Chapter 28
Domino Effect
~IRIS~
There is, on the small embarrassing inventory of the hotel’s availability page at the moment Coach Declan booked the rooms two weeks ago, one king-size bed in this room.
Only one.
Matteo, on discovering this fact at three this afternoon, made a small soft incoherent noise of triumph somewhere in the back of his throat that the room-service receipt has, since, been able to do nothing to walk back.
Rémi accepted the configuration in his usual silence, with the small dry observation that, on the small private cubic-foot ledger he maintains in his own head, the king bed in question was, against the small posted dimensions on the hotel website, in fact a single inch short of the proper specification, and that the inch was going to matter.
Jude, in his captain register, observed only that the arrangement was, in fact, structurally fine, on the precise condition that the four of us were going to behave like adults for the duration of the night.
Filing the captain’s caveat. Filing the small downstream implications of the captain’s caveat. The folder is already in distress.
Right now, however, the four of us are crammed shoulder-to-shoulder against the mountain of overpriced hotel pillows, the duvet pulled up to our laps, the small slim silver laptop of Rémi’s open on his thighs across our laps, and the long bright square of its screen lit on a small old archived sports-blog article from seven years ago.
The article’s lead photograph is, in the precise compressed pixel resolution of a piece of online journalism that has been quietly buried for the better part of a decade, of an Omega woman.
Oh.
She is in goalie pads. Full uniform. The home jersey of a small senior-tier squad whose colors I do not, on first read, recognize.
She is laughing on the ice in the precise unguarded joy-on-skates posture of a goalie who has, in the small private chamber of her own chest, just won a thing she has earned, and she is looking up at the camera over the curl of her own shoulder with the small bright openness of a woman who is, on the day this photograph was taken, twenty-three years old and about to be famous.
Her hair, where it escapes her helmet, is the precise warm gold of a wheat field in late September.
Her eyes — and this is the small unfair detail of her face that I cannot, on first viewing, look away from — are the precise pale gold-amber of a small expensive whiskey held up against a winter window.
And behind her, half-cut off by the edge of the frame, in a coach’s jacket of the same small senior-tier squad, the precise scaffolding of his shoulders not yet hollowed out by five winters of grief, with the small unguarded fully-present captain-and-coach grin of a man on a Friday afternoon in his late twenties — is Coach Declan O’Rourke.
Oh.
Oh, Coach.
Two tall buff men flank him, also in uniforms of the same colors. They are smiling. The four of them are, in the small frozen joy of the moment captured, in fact a complete unit.
Her name, in the caption, is Saoirse Boyne.
Matteo, beside me, exhales the small honest exhale of a man clocking the photograph for the first time.
“Fuck,” he whispers.
Rémi reads.
“Okay,” Rémi says, evenly, scrolling through the article with the precise unhurried index finger of a defenseman reading a scouting report.
“Saoirse Boyne. Twenty-three years old at the time of the photograph. Signed three months prior by Vance Athletic Group. Half-mention in a senior-tier sponsorship release. Two clips of game footage on the page. The rest is, on the publicly indexed internet, very thin. The article from seven years later announcing her death is, professionally, even thinner. Three paragraphs. Listed as equipment failure and skater error. No follow-up coverage. No obituary in the senior-league reports of the year. As if a senior-league administrative tier of approximately fifteen men collectively decided that, on the small public-facing internet, the woman never quite existed.”
“We knew that part,” Jude says, quietly, on my other side. “Vance laid it out in the corridor.”
“I can find more,” Matteo announces. “Trust me. Give it.”
Rémi, with the small dry look of a man handing a hand-grenade to a colleague who has, in two seasons of cohabitation, demonstrated his pin-pulling competence, hands the laptop over.
Matteo takes it onto his own lap.
“Give him,” Jude observes, mildly, “nine minutes.”
“Seven,” Matteo corrects, fingers already moving.
While Matteo works, Jude does what the captain always does in a room full of half-information, which is to fill the small ambient air with the rest of the data he has been carrying around all afternoon and not, until this exact moment, deployed.
“The coach who pushed Coach Declan out,” Jude says, “the one who currently runs O’Shea’s old town squad. His name is Garrett Sloane.”
