Chapter 27 #2
“No,” I whisper.
Vance closes his eyes for a small half-second.
Then he opens them again. He looks at me, very steadily, with the small considered weight of a man choosing to deliver the rest of the story with the gravity it requires, and I have, against every instinct I have nurtured in the past five years about Coach Declan O’Rourke, the small honest premonition that what is coming next is the precise piece of biographical wreckage that explains, in retroactive structural cleanness, every single small unaccountable thing I have ever observed in the man.
“Coach Declan O’Rourke,” Vance says, “is, on a professional metric, the best coach of his generation. The youngest in the senior leagues to make a championship final. Considered, by the small senior alumni circles I move in, to have been on the precise trajectory of an eventual head-coaching legacy.”
“Mm.”
“Seven years ago, he and his pack were, on the small inner registry of the elite circuit, seriously considering registering a marriage with the Omega who had been a part of their lives for six years. She was twenty-three. She was a goalie. She had just been signed to her first senior-tier contract.”
Oh.
Oh, my God.
“She would,” Vance continues, very evenly, “have been the first Omega goalie ever signed in the league. Had the skating incident not happened.”
My breath stops for real this time. Jude’s hand, in mine, tightens.
“What,” I manage, very small, “happened to her.”
Vance does not, immediately, answer.
He looks down at the carpeted floor of the corridor between us for a small beat. He looks back up. His eyes are, against every assumption I would have made about a man in his shoes, briefly the eyes of a person who has, professionally, lost someone he respected.
“She died,” he says, slow. “On an outdoor practice rink. Set up.”
“Set up,” I echo.
“The upper administrative tier of the league at that time did not, on the record, want an Omega goalie in the senior structure. This was, I should clarify, several years before the Knot-Pucking League Organization had developed the infrastructure to publicly intervene in this kind of situation. Before social media made it untenable for events of this nature to be brushed under the rug. The dispute that led to the incident took place on the ice itself. Witnesses present at the time were, by professional pressure of various kinds, encouraged not to provide complete statements. She went through a thin patch. She did not come back up before the safety crew reached her. The official report read equipment failure and skater error. The unofficial report, which I have personally seen in private circulation, reads otherwise. There are, today, considerably more rules on the conduct and condition of any outdoor practice surface used by an Omega athlete than there were in that calendar year. That is, in the small dark professional irony of the sport, the legacy she left.”
I have, in this corridor, with a melting cone of stolen salted caramel in my hand, started to cry. Quietly. The small wet pull of a person who has not, for some hours, expected to be doing the small wet pull in a hotel hallway.
Coach.
Coach Declan O’Rourke.
All of it. All five years of it. The protocols. The ghosting. The grueling four-a.m. drills. The protectiveness. The not letting any agent into the building.
“Some of us,” Vance adds, quieter, “were given to understand, on the back end of certain hospital records that had to be filed for legal reasons, that she may also have been carrying their pack’s first pregnancy at the time.
That is not, on any official record, confirmed.
I will not pretend it is. But it has been, in certain small private circles, the assumed undercurrent of his withdrawal from the senior coaching circuit for the better part of half a decade. ”
My free hand, the one not holding Jude’s, comes up and wipes, fast, at my cheek.
Jude’s thumb, against the back of my hand, runs a small slow steady arc.
“Miss O’Shea.” Vance reaches into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket.
He produces a small business card, heavy stock, the precise off-cream colour of the kind of stationery that signals, at distance, that the man producing it has not, in fifteen years, had to apologize for his fees. He extends it to me.
I take it.
“You will,” Vance says, evenly, “be in net against one of the senior-tier conference rosters tonight. Whatever the outcome of that game, if you, or any small subset of your pack-house here, decide that the time has come for proper professional representation, I would consider the meeting a personal favor.”
He looks at Jude.
“Captain. You know my reputation. You can walk Miss O’Shea through how I operate at your leisure.
There are, in this industry, men who paint me as the small house villain.
I am content with the painting. When you want to win, you have, in the end, to be willing to be hard, and to be focused on getting to the top. ”
Jude’s nod is small.
“And,” Vance adds, almost as an afterthought, turning to leave, “do tell Coach O’Rourke I hope he is in good health. And that his current position is, on my last reading of the registry, still secure.”
Jude stops, mid-pivot back to the elevator.
“Still secure.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Explain that.”
Vance pauses. His brow does the small considered thing.
