Chapter 15
Matt
The calls started at six in the morning.
Coach George was first. Third time in two hours. I couldn't dodge him forever.
"Baker." Clipped. Professional. The edge underneath barely held. "We need to talk."
"Coach, I can explain—"
"Can you? Because I'm finding out from Twitter that my future captain is in talks with the White Hearts. Why you didn't come to me first before entertaining offers from our biggest rival."
Each word landed where it was aimed. Future captain. The thing I'd worked my entire career toward, and right now it felt less like an honor and more like a jersey I'd put on wrong.
"I wasn't in talks with them. I was set up."
"Set up." Tasting it. Finding it thin. "By a woman in a black dress who whispered in your ear and led you outside to meet with their media strategist."
"It wasn't—"
"Then prove it, Matt. Come to practice. Look your teammates in the eye. Tell them you're committed. Because right now, a team that doesn't trust its captain doesn't win anything."
He hung up. Left me sitting on the edge of my bed feeling like I'd been stripped of pads and sent back out to take the hit bare.
Mason was next. No greeting. No preamble.
"Are you actually thinking about leaving?"
"No. I told you—"
"You told me a lot of things, Baker. And now I'm seeing photos of you shaking hands with the enemy while some blonde leads you around by your dick."
Mason was my best friend. My brother in every way that mattered except blood. And I could hear in his voice that something between us had cracked, and the crack was the kind that gets into the foundation.
I tried. Explained the gas station, the dog, the night, Carrie's job, the setup. All of it. It sounded thinner each time I told it.
"So you slept with someone from the White Hearts and didn't think to mention it to anyone on the team."
"I didn't know she worked for them when—"
"But you knew afterward. Two weeks, Matt. You sat on that for two weeks."
"I wasn't thinking."
"No. You weren't."
He hung up. No goodbye.
Nate called next, sounding more disappointed than angry.
Dylan asked if the old doping situation had made me want a fresh start somewhere else, and the casual way he referenced it, like it was just another data point in my file, put a cold line down my spine.
John asked quietly if there was anything he could do.
Each call chipped another piece off.
I texted the team group chat. Explained what had really happened. Posted a statement online. Did a phone interview with a local sports reporter. The apologies helped, barely, the way a bandage helps a fracture. The tension didn't ease. It just went underground.
I needed to move. Changed into running gear, pulled on a cap, and went out.
The run started clean. Feet on pavement, lungs burning, the familiar neighborhood blur. My body doing the one thing it always did when my head was falling apart, the one reliable system.
Then someone recognized me.
"Hey! Aren't you Matt Baker?"
I kept running.
"That's him! The guy who's selling out Boston!"
Faster.
"Traitor! We don't want you here anyway!"
"My kid had your poster on his wall. I'm burning it tonight!"
Each one landed like a check from the blind side. I'd been booed before. Heard away crowds chant against me. But those were opponents. These were my people. My city. The fans who were supposed to be on my bench.
I made it home with my chest heaving and my face burning and something sitting in my gut that I wasn't going to give a name because naming it would make it permanent.
* * *
My phone rang before I'd closed the door.
Unknown number. I almost let it die. But something in the morning's rhythm, in the way the day had been stacking disasters like a dealer who'd decided I was due, made me answer.
"Matt Baker? This is Boston Police Department. We have a Frank Baker in custody. He listed you as his emergency contact."
Frank.
The name went through me the way a hit goes through you when you don't see the shoulder coming. Cold. Total. Rearranging everything.
My brother. In custody. In Boston.
The last time we'd spoken, actually spoken, he'd been in Chicago. Two years ago. Before that, another two years of silence. Four years since I'd seen his face.
"What was he arrested for?"
"I can't discuss that over the phone."
I was out the door before she'd finished giving me the address.
The station was fluorescent lights and hard plastic chairs and the smell of bad coffee. I gave the desk officer Frank's name and waited, standing because sitting felt like something I'd run out of patience for.
