is where my dignity lives now.
The ghost is quiet.
I don’t know if what I said in the tunnel did that or if tonight was always going to happen andI’m not going to ask, because asking would mean looking at the answer, and I am very specifically not doing that.
After the buzzer the building loses its mind.
He finds Aurora in the family section first — picks her up belly and all, makes her laugh, sets her down careful. Then the team is on him. Aiden in a headlock. Brody yelling directly into his ear. The whole noisy righteous mess of a forty-four-save Game 2 win.
His eyes come up.
Press box.
Me.
I lower the camera.
Just look back.
That look is a problem and I am going to deal with it later.
Aurora’s photo hits my phone before I’m out of the building.
His eyes. Mine. The whole celebration happening around us and neither of us in it. Her caption: just so you know.
I look at it walking to my car.
I look at it sitting in the driver’s seat with the engine off.
I look at it for longer than I would tell anyone I looked at it.
Aurora knows.
I don’t know when she figured it out and I don’t know how long she’s known, but she knows.
And now I have proof of it on my phone in the form of a photo of Jax Mercer looking at me like the rest of the arena dropped out.
I drive home.
I keep the radio off.
I think about all those press boxes, the tunnel, the forty-four saves, and a man who said okay in a way that wasn’t agreement, exactly — it was something more like I heard you. I’m taking it in. I’ll get back to you.
I’m in a lot of trouble.
I already knew that.
I get home. Apartment quiet. I sit on the couch with my laptop on my knees and look at the photo Aurora sent me and don’t put it in the file with the press shots. It goes in a different folder. The one I’ve been pretending isn’t there for a couple of months now. I add it. I close the laptop.
Open it again. Look at his face.
The relief on his face.
Real. Unguarded.
Like he got through forty-four shots, looked up, and found what he was looking for.
I close the laptop. That’s enough of that.
V. North wrote about that ghost like it was a character flaw.
I sat in a tunnel and named it for him and watched him breathe.
Both things are true. They live next to each other in me and they’re not getting smaller.
He needs to hear it from me. He needs to hear it from me before it shows up in a comment thread or a podcast or a piece of mail Riley has to flag for legal, and the longer I wait the worse the version is when it lands.
Tomorrow.
I’m going to tell him tomorrow. I open my personal notebook. I’ve had the word for a while. Long enough that writing it isn’t discovery anymore. It’s just me being annoying and late.
I write it small near the margin anyway.
Pick up my phone. I’m going to text him. I don’t know what I’m going to say. I’ll figure it out when I —
Open messenger. One waiting. Not from Jax.
Heard you’ve been having fun in Canyon Bay, NV. Funny thing — people are starting to ask about the V. North angle. Wouldn’t take much to help them along. Thought you should know before it moves. — G
NV.
My stomach drops so hard it almost hurts.
Not because of the message. Because of that nickname.
Because for half a second I am back in Tampa, sitting across from Griffin Novak while he smiles like he knows exactly which parts of me are easiest to make small. Two letters, and suddenly Canyon Bay feels less like a place I chose and more like a room with no exits.
My notebook’s on the table. The word I just wrote inside it.
He was right there. I could’ve just—
No.
I press my palm flat against the cover like I can keep the thought trapped if I hold it down hard enough.
I have a flight to Vegas in six hours.
So I do what I’m good at.
I turn the panic into logistics.
I pack.