“You are, perhaps, a touch young to follow the small senior administrative politics of the league. The current rule, on the books for the past nine months. Unpartnered Alphas over thirty-five, with no registered Omega and no registered pack standing, are now subject to professional penalty. If they have not, by the end of the calendar year of their thirty-sixth birthday, established a formal pack registration or an individually registered Omega, they lose their coaching credentials. Coach O’Rourke is, on the registry, six weeks out from that deadline. ”
Six weeks.
“He has not,” Vance adds, mildly, “registered anyone. The one thing the man has, in fact, struggled with for the better part of his career is the small inconvenience of communication. Which is, I admit, a touch amusing in a coach. His Omega used to do that for him. She pushed his buttons. She refused to take no for an answer. She fought when every available door in the room was closing on her.”
He pauses.
He looks, very specifically, at me.
“Similar to you, Miss O’Shea.”
Oh.
“Declan needs,” Vance continues, soft, “someone like that in his life. Or he spirals, structurally, into the small protective silent misery I have, frankly, watched him manage for half a decade. I can see, on a close reading of this corridor, why he went ghost on you for five years. At least the recent tape, Miss O’Shea, suggests you are not, in fact, the one-hit wonder some of the small senior commentariat assumed.
You will, on the small probability ledger of my own desk, be the next big thing in this sport.
I am, however, in the small interest of being honest, obligated to tell you that not everything that glitters is gold.
The small private architecture of the senior leagues is the small private architecture of the senior leagues.
I would prefer, on the record, to help you and the half of your roster currently engaged in the long process of becoming worth glittering, achieve the outcome you have earned. ”
He turns. He walks, unhurried, back down the corridor.
“Everyone,” he says, over his shoulder, “deserves their happily ever after. You have my number.”
The elevator at the end of the corridor dings.
The doors slide open.
Coach Declan O’Rourke, in a dark practice jacket with the small North Star embroidered patch at the chest, in the small unhurried stance of a man making the routine corridor run between his hotel room and the ground-floor lobby, steps out.
He stops.
He looks at us. His eyes do the small first read — his goalie and his captain, holding hands, in a hotel corridor, two hours before a major outbound game, an ice cream in the goalie’s hand and a small piece of card stock in the captain’s.
The cedarwood-and-black-coffee scent of him layers itself into the small contained air of the corridor, the winter-whiskey-and-leather under it doing the precise instantaneous small thing my body has, every time, been filing as the small safest scent in the building.
His eyes flick down the hallway, past us, to the small disappearing back of Marcus Vance.
The captain, beside me, moves.
Jude tucks the small heavy business card, with the smooth unhurried sleight of a man who has, in seven hockey seasons of captaincy, learned to move his hands without being seen to move his hands, into the inside pocket of his own jacket.
“Good evening, Coach,” Jude says, level. “We were just heading up.”
He tugs me, gentle, into the open elevator.
Coach Declan’s gaze finds mine. Holds. The grey-green of his eyes, in the warm overhead corridor light, does the small unhurried captain-coach read of a man who has just clocked at least two of the three available data points in this corridor and is, in real time, doing the small private accounting.
Poker face. Iris. Hold the line.
I lift my cone. I lick, with elaborate goalie-Omega seriousness, the small drip of salted caramel that has, in the past nine minutes, run halfway down the side of the waffle.
Coach Declan’s mouth, against every visible captain instinct of his own, twitches.
“Salted caramel,” he observes, evenly, “is the way you like it, O’Shea.”
“It is, Coach.”
“Good.”
The elevator doors slide closed between us.
The lift starts up.
I look at Jude.
Jude looks at me.
The small careful captain-and-goalie eye contact, in the small mirrored stainless-steel interior of a hotel elevator on a Saturday afternoon in a city I have, until twenty hours ago, never set foot in, says everything that needs to be said before either of us has, in fact, said any of it.
“Okay,” Jude murmurs, after a beat. “We are, before the game, going to need to do a small careful conversation, O’Shea.”
“Yes, Captain.”
My hand, against the small heavy embossed weight of the business card now nesting against the bourbon-and-vanilla interior of his jacket pocket two feet from my elbow, does not, in fact, reach for it.
I lick the cone, instead.
And, in the small private chamber of my chest, I think the only sentence the small private chamber of my chest is, at this exact moment, capable of thinking.
The sentence is not the small clean girlhood sentence of the romance novels on my Kindle.
It is the small dark precise sentence I have, against every cozy instinct in me, just earned in the past nine minutes.
An Omega who perished, in fact, at the hands of those who did not want her to have a happily ever after…