Chapter 1
Chapter One
Alberto
Conrad Pierce, my agent, calls three times in a row.
I miss the first call because I’m in the shower, water pounding my shoulders like it can rinse off dread. The second because I want to. Because I know what this is. The trade deadline is next week, and I’ve lived this movie enough times to recite the lines before anyone opens their mouth.
I miss the third because I’m standing in front of my closet, staring at suits I never wear and jerseys I don’t own, and thinking, I didn’t even make it a full season here.
Boston is supposed to be a legacy city. Original Six. History. Loyalty.
My apartment doesn’t care.
It still doesn’t feel like mine. I’ve been here long enough to learn which floorboards complain when you cross the living room. Long enough to know the neighbor’s dog barks at midnight like it’s paid hourly. Long enough to keep protein powder in a cabinet that smells like humidity and cheap wood.
The neighbor downstairs swears this building is haunted. Maybe it is, and that’s why it fits me.
I never make friends with anyone, not even the ghosts. Honestly, I never unpack all the way.
I keep my life in stacks that can be shoved into duffels fast. I keep my heart in my chest like a locked room, because I learned early on that “home” is a word people toss around like it’s permanent.
For me, it’s always been temporary, with a lease attached.
The phone rings again.
Fourth time.
I answer because I can’t outrun the inevitable forever. “Yeah.”
“Monty.” Conrad’s voice is controlled in that way agents train into themselves—like he’s speaking from inside a booth where nothing can touch him. “Where are you?”
“My apartment,” I say, because that’s the answer he needs. As if I might be in a bar. As if I might be doing something reckless. As if the worst thing I could do is look human.
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah,” I say.
I could answer, “I always am”, but I don’t. I don’t explain that I never bring anyone here. Why would I? Why bother letting someone learn your habits, your mornings, your bad jokes, your favorite coffee order, if you’re going to disappear?
I’m too old for one-night stands.
Too jaded to pretend a relationship is possible when I can’t even promise the same zip code next month.
Also, I’m in love with a woman who can’t choose me. It’s not because she doesn’t love me. It’s because she loves too much.
Her heart is big enough to hold two men, and mine is selfish enough to want her anyway.
The entitled asshole.
Or me.
“Good.” A pause. Then: “I’m going to say it, and you’re going to let me finish before you speak.”
My jaw sets, the muscle ticking like it’s got its own pulse.
“That’s cute,” I tell him. “You think you control me.”
“Alberto Montoya Navarro Wade.”
My full name in his mouth is a leash tug. Something hot rises in me—an urge to laugh, to curse, to throw my phone hard enough to hear it crack, just so something breaks that isn’t inside me.
I want to yell I quit because I’m fucking done. Instead, “Just fucking say it,” I snap.
“They’re trading you.” He doesn’t hesitate. That’s what guts me. He doesn’t circle it. He doesn’t soften it. He doesn’t pretend I’m a person before he makes me a headline.
My body goes still. Not shock. Shock is for people who expect fairness.
This is the familiar slide of the floor shifting under my feet, the same sensation I’ve carried since I was six, and I learned nothing stays—parents, bedrooms, routines, promises.
“They’re what?” I say, because if I make him repeat it, maybe it won’t feel real.
“They’re trading you,” he repeats, like he’s reading the weather report. “It’s done. It’s going to be announced soon.”
I stare at my kitchen counter. The mail I haven’t opened. A jar of peanut butter and the butter knife in the sink.
Everything looks normal, which feels like the cruelest part. Like the universe is daring me to fall apart while my apartment keeps pretending it’s just another day in the life of Alberto Montoya Navarro Wade.
“Again,” I say, and the word comes out low.
He exhales. “Monty—”
“Again,” I repeat, louder this time, and my voice sounds like someone else’s.
Like the version of me that still believed hard work earned stability isn’t dead and gone.
“I have the best save percentage in the league. I have the stats. I have the wins. I have the reputation. I have—” My voice scrapes. “Boston fucking needs me.”
They also need a defense that doesn’t treat me like a practice net, but that’s not the point. The point is I did my job. I did it well. I did it anyway.
“They do,” he says quickly. “This isn’t about performance. It’s about another team needing you more—and willing to pay a lot for you.”
“It never is,” I mutter, because that’s the truth no one puts in the press release. You can be excellent and still be disposable. You can be the reason they’re still winning and still be the first thing they move when the math demands it.
