Chapter 8 His Brother’s Keeper #2
Caleb snorts. “He never let me win.”
“Me neither,” I say.
There’s a new silence, but it’s not bad. It’s a shared thing, like a blanket nobody wants to admit they need.
The night drags on. Guys start to peel off, heading home to wives, to empty apartments, to whatever passes for comfort these days.
Caleb stands, stretches, and says, “Thanks for letting me hang.”
Ash says, “Any time, man. You’re team.”
Caleb nods. He leaves, and for a second the cold rushes in behind him.
I watch Ash as he watches the door. His face is set, but his eyes are soft, and I can tell he wants to say something. I want to say it for him.
Instead, we clean up, tossing bottles into the bin, wiping chip dust off the table.
At the door, Ash says, “You think he’ll be okay?”
I shrug. “Eventually.”
He doesn’t move. “You coming to the gym tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I say.
He chews his lip, then, “You want to grab breakfast after? Real food?”
I blink. “Yeah. That’d be good.”
He nods, and for a second he’s about to reach for me, but he shoves his hands in his pockets instead. “Cool.”
I watch him walk to his car, shoulders hunched against the night, and I know, absolutely, that tomorrow I’ll be at the gym at 5:00 on the dot. Maybe even 4:58.
I walk home, thinking about Cap, about Caleb, about Ash and his scone and his hoodie and his hands. I think about how easy it is, sometimes, to want something, and how fucking impossible it is to say it out loud.
I sleep, eventually, and in my dream, we’re back at the rink, all of us, alive and stupid and yelling at each other. Ash is there, laughing, and for once, I don’t want to wake up.
—
Morning. The gym is open. I’m early. Ash is earlier.
We lift. We sweat. We don’t talk.
But when I spot him, hands hovering just over his chest, he looks up at me and grins. “Don’t let go.”
I never would.
———
Practice days are always the same.
The city half-dead with fog, the rink alive with fluorescent glare and the hum of rental compressors.
The temporary facility is basically a meat locker, cinderblock walls sweating condensation, the locker room crowded with bodies and wet gear and the sick-sweet stink of disinfectant.
I sit on the bench, head down, taping my stick. Left over right, three wraps, then spiral the knob, old habit from peewee.
The tape is new, but already sticky, already bleeding glue onto my fingers. Ash sits across from me, unlacing his shoes, mouth set in a line, eyes fixed on the scuffed concrete.
Around us, the room buzzes, guys trash-talking, rookie singing off-key, O’Doul holding court about “the time he knocked a guy’s tooth out and made a necklace.” The noise is a comfort, a blanket over the real tension underneath.
I ignore my phone at first.
The only thing I care about is finishing the stick, testing the flex, imagining the puck rocketing off the blade, clean and pure, the way it did when I was a kid and everything was simple.
But then, all at once, the room shifts.
It starts with a single chime, then another, and another, a ripple of notifications that spreads like a virus.
Every phone in the place, buzzing and beeping, a wave of sound that shreds the air.
The effect is instant, guys glance at their screens, then at each other, then back at their screens, faces blanching as the words sink in.
I finish the last wrap, rip the tape with my teeth, and only then do I check mine.
It’s a news alert. There’s only one headline that matters.
Second shooter apprehended. Identity confirmed—Caleb Holt.
The letters slide around, out of focus, then snap back, sharper than glass.
For a long second, nothing happens. Nobody speaks, nobody moves.
Then the room collapses, sound leaking out like blood from a cut.
O’Doul is the first to say anything. “Fuck,” he whispers, but it carries across the cinderblock.
Raz sits down hard on the bench, head in his hands. One of the rookies just stares at his phone, eyes wide, blinking like maybe it’s a prank, like the words will change if he looks again.
I can’t breathe. My throat locks up, chest tight, and my whole body goes cold and clammy. The stick slips from my hands, lands on the rubber floor with a hollow thunk.
The details trickle in over the next hour, fragments from the team chat, from the news ticker, from Coach's tight-lipped calls in the hallway.
Caleb had planned it, months in advance, maybe longer. His laptop was full of it. encrypted forums, manifestos from shooters he'd been studying like game tape, a digital trail so dark the FBI had already taken the hard drive.
The alibi was part of it too, he'd left his phone with a friend in Pullman, paid two classmates to cover for him, built the whole thing like a play he'd been rehearsing in his head since long before Ryan ever died.
