25. CHAPTER 25
Locke
Iknock once on Livia’s office door and enter.
I expected her to have arranged the chairs again facing each other, but instead everything is back in its original configuration. She’s behind her desk, looking undeniably beautiful and very determined. She motions to the empty chairs.
Settling back into one, I prop an ankle on my knee. “So here we are.”
“Here we are,” she murmurs. “How are you feeling?”
I can’t help but chuckle. I glance at my watch. “I was fucking you in your bed just two hours ago.” Livia blushes, ducks her head slightly. “And now here I am, and we’re probably getting ready to have our first real fight.”
“Why will this be a fight?” she asks.
“Come on, Livvy,” I chide, using the nickname I heard her mom call her at Thanksgiving. “You know that the job you’re required to do is directly in opposition to what I want to do.”
The corner of her mouth moves almost imperceptibly. She knows I know what she’s doing. I know she knows I know. We’ve been doing this long enough to be past the pretense of it, which is either comfortable or dangerous. I haven’t decided which.
“The team events,” she says, settling back in her chair.
“You’ve done a great job at attending them.
I can actually see you forging relationships.
Your on-ice numbers are great, no unnecessary penalties.
You’re reading plays faster, communicating better with your teammates.
” She stops, because she can see from my face that I don’t need the metrics recited back to me.
“You’ve done the work. I want you to know I see that. ”
“Thank you,” I say, but I know there’s more coming.
“I still have concerns though,” she says, and her tone becomes slightly harder. “The underlying anger is still there.”
I look at her.
“The improvement is real,” she continues.
“I’m not walking it back. But improvement and resolution aren’t the same thing and you know that.
You’re managing it but trust me when I tell you that it has a ceiling, Locke.
We’ve talked about this. Whatever is feeding your anger, it’s still there.
And my concern is that at some point this season, or next season, or in the playoffs when the pressure compounds and the stakes are real, the lid comes off.
And when it does, the team will let you go, and I doubt another will take you. Your hockey career will end.”
Her words strike true, but it’s not a warning I need. I know how precarious things are. They’ve been that way forever.
“I’ve managed it for nine years,” I say, my only defense.
“You’ve managed it badly for nine years,” she corrects me.
I look at the window again.
She’s not wrong, but neither am I.
“So.” I bring my eyes back to her. “What do you want from me?”
“I want to know where it comes from.”
“Come on, Livia. You should have this figured out by now.” I reply evenly. “You know my childhood. I learned early that I wasn’t anyone’s priority. Attachment issues and all that.”
“That’s not where it comes from,” she says softly and with such certainty, I know I can’t bullshit her.
“The childhood history is real and it matters, but that’s not the source of the anger.
That’s the foundation. Something happened, Locke.
Something very specific. And it’s that thing that’s been driving the on-ice behavior for the better part of a decade. ”
I say nothing.
The room is very quiet.
“There was someone,” she continues, carefully. Like she’s handling a live bomb. “I’m guessing you were close to that person and now you don’t have him or her anymore.”
I force myself to hold her gaze.
To not look away.
She leans forward over her desk. “I’m not guessing.
Someone you trusted completely failed you, and it left behind an anger that keeps resurfacing on the ice.
It’s got nothing to do with the refs or the opposing players or the institutional oversight you despise.
All of this is about one person, and I want to know who it is. ”
I’m not sure at what point in her onslaught I decide to offer a truth or why I’m doing it, but I say, “It was a friend.” The word feels strange in my mouth, as if from a language I used to speak. “We grew up playing together, went through Major Junior together.”
“Your best friend,” she surmises.
I nod. “He was the only person I’d have called family. At that point in my life, the only one.”
“What happened?” she asks gently.
I lift my chin. “He betrayed me.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “How?”
“Does it matter?”
“You know it does,” she chides.
A small, mirthless laugh escapes. “Yeah… I guess it does. But all you need to know is that the betrayal cost me everything in that environment, and he did it deliberately, and I’ve never—” I stop, unlock my teeth.
“I’ve never reconciled it. There. That’s the answer.
That’s where the anger comes from. A person I trusted completely destroyed something I couldn’t rebuild, then I had to face him across the ice on a schedule determined by the league for the next decade. ” I look at her. “Satisfied?”
“That’s Adam Belleau? The player that called you a traitor?”
“The one and only,” I grit out.
“What did he do?”
“I just told you—”
“You told me the category,” she says. “Not the thing.”
“The thing isn’t your business.”
“It became my business when it started costing you jobs.” She says it quietly. Not cruelly, but without backing down. “Did he sleep with someone you cared about?”
The question is so far from the actual thing that a bark of a laugh escapes and I shake my head. “No, nothing like that.”
“Did it happen on the ice? Take a cheap shot, cost you a contract somewhere—”
“No.”
“Then what—”
“Drop it.”
“Locke.”
“I said drop it.” My voice comes out harder than I intend and she doesn’t flinch, which is simultaneously what I expect from her and what makes me want to put my fist through the window.
She looks at me, unwilling to back down, searching for a new in. “He lied,” she guesses, and I blink in surprise at how close she is. “He lied about something very important. And it made you look like the problem when you weren’t.”
The accuracy of it lands a physical punch to my gut, which immediately knots up.
I don’t confirm it. I don’t have to. She can see it in my face and we both know it. The fact that she got there without me telling her is both impressive and infuriating at the same time.
“Come on, Locke.” Her tone shifts again. Softer and encouraging. “I’m more than just my job with the Wildfire and you know that. What we are to each other—what this has been—you know I’m with you. Not just physically, but I hope you know emotionally.”
I look at her and I can see she means it.
“You can trust me,” she says, and that’s where it all goes sideways.
