3. Evan
THREE
EVAN
Natalie Lockwood only called when something was already decided.
That was the architecture of how she operated, and I'd understood it by month three of the season.
She didn't consult. She didn't float ideas.
She made decisions and then informed you of them, and the call was courtesy rather than collaboration.
Once you understood that, the conversations got easier.
My phone had the missed call notification before I'd pulled my helmet off.
One missed call. Underneath it, one text: Call me when you're free.
Which meant now.
—
The locker room was running at full volume around me.
Mason had the music going — the same classic rock rotation he'd been playing after practice since early in the season, a playlist somewhere between his taste and everyone else's tolerance and had never once been voted on democratically.
It was just there, the way certain things in a locker room were just there, and the room had adapted around it the way rooms adapted around things that weren't going anywhere.
Petrov was still mid-argument about the power play structure, which he'd been mid-argument about since the second drill of the afternoon skate.
He had his shin pad in his hand like a prop, gesturing with it in a way that suggested the positioning concept he was trying to illustrate required physical demonstration to be properly understood.
Hayes was in his stall with the particular stillness of a man who had decided to be somewhere else mentally and had substantially achieved it.
I found my stall and started on the gear.
Skates first. The tape would need to be redone before tomorrow — I'd noticed the grip slipping in the third repetition of the breakout drill, the handle rotating slightly under pressure, the kind of thing you filed automatically and addressed at the next opportunity.
Small maintenance, the constant calibration for equipment that couldn't afford errors.
Two weeks to the playoffs. Everything got calibrated more carefully this time of year.
You didn't get sloppy with the small things when the small things were the difference between a clean read and a half-beat hesitation.
I learned that in year four of my career, playing for a team that had made the second round and lost it on exactly that kind of accumulated slippage. I'd carried it since.
"The angle was wrong," Petrov was saying to whoever was still listening, which appeared to be approximately one and a half people. "If you hold the position through the rotation the lane opens automatically. This is not a difficult concept."
"It's not difficult," Hayes said from his stall, without looking up. "It requires everyone to execute it simultaneously."
"Yes. That is the concept."
"That's what I said."
"You said it like it was a problem."
"It is a problem."
"Only if people don't execute it simultaneously."
A brief silence. Then Hayes, still not looking up: "Viktor. That is what I said."
From across the room, Mason caught my eye and did the minimal headshake that meant I have no further comment on this and neither should you. I finished the skate tape and started on the other one.
The argument would dissolve. It always did.
Petrov would reach whatever internal threshold constituted resolution and the room would exhale and move on, and by the time anyone hit the parking lot it would be filed under Tuesday afternoon and forgotten.
These were the rituals of a first-season locker room still learning itself — not the real fights, not the actual disagreements, but the daily ventilation that kept everything functional.
Everything was being written here for the first time.
Someone called out from the back asking if anyone was doing anything.
"Driftwood," Mason said, without looking up from his phone. Flat. Factual.
A few guys nodded. I set aside the tape, looked over at him. "I'm in," I said.
He nodded once, already back to his phone.
I pulled out mine and looked at Natalie's text.
Call me when you're free.
Later, I decided. Parking lot.
—
The Jacksonville evening was doing its thing — warm, thick, the air textured enough to slow you down and make you aware of breathing in a way that northern cities didn't. I'd grown up in Chicago, played in cities with winters that had opinions about you.
Jacksonville didn't have opinions. It just was, steady and consistent, the same in April as it was in October.
The back lot had the particular atmosphere of a practice facility at the end of a working day — equipment cases being loaded, the training staff doing their final checks, cars spread across the asphalt in the patterns of people who always parked in the same spots without ever formally deciding to.
The building was cycling down behind us, the exterior lighting starting its automatic sequence.
I found a quiet stretch of the lot and called Natalie.
Away from the noise.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Evan." Composed. Direct. Her version of a greeting.
"Natalie. What's going on?"
"How's the house?"
Not what I'd expected. "The builder says it's done."
A pause that communicated more than most people's full sentences. "Have you been there recently?"
"A few times."
"And the interior?"
I kept my voice even. "It's on the list."
He was already reaching for the tape.
Another pause, longer this time. "That's why I'm calling."
I waited.
"I've arranged for someone to come in and help you finish the interior," she said.
"A designer. Her name is Blair Collins — she runs a firm in Atlanta.
Her work was featured in Architectural Digest earlier this spring.
Clean work, thoughtful, she understands waterfront architecture.
I reached out to her last week, and she's already reviewed the architectural plans. "
I kept my voice even. "I didn't realize that was necessary."
"The house has been sitting empty for three months."
"I've been playing hockey."
"You have one couch, Evan." She said it the way she said things that were established facts — not unkindly, just with the precision of someone who had confirmed the information before speaking. "The kitchen isn't functional. The primary suite isn't finished. You have hockey sticks in the entryway."
I didn't say anything to that.
"The house is too good to leave half-finished," she continued. "And you don't have the time to address it properly during the season. You know that."
Natalie was usually right. That didn't make it easier to hear, but it was a relevant factor in every conversation with her.
"When did this get decided?" I asked.
"I've been thinking about it since February."
Which was not an answer to the question I'd asked, but was a very Natalie answer, and it confirmed that the decision was already made and the call was indeed courtesy.
"When does she start?" I said.
"She'll be in Jacksonville for an initial consultation later this week. She'll walk the house, assess the scope, and you'll have a plan."