The investigators said he'd been radicalized online, pulled into communities that fed on isolation and rage, though nobody could pinpoint the exact moment he tipped from grieving brother to something else entirely.
His own brother. He killed his own brother.
I think back to the last time I saw Caleb. He was wearing Cap’s old jacket, sleeves too long, face still baby-soft.
He hugged me at the funeral, fingers trembling, and thanked me for “taking care of the team.” He smiled when I showed him Cap’s lucky puck, the one with the chip in the side from a playoff goal.
I want to throw up. The worst part isn't the betrayal. It's the math.
Every smile, every hug, every story about Cap, all of it was real and performed at the same time. The kid who cried at the wake had already pulled the trigger.
The grief wasn't fake; it just wasn't the whole picture.
Whatever broke inside Caleb had been broken long before the shooting, and none of us saw it because he looked exactly like what we needed him to be, the little brother who survived.
He ordered pancakes at the diner and poured syrup until it overflowed onto the table.
He cried once, after a bad joke from Raz, but laughed it off. Every time I saw him, he looked smaller, like the grief was eating him from the inside out.
I want to throw up.
Across the room, Ash is frozen. He’s holding his phone in both hands, elbows braced on his knees, staring at the screen so hard I worry he’ll burn a hole in it.
Nobody knows what to say. Nobody can even make a joke. The silence gets so thick it’s hard to move through, like air has been replaced with cement.
Coach Vasquez walks in, clipboard in hand, already barking “five minutes to warmup.” She stops when she sees the room, reads the temperature like a pro. For a second, she looks confused.
Then she pulls her own phone, glances at the screen, and just stands there, shoulders slumping as the news hits her.
She says nothing. For once, the woman with a line for everything has no line. She sits on the edge of the bench, clipboard resting on her knees, and just breathes.
The rest of the team tries to process. Some guys check other news feeds, hoping for a correction, a retraction, a “just kidding.” Others sit in silence, eyes fixed on nothing.
I think about every conversation I ever had with Caleb. I think about his smile, his easy laugh, the way he told stories about Cap that nobody else knew.
I think about the way he hugged me, desperate, and how I never once thought he was anything but another casualty of the violence, another brother in the fraternity of the lost.
I feel my hands go numb. The stick is still on the floor. I stare at it, willing myself to pick it up, to act like nothing has changed. But everything has.
Next to me, Ash is breathing too fast, nostrils flaring, sweat beading on his temples. He doesn’t look up.
I want to say something to him, anything, but the words are jammed behind my teeth.
Coach finally speaks, voice flat. “Practice is cancelled. Everyone out. Go home, stay together, don’t talk to press. If you need anything, you call me.”
Nobody argues. We stand, one by one, some grabbing their shit, some just wandering out in a fog.
Ash waits for me by the exit. His face is gray, eyes rimmed in red. He doesn’t say anything, just bumps his shoulder into mine as we walk to the parking lot.
Outside, the world is colder than it should be. The cars look like tombstones, the sky heavy and blank.
I slide into the passenger seat of Ash’s car. He puts the key in the ignition, but doesn’t start it.
We sit in silence, the only sound the ping of the car door reminder, relentless and stupid.
After a while, Ash speaks.
“You okay?”
I want to scream at him, tell him that nothing is okay, that the whole world is fucked and will never be right again. Instead, I just shake my head.
“Me neither,” he says.
We sit like that for a long time, parked in the dead lot, the world spinning off its axis outside the windows.
I think about the last six weeks, about the way we built ourselves back up, piece by piece, routine by routine.
I think about how easy it is to pretend you know someone, and how impossible it is to ever really know.
I look at Ash. His hands are clenched on the steering wheel, white-knuckled, like he’s holding onto the last piece of sanity.
I want to reach out, touch him, say something that matters.
But I don’t.
Because nothing makes sense anymore.
Not even us.
———
The city outside my window is a smear of light and fog, the skyline blurred by rain that sticks to the glass and refuses to let go.
It’s almost midnight, but the world below is still awake, headlights moving in slow motion down Mercer, the hum of a police siren in the distance, the neon smear of a falafel place that never closes.
I sit on the floor, back against the cold radiator, knees hugged to my chest. My phone is in my hand, but I’m not looking at it. I’m just letting the blue glow paint my face and the backs of my eyelids.
After practice, I drove Ash home. We didn’t talk.
I dropped him at the curb and watched him walk up the stairs, hoodie pulled tight, not looking back. I waited until the porch light blinked on before I left.
