Chapter 28 Theo
Coach runs us hard.
Forty minutes of systems work — breakout patterns, neutral zone transitions, defensive zone coverage — and then full scrimmage, which is where things get interesting.
Silas is sharp today. Center ice, reading plays before they develop. This is what he looks like when he's happy, when the position is his, and nobody is threatening it.
I feed him a pass in the slot that he buries top shelf without breaking stride.
He points at me on the way back to center ice. I nod once.
Beckett is a different story.
He's not bad. That's the thing about Beckett — his baseline is high enough that off days still look competent to anyone who doesn't know what he's capable of. Coach won't notice. Half the team won't notice.
I notice.
His gap control is half a step slow. His first pass decisions are hesitant in a way they never are when his head is clear. During a two-on-one rush, he takes the pass option when he should have stepped up, and the shooter scores on a release he should have smothered before it happened.
I watch him reset to center ice, jaw tight.
After the whistle, I come off the boards and fall into line beside him.
"You're half a second behind yourself." I keep my eyes forward.
He doesn't respond.
"Whatever's in your head," I say, "get it out. We play on Saturday."
Beckett turns to look at me then, and I see that particular flatness he gets when he's controlling something he doesn't want me to see.
He's been doing it since she called him to her dorm room.
Since he started staying nights. Since he confused proximity for progress and forgot what he was there for.
"I'm fine," he says.
I hold his gaze for exactly long enough. Then I skate away.
The locker room after practice is loud. Music, voices, the hiss of showers, and the smell of sweat and rubber and tape.
Silas drops onto the bench beside me, already half out of his gear. "Beckett looks rough."
"He does."
"You going to say something?"
"I already did."
Silas pulls his jersey over his head. "And?"
"And he said he's fine." I unlace my skates.
Silas is quiet for a moment. Then, low enough that it doesn't carry, "How bad is it?"
I think about Adela turning her phone face down on the library table. Beckett's name on the screen.
"Bad enough," I say.
Silas nods slowly. He doesn't ask anything else. That's what I've always appreciated about him — he understands when a sentence is finished.
I finish changing, grab my bag, and leave without another word.
The library is quiet at four in the afternoon.
There's a text I've been meaning to pull for weeks, something on Foucault that would strengthen the third chapter of my thesis. I have forty minutes before I need to be at my mother's office.
I take the elevator to the third floor.
She's there.
Head down, hair falling forward, laptop open, one hand wrapped around a coffee cup. She doesn’t look up. She's too far inside whatever she's writing, her shoulders slightly hunched, her pen moving across a notepad beside the keyboard.
She writes things down twice. I've noticed that. It’s like she doesn't trust the screen to hold things properly.
I cross the floor without hurrying and come up behind her.
Her essay is open on the screen. The extra credit response for Professor Aldridge — I can tell by the header, the citation format, and the way she's structured the argument in three clean movements.
She's writing about compliance. About the psychological mechanisms that allow institutions to sustain authority beyond their legitimate mandate.
She's used something I said in the talk.
Not quoted. Paraphrased, folded into her own argument so smoothly that someone who hadn't been in that room wouldn't catch it. But I catch it.
I read to the end of the paragraph and smirk.
She's smarter than she looks.
I lean in slightly, reading the next section, and she must feel the shift in the air or the warmth of proximity or something, because her hands go still on the keyboard.
Then she slams the laptop shut.
She turns in her chair and finds me standing approximately eighteen inches behind her, and the color that moves up her throat is immediate and involuntary. I’ve made her nervous, how…delicate.
"How long have you been standing there?" she asks.
I pull out the chair beside her and sit. She watches me do it. Doesn't move away. Doesn't adjust her position or create more distance or do any of the things people do when they want someone to understand they're uncomfortable.
She watches me with those eyes and the very beginning of a smile that she's trying to flatten.
"What are you doing?" she asks.
There it is.
Not can you move, or that's too close, or any version of discomfort. Just curiosity. Just a girl who knows exactly what I'm doing and wants to see if I'll admit it.
Satisfaction ripples through me.
"Sitting," I say.
"There are other chairs." She looks around the room, at the open space. I could be anywhere, but instead I’m right here.
"There are," I agree.
She looks at me for a moment. Then she pulls her laptop closer.
I stand.
She doesn't watch me this time. Keeps her eyes on her notepad, but her shoulders have changed. I move behind her again, slower this time, testing.
I reach around her and fully open the laptop, tilting the screen back so I can read it properly. She goes very still. Not frightened — I know what frightened looks like on her, and this isn't it. Just — aware. Every nerve aware.
I read the paragraph she was working on when I came in. Then the one before it. Then the thesis statement at the top.
"Your argument breaks down in the third section," I say quietly close to her ear. "You're conflating compliance with consent. They're not the same."
She doesn't respond immediately. I can see the side of her face from this angle — the line of her jaw, the way she's looking at the screen without reading it.