"What does she need from me?"
"To be there. And to actually engage with the process instead of delegating it and forgetting about it."
"I wasn't going to delegate it."
"Evan." A pause. "You have one couch."
I conceded the point internally and didn't say so. "Fine," I said. "Send me the information."
"Already done." A brief silence that might have been the closest Natalie came to warmth. "You bought a good house. Let someone help you make it worth what you paid for it."
She hung up.
That was also very Natalie — the conversation ending when the information had been transferred. No social tail.
I stood in the parking lot for a moment, the evening air thick and warm around me, the building behind me finishing its cycle-down. A designer. Someone to come in and tell me what it should be.
I thought about the house. The waterfront view that was genuinely excellent.
The kitchen that worked only if your definition of working was that it had running water and functional appliances.
The living room that currently had one couch and a lamp on the floor because I hadn't found a side table I liked well enough to buy.
The place had everything except the part that made it feel lived in.
I didn't want someone coming in and deciding everything. The house had something right in its bones — the proportions, the light, the way the water was visible from almost every room — and I didn't want to hand it over and get back something that looked like a hotel lobby.
But I also couldn't keep eating dinner standing at a kitchen island that fought me every time I tried to cook.
That was apparently something a designer was going to fix.
I got in the car.
—
The Driftwood was exactly what it always was on a Tuesday.
We pushed two tables together in the back corner, the spot that had become ours over the course of this season — not formally reserved, not discussed, just the place we went because it had the right sightlines and enough space and the bartenders had learned what that meant.
Drinks arrived quickly. Viktor was still processing the power play argument.
Mason had food in front of him before anyone had fully settled, which remained impressive logistics on his part.
The room filled the way it always filled when a group like ours walked into a civilian space.
I'd been in enough of these situations — bars in ten cities, different teams, eleven seasons — to read them without thinking.
The recognition that spread through a room in waves.
The particular way people who had figured out who you were calibrated their behavior: some moving toward, some deliberately away, most landing in the middle ground of awareness-without-engagement that was the most common response to proximity to mild celebrity.
It wasn't interesting anymore. It was just part of the job.
What was interesting, tonight, was the room itself.
Natalie's call was still running in the background, and the word interior was in my head in a way it hadn't been before, and I found myself looking at the bar with a different kind of attention.
The lighting was good — someone had made deliberate choices about that, the warmth of it absorbing into the wood rather than bouncing off the surfaces.
The outdoor section framed the marina view correctly, the doors positioned to draw your eye through rather than interrupt the room with an exit.
Which was a problem, because I didn't have bandwidth for this right now.
I noted that it was a problem and kept moving.
The ceiling was going to be a problem.
I noted it and looked away.
The orbit built the way it always did — gradually, then all at once. People noticing, moving closer, the table becoming its own system. A photo request. Viktor standing for it with his practiced expression. The younger guys signing things. A round sent over from somewhere at the bar.
I was about to reach for my drink when I noticed her.
Not at the table. Not in the orbit. She was sitting two tables over with another woman, both of them in the middle of their own conversation, and where the room had reoriented toward us, she hadn't.
That was new.
She was looking at the room — not us, not the table, not the players — with the particular focused attention of someone cataloguing the space rather than the people in it.
She looked at the room like it needed fixing.
I noted it — the way she moved, the way she looked, her attention — and filed it without examining it too closely. The server arrived with another round and the moment disappeared into the noise of the table.
Her eyes moved along the ceiling line.
I watched her for a moment. Longer than I needed to. The way she tilted her head slightly, the way her attention moved in a specific sequence — not casual, not tourist-curious, but methodical. Like she was solving something the room hadn't.
Which should have been easy to move past.
It wasn't, immediately.
I stepped outside. Not for air. Because the room had gotten loud in a specific way and I needed a different kind of quiet for a minute.
The deck. The railing. The water doing its thing in the dark, the marina lights scattered across the surface, a single boat in the channel with its running lights still on.
The air off the river was slightly cooler than inside, and I stood there with my drink and let the noise of the table recede until it was background rather than foreground.
Two weeks.
I was aware of it the way you were aware of a deadline that was also an opportunity — the season had been building toward this since October, everything new and still being established.
I'd been on playoff teams before. I knew what those final weeks felt like: the sharpening, the narrowing, the way everything that wasn't the next game became peripheral.
I held that beside the other thing — the Natalie conversation, the designer already looking at my house plans, the word Blair Collins sitting at the back of my mind like something I'd filed without reading yet.
The water moved. The boat cleared the channel.
I finished my drink and went back inside.
—
The table had expanded in the usual way. Viktor was demonstrating something with a beer bottle and a coaster. Hayes had a book. Mason had finished eating and was monitoring the room, arms crossed, keeping his count.
I sat back down and checked Natalie's message properly — the designer's contact information, a note that she'd been briefed on the project and would reach out to coordinate the site visit, a link to her firm's portfolio that I didn't open.
I looked at the name again.
Blair Collins. Atlanta-based. Available this week.
I looked at the bar — the room, the water through the open doors, the team at the table doing what teams did on Tuesday evenings in the first season of something that was still becoming what it was supposed to be.
The house needed finishing. The season was in its final weeks. Both were happening whether I was ready or not.
I put the phone face-down on the table and rejoined the conversation.
Two weeks out. Everything hitting at once.