I haven’t moved since.
The news replayed in my head all night, a feedback loop of horror and guilt and betrayal.
The kid we took in, the one we swore to protect, was the thing we feared most.
All those memories, hugging him at the wake, giving him Cap’s puck, teaching him how to tape a stick, now twisted and poisoned, retroactively criminal.
I keep thinking there was something I missed, some tell in his voice or the way he hugged too hard or the way he always lingered at the edge of every conversation, like he was collecting data for a case nobody else could see.
I want to call Ash. I want to hear his voice, even if all he says is “fuck” on repeat. But I’m afraid of what will come out if I open my mouth. I’m afraid I’ll break something that can’t be fixed.
Instead, I stare at my phone. I scroll past the team chat, which is a disaster zone of memes and black humor and nervous energy.
I skip over Nia’s texts, which have gotten shorter and colder in the last week, her patience with my absences draining by the day.
I stop at the contact labeled MOM.
I haven’t called her since the funeral. She left a voicemail yesterday, said she was “thinking of me, always.” I deleted it after the first five seconds, but the guilt stuck around.
I hit the call button before I can change my mind.
It rings twice. On the third, she answers, voice clear and warm as soup. “Darius?”
For a second, I don’t know what to say.
She fills the silence. “I was about to go to bed. But I’m so happy you called, baby.”
I swallow, hard. “Sorry it’s late.”
“Don’t be silly. I’d rather hear your voice at midnight than not at all.”
I breathe out, slow, and let her words wash over me. The sound of her is the only steady thing in the world right now.
“You heard about Caleb,” I say, not a question.
A pause. “Yes. I saw the news.”
It’s silent on both ends for a while, the shared weight of it bigger than either of us.
“I can’t stop thinking about it,” I admit. “He was just a kid, Mom. He lost his brother, he lost everything. And the whole time, he was—”
“Hiding,” she says, soft and sure.
“Yeah.” I want to cry, but the tears won’t come. “How do you ever trust anyone, after something like that?”
She thinks about it, doesn’t answer right away. "You know what your grand-mère used to say?" she asks, slipping into the half-French cadence she uses when she's channeling the old country.
I shake my head, even though she can’t see me.
“She said, ‘People are oceans, Darius. You only ever see the surface. Maybe a wave, or the foam. But you have no idea what’s below.’”
She lets it sit there, the silence gentle this time.
“Doesn’t that scare you?” I say. “That you can never really know someone?”
She laughs, low and kind. “Baby, it should. But it’s the only thing that keeps us alive, too. If everyone showed their depths, all at once, the world would end.”
I let the words roll around in my skull, bumping into every bad thought I’ve had in the last six weeks.
“Were you scared of me, when I was little?” I say, and I realize I mean it. “Like, did you ever think I could be—”
She cuts me off. “No. Not for a single second.”
I want to believe her. I really do.
“People are whole oceans,” she says again. “Sometimes, even they don’t know what’s at the bottom.”
A siren wails closer, then fades. I hear her breathing, steady, patient.
“What if I don’t even know myself?” I ask.
She makes a small, happy sound. “Nobody does, darling. That’s why we have family. And therapy. And ice cream.”
I laugh, just a little.
She goes quiet, then says, “Do you want me to come visit?”
“Maybe,” I say, and the word comes out a whisper.
“Or you come home. Any time, Darius. No excuses.”
I nod, phone pressed to my forehead.
We say I love you, goodnight. She hangs up.
I sit in the dark a long time, just breathing.
Then I think about Ash.
The way his eyes flash when he’s about to say something real. The scar under his chin from a high stick in juniors.
The way he shakes out his hands before a big set, like he’s trying to exorcise the nerves.
The way he says “don’t let go” when I spot him, and the way my heart hammers in my chest every time he looks at me like maybe I’m the only thing holding him up.
And then it hits me, the thought I've been circling for weeks without knowing it. Caleb sat with us. He hugged us. He cried with us.
And the whole time, he was carrying something so dark it killed four people.
If he could hide that, smile through it, grieve through it, eat pancakes through it, then what the hell is my excuse? I've been hiding too.
From Nia, from the team, from myself. But the thing I'm hiding isn't dark. It isn't dangerous. It's just true.
It’s not dark, not like the things we fear in other people. It’s just there, waiting for me to say it out loud.
I pick up my phone. Open the texts. I scroll until I hit Ash’s name.
I hover for a second, thumb trembling.
Then I start to type.
No more hiding.