"I know they're not the same," she says finally. Her voice is steady. Impressively steady. "That's the point. The institution relies on people not knowing the difference."
"Then say that. Explicitly. You're implying it when you should be stating it."
I straighten.
And I notice, in the half second before I do, that she smells like something warm and clean, and I am now going to have difficulty unnoticing that.
I take a step back.
She turns in her chair and looks up at me, and the smile she'd been flattening is fully visible now, small and certain and slightly devastating in a way that I find — inconvenient.
"Better?" she asks.
I look at her for a moment.
"Fix the third section," I say.
I leave and don't look back.
I'm in the elevator before I register that I stood behind her for longer than the essay required, that she knew it and smiled about it, and that I am now going to be late for therapy, thinking about the way Adela smells instead of what I'm going to say when I get there.
I stare at the elevator doors.
This is a problem.
Family therapy is at five.
I show up because my mother asked me to and because showing up costs me less than the conversation that follows when I don't. The office is warm and quiet, the kind of carefully designed neutrality that's supposed to make people feel safe enough to say things they'd normally keep buried.
I've always found it faintly aggressive.
Dr. Hartley is already there when I arrive.
My mother. My father, who looks like a man performing the role of concerned parent with moderate success.
And Nessa, curled into the corner of the couch with her sleeves pulled over her hands, headphones around her neck like she might need them at any moment.
I sit, and the session begins.
I do what I always do — give enough to appear cooperative, deflect anything that gets close to something real, watch the others, and file everything away.
My mom speaks carefully. My dad speaks carefully.
Dr. Hartley navigates the space between them with the practiced patience of someone who has seen this particular dynamic a hundred times.
Nessa is quiet for most of it.
The first thing she says is, "I heard his eyes opened."
The session continues around me. Dr. Hartley asks Nessa questions to clarify what she means. My mother's expression shifts into something careful and professional. My father doesn't react.
I sit very still.
His eyes opened?
I hear the words again in the specific silence of my own skull. I feel them move through me the way cold water moves — slowly, reaching everything.
How does she know? Who told her? Why does she know before I do?
And underneath that, I think about Adela.
Does she know yet? Is she already at the hospital? Is she sitting beside his bed right now, holding his hand, looking at his face, listening to whatever version of events he decides to give her?
My chest tightens.
I wanted him dead.
I want to be very clear with myself about that, in the privacy of my own head, where no one can read it.
I wanted him gone. Permanently. Completely.
I wanted him removed from the board in a way that couldn't be reversed, couldn't be negotiated, couldn't be walked back by a surgeon and a medical team, and whatever particular miracle of modern medicine kept his heart beating when it should have stopped.
He was supposed to stay under.
He didn't.
And now he's awake, and he has a mouth, and whatever he remembers or doesn't remember or chooses to say is a variable I cannot control from here.
I become aware that Dr. Hartley is saying my name.
"Theo. How does this news land for you?"
I look at her. "Fine," I say. "It's good news."
My mother is watching me. She's always watching me, reading the thing underneath the thing, assembling the picture I'm trying to keep scattered.
I stand. "I need some air."
"Theo—" Dr. Hartley starts.
"Five minutes." I'm already at the door.
The hallway is quiet. Carpeted. The kind of building that absorbs sound and returns nothing.
I stand with my back against the wall and breathe through it. Not panic. I don't panic. Just recalibration — taking the new information and running it through everything that follows, mapping outcomes, identifying threats, deciding which ones require immediate action, and which ones can wait.
Cody awake.
Adela's investigation suddenly having a source.
Beckett compromised.
The footsteps behind me are my mother's. I know them before she speaks.
"Theo."
I don't turn around.
"Come back inside."
"In a minute."
She comes to stand beside me, which I should have anticipated. She doesn't touch me. Just stands close, her voice very quiet. "Talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"You went white in there."
"I'm always pale, Mom. It's winter."
"Theo." Her hand finds my arm. "If you know something about what happened to that boy—"
I turn to face her then.
And I lean in close — close enough that she can't mistake the words, can't soften them in the translation, can't reframe them later into something more manageable — and I say, very quietly so that the hallway cameras can’t hear, "The things you don't know about are the things keeping this family safe.
And if you start pulling at threads, you won't just unravel me.
" I hold her eyes. "You'll unravel Nessa. "
The color leaves her face.
I straighten, stepping back. I adjust my jacket.
"I'll be in the car," I say.
I walk down the hallway and push through the door into the cold night air, and I don't look back, and my hands are completely steady, and somewhere across the city, a rich, privileged fuck who was supposed to be dead is awake in a hospital bed.
I get in the car and pull out my phone.
It rings twice before he picks up.
"It's done," the voice says. "Surgery was successful."
I stare through the windshield.
"And?"
A pause.
"He’s awake."
I hang up.
I sit with that for a long moment. The engine off. The city quiet around me. The specific stillness of someone who has just been told that the one thing they needed not to happen has happened.
I wanted him dead.
He's not.
I start the engine.