Trust.
The word drops between us with a thud and my blood runs cold.
Trust.
She says it like it’s simple. Like it’s just a word, just an offering, just the obvious next step for two people perhaps starting to fall for each other. She says it in that naive way someone would who has never had it weaponized.
I look at her sitting in that chair with her careful eyes and the mandate from Patrick Rowe that started all of this, and a vault that I’ve been keeping sealed for a long damn time cracks open within me.
“You want to talk about trust?” I grit out. She clocks the difference in my posture and my tone and goes very still. “You want to throw that word around and think because you and I got naked, that you can assume it exists between us?”
“Locke—”
“No,” I snarl in fury. “You leveraged our personal relationship to get me to open up, and now you’re going to hear it.
” I lean forward, elbows on knees, and I’m aware that my hands are not entirely steady.
“Let me tell you what trust got me. Adam Belleau came to me when we were seventeen. My very best friend. Really, my brother. Came to me in the middle of the night, scared like I’d never seen him, and he told me that our coach was abusing him and had been for months. ”
Livia gasps. Yeah, I know it’s shocking.
“I told Adam to report it. Begged him to, but he refused. He was ashamed, said he couldn’t, said the stigma would destroy everything, the team, his career before it started.
He begged me not to say anything.” I look at my hands, then back up to Livia.
“So I didn’t. I honored it. I kept his secret and I watched him fall apart.
I kept my mouth shut because he asked me to and because I thought that was what trust looked like. ”
“But you didn’t keep your silence forever,” she guesses.
I shake my head. “No, not forever. I suspected it was happening to another player. A younger player. I saw that coach and another kid… in the corridor outside the locker room one day, and I just knew… it was happening again.”
My voice has gone distant. I’ve never told this story to anyone, and I feel like it’s happening from far away.
But she pushed it. She forced it, and now she’s getting it.
“I knew I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore.
Not for Adam’s sake, not for anyone’s sake.
There was another kid and I was the only person who knew. So I reported it.”
I finally look up, not realizing my gaze had dropped again.
Livia’s face is completely open. No professional composure, no careful management. Just a woman hearing a terrible story and listening objectively but with clear sorrow. “What was the fallout?” she asks.
“The coach resigned,” I say bitterly. “It was all done quietly and no charges were filed. No accountability. Just—gone. Packed his office and disappeared while the investigation was still running and nobody pushed hard enough to follow it and that was the end of it.” Heat flushes through me. “He walked away clean.”
“That’s not fallout,” she says. “What happened to you? To Adam?”
Pushing. Always pushing.
I exhale, helpless to reel any of this back in. “The team needed somewhere to put it. Someone to be the problem and that was me.”
“Adam,” she says. Barely above a whisper.
“Adam told them I was lying.” The words come out with a terrible flatness.
“Stood up in front of the entire team and said he never told me anything. Said I fabricated the whole thing. Said he didn’t know why I’d done it—maybe I had a problem with the coach, maybe I was angling for something, maybe I was just the kind of person who burns things down.
” I look at the window. “His exact words were that I was the kind of person who couldn’t be trusted. ”
The silence in the room is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
“He denied it,” I say, feeling the surge of anger welling inside me.
“Everything he told me in confidence, every word of it, he stood up in front of thirty people and denied it. And they believed him because it was easier to believe him. Because the alternative—that their coach had been doing what I said he’d been doing—was not a truth anyone wanted to look at. So they looked at me instead.”
“The entire team turned on you,” Livia says in understanding.
“The coach got away with it. Adam got to keep his story. The team got to keep their version of events. And you,” she says, full understanding dawning.
“You got to be the problem. The guy who couldn’t be trusted.
The one who burned it down for no reason. ”
“And now you know,” I say, my anger surging brighter. I’m sitting here in her chair in her office with my chest cracked open and eleven years of carefully contained damage spread out between us.
It’s a story I didn’t want her to have, but she kept pushing, and now she can choke on it.
She pushed past the boundary of what we agreed to.
She used the sessions and the patience and the professional calibration and then, when that wasn’t enough, she used us.
She reached into what we are to each other and used it as a tool and I handed her everything because she said Trust me and I was stupid enough to do it.
I look at her.
There’s a flicker of awareness in her expression as she just realized she went too far and knows it.
“Locke—”
“There.” I push out of the chair. “You have it.”
“Please don’t—”
“The whole thing.” I pick up my jacket. My words are very quiet and very steady.
I feel the walls locking back into place.
“The origin, the incident, the fallout, the years of managed consequences. The reason for the anger and the isolation and the disciplinary record and everything else you needed for your report.” I look at her. “Are you satisfied?”
“This isn’t about the report,” she says. “This was never just—”
“You pushed until I cracked,” I snarl at her.
“That’s your job. That’s what you were hired to do.
” I put the jacket on. “Get the reluctant player to open up. Identify the source. Complete the assessment.” I hold her gaze.
“And when the professional tools weren’t enough, you used the personal ones.
Very effective. Patrick Rowe should be pleased. ”
She stands up. “That’s not what this was.”
“It’s exactly what this was.”
“Locke, I care about you—”
“I know you do.” The certainty of it comes out without heat and somehow that’s worse. “I believe that. And it still doesn’t change what you just did. In fact, it kind of makes it worse.”
I open the door.
“Locke.”
“Guess our fun’s over, Livvy. Take care of yourself.”
She pushes out of her chair. “Locke… don’t.”
I ignore her and walk out.
The corridor is quiet and long and I walk the length of it without looking at or talking to anyone. I push through the exterior door into the December cold and stand there with the gray sky overhead, the air biting at my face.
I feel empty. I just handed someone the most important thing I own and then walked away before she could do anything with it.