Frank appeared twenty minutes later. My brother looked rough.
Older than four years should have made him.
Hair longer, falling into his eyes. Stubble that was becoming a beard.
Dark circles. But he smiled when he saw me.
That same cocky grin that had been getting us both into trouble since we were kids.
"Hey, Matty."
I didn't smile back. "What did you do?"
"Little speeding."
The officer behind him snorted. "Ninety in a thirty zone. Nearly hit a family in a crosswalk."
My gut clenched. "Jesus, Frank."
"They're fine. I had it under control."
I turned to the officer. "What do I need to do?"
Bail. Paperwork. An hour I didn't have on a morning that was already underwater. By the time we walked out, I was running on coffee and the specific brand of exhaustion that comes from loving someone who keeps handing you reasons not to.
"Breakfast?" Frank suggested. Like we were catching up. Like the last four years were a scheduling conflict.
I should have driven him to a hotel and told him to go back to Chicago. But part of me, the part that still remembered being kids on the driveway with plastic sticks and a tennis ball, needed to understand what had brought him here.
Diner two blocks from the station. Cracked vinyl booths, laminated menus, waitresses who called everyone "hon." Frank ordered the biggest plate they had. I ordered coffee and toast I knew I wouldn't touch.
He dug in like he hadn't eaten in days. I watched him and tried to reconcile this man with the brother who'd taught me to skate. Who'd stood between me and every bully on our block. Who'd been the first person to tell me I was good enough to go pro.
Who'd almost destroyed it.
"Why are you here, Frank?"
He looked up. Swallowed. "I missed you."
"Try again."
"It's true. Four years, Matt. That's too long for brothers."
"There's a reason it's been four years. And you know exactly what it is."
The grin faded. Something more serious underneath, more real, surfacing the way it always did with Frank when the charm stopped working.
"I've changed," he said.
"Have you."
"I quit all that. The lifestyle, the substances, all of it. I'm clean now. Actually clean. Not just saying it."
The words should have meant something. Should have cracked the door, even an inch. But all I could hear was the last time he'd said them. Right before he'd slipped performance-enhancing drugs into my food the night before a game the scouts were watching.
He'd called it helping. Said he wanted to give me an edge. Said the scouts needed to see me at my best, and he was making sure they would.
The random drug test had come three days later.
I'd failed it so completely that the lab had called to confirm the sample twice.
The suspension was immediate. One year. My name in every headline, every blog, every conversation about cheating in hockey.
A year of watching my team play without me, of knowing the guys on the bench were wondering whether I'd done it on purpose, whether every good game I'd ever had was built on something I'd taken.
My body. The one thing I'd always trusted. And my own brother had turned it into evidence against me.
"I don't believe you," I said.
Frank flinched.
"What do you really want? Money? A place to crash? A connection to whatever you're running now?"
"I don't want anything. I swear." He ran his hand through his hair, and the gesture was so familiar it hurt, because it was mine. The same tell, the same movement, the same blood. "I wanted to see you. To talk. To maybe start fixing what I broke."
"You can't fix it."
"I can try."
My phone rang. I pulled it out.
Carrie.
She'd been calling all morning. Texts I hadn't opened. Voicemails I hadn't played. As if there was anything she could say that would un-take the photos or un-crack the locker room or un-teach me the lesson she'd just taught me about what happens when you let someone in.
I silenced the call.
Frank watched me, eyebrows up. "Who's that?"
"Nobody."
"Didn't look like nobody."
My phone buzzed. Text.
Please let me explain. It's not what you think.
Not what I thought. I'd heard that before. From the man sitting across from me, eating eggs like the last four years were a bad dream. From every person who'd ever told me they were doing me a favor right before they proved they weren't.
I put the phone face-down on the table and looked at my brother.
Two people in one morning, both asking me to trust them again. Both carrying wreckage with my name on it.
My toast sat untouched. The coffee had gone cold. And outside the diner window, the city I'd given everything to was deciding whether I was still worth keeping.