“Garrett Sloane,” I repeat. “Why do I know that name.”
“Because you have, on a Saturday morning of every winter of your adult life, watched at least one nationally-broadcasted senior-tier game in which Sloane’s name has appeared in the small scrolling bottom-of-the-screen text as the head scout or assistant coaching consultant of one of the two rosters on screen.
Sloane is, in the small private metric of the senior-coaching circuit, the top scouter in the country.
They call him a villain. Not, frankly, without reason.
His training methods are described, by the men who have been through them, as professionally brutal.
But when Sloane picks a player, that player soars.
Every man and woman he has selected in the past fifteen years has, statistically, reached at least a national championship final. His door is the door.”
“And?”
“Coach Declan,” Jude says, evenly, “was one of Sloane’s.”
Silence.
Rémi looks up from his careful index-fingering of the trackpad.
“If Coach Declan was scouted by Sloane,” he says, the slow careful screw-driving cadence of a man laying out the precise structural inconsistency of the data, “then why would Coach Declan be the one telling Vance that Iris was not, in fact, interested.”
“Exactly,” Jude says.
I, in the middle of the bed, in my borrowed sleep T-shirt of Matteo’s and the small dignified pair of pink shorts I packed for sleeping in, tilt my head back against the headboard and try, with limited success, to do the small inner accounting.
If Coach Declan was Sloane’s, and Sloane and his upper-administrative friends ran the men who set Saoirse up, then Coach Declan telling Vance I wasn’t interested was —
“Okay,” Matteo announces, lifting the laptop screen and turning it so the three of us can see. “I have, on a small private archive accessible through the back end of an old league press portal my father’s lawyer’s firm still has credentials for, located the following.”
On the screen, a second photograph.
Saoirse Boyne again. In a different outfit.
Black blazer over the home jersey of the same squad, the precise small unguarded grin of a woman about to sign her first senior-tier representation contract.
Beside her, holding the corresponding press copy of the contract, his polished iron-grey hair half a shade darker than its current iteration, his tie the precise red of a man who knows precisely what red is going to do in any photograph, is Marcus Vance.
The headline above the photograph reads, in the precise large heavy sans-serif of a sports-business outlet hyping the small upcoming year:
FIRST OMEGA GOALIE ON THE HORIZON?
And below the photograph:
Vance Athletic Group signs prospect Saoirse Boyne in landmark deal.
“Oh,” I whisper.
“Mm,” Matteo agrees. “Three months later, she went through the ice on Sloane’s outdoor rink.”
Sloane’s outdoor rink.
Of course it was.
“When,” I ask, quietly, “did she die.”
Matteo glances at his screen. “October nineteenth. Six years and one month ago.”
I close my eyes for a small careful beat.
“That is the day,” I say, “Coach Declan disappeared.”
“Damn,” Jude whispers.
Rémi turns his head toward me, the small careful look of a man who has, in the past forty-five days, learned to read me in three frequencies at once.
“Iris,” he says, gently. “How are you feeling.”
Oh.
Defenseman D, do not, in fact, ask that of me right now, because the answer is, frankly, embarrassing.
I take a breath. I look at the screen. I look at the small bright photograph of Saoirse Boyne and Marcus Vance and the contract in their joined hands.
I look at the small bright photograph in the article above it of Saoirse Boyne in goalie pads in front of a Coach Declan O’Rourke whose face I have not, in five years of knowing him, ever seen wear that small unguarded grin in real life.
“Kind of guilty,” I admit. “Honestly.”
“Go on,” Jude says, soft.
“I —” I take another breath. I am, on the small inner ledger of an Omega who has spent five years convincing herself the small ledger entry in question did not, in fact, exist, about to put a small piece of personal biography on the record in front of three Alphas in a hotel bed.
“I may. Have had. A small. Embarrassingly small. Embarrassingly normal-for-the-age. Crush. On Coach Declan O’Rourke. ”
The three of them blink at me.
Oh, please.
I am, on the record, in a hotel bed with the three men I am actively falling for. None of these three is going to take small competitive offense at a five-year-old nineteen-year-old’s crush on a coach. Get a grip.