He starts talking. Explaining. Framing. Packaging me into something digestible.
“It’s a strong opportunity. Your cap hit works for them. Your contract structure—”
“Stop,” I cut in, because if he says “opportunity” one more time, I’m going to do something violent with the blender I don’t even own. “Just tell me where the fuck I’m heading this time.”
“You’re going to the Portland Orcas.”
My mouth goes dry.
“The Orcas traded me during my rookie year,” I say, because rage is easier than the tiny, brutal fear crawling up my spine. “Why the fuck would they want me again?”
“If you recall,” he says, slipping into salesman mode so hard I can practically hear him smiling, “they’ve been under new management since then, and the franchise moved from Vancouver to Portland.
Mills Aldridge, the new owner, believes you’re the key to taking them into a championship window again. Their captain is retiring this year.”
Retiring.
My mind spins through the familiar cycle: new city, new team, new promises, new interviews where I pretend I’m excited. I can already see the welcome video. The jersey reveal. The press conference where I say all the right things while my life gets shoved into boxes.
I still have years left in me, but I’m also so fucking tired.
“You like Oregon,” he continues, like he’s offering me a consolation prize. “Didn’t you train with Philippe Lafontaine?”
Juniper Ridge punches through my ribs.
And then her name follows—Vesper Lafontaine—bright and immediate, like my body says it before my brain can stop it.
Her.
It’s not the Cup I want.
It’s never been the fucking Cup.
It’s her.
It’s always been her, sitting on the edge of a dock at midnight, feet dangling, mouth full of laughter, eyes too honest for a world that punishes honesty.
My hand tightens around the phone until my fingers ache.
“They need a goalie who can take them all the way,” he says. “Because they have a roster built to contend, and they’ve been missing one piece. That piece is you.”
I let out a humorless laugh.
“So I’m a piece.”
“You’re a franchise goalie,” he insists. “They’re investing.”
Investing.
Like I’m a stock. A gamble. A number on a spreadsheet that either performs or gets replaced.
As if I’m not a man who has spent his whole life trying to build something that won’t vanish the second someone decides they can do better.
I walk to the window because I need distance from my own kitchen, from everything that surrounds me. The city is gray today. The sky hangs low, dull and tired, like it couldn’t be bothered to lift itself.
People move down the sidewalk, bundled up, holding coffees and conversations. Their lives don’t get rearranged by a phone call. They don’t have an invisible hand reaching in to shove them across the map.
“I’m fucking tired,” I say.
“I know,” Conrad replies, and his voice tries for empathy the way a man tries on a coat he’s not sure fits.
“No,” I correct, because he doesn’t. He can’t. “I’m tired of being good and still getting treated like I’m replaceable.”
“Monty—”
“I’m tired of signing leases.” The words come fast now, spilling out before I can choke them back. “I’m tired of learning new routes to the rink. I’m tired of new kitchens and new beds and new neighbors I never talk to.”
My voice stumbles at the end, and I hate that it does. I hate how easily my body gives me away, like there’s still a kid in there who thinks if he’s quiet enough, maybe nobody will leave.
I drag in a breath that doesn’t feel deep enough. “I’m tired of pretending this doesn’t hurt.”
“Your pay is going up.” There’s a pause. Conrad starts choosing his words with care, like he’s stepping around broken glass. “Significantly.”
I close my eyes.
There it is—the carrot, the silver lining, the thing he thinks can make this easier. As if money is a bandage big enough to cover this.
Money has never fixed what’s wrong with me.
It never brought anyone back.
“I don’t fucking care.”
“You should,” he says, firmer now, because he’s trained to believe dollars can solve most problems. “This changes your future.”
My laugh comes out thin and ugly. “What future? I don’t even know where I’m going to live in six months.”
“You’re going to Portland,” he says quickly, like Portland is a gift. “You’ll be close to the training facility. You’ll have stability.”
I bark out a laugh. “You can’t promise stability.”
“Next year it won’t be like this—”
“You don’t know that,” I cut in. “Next year it’s someone else deciding they need me. They don’t need me. They just don’t know what the fuck to do with me.”
The sentence hits something deep and my stomach turns, because I’m not only talking about hockey. I’m talking about my whole damn life.
I almost choke on it.
Because I’ve been hearing versions of that line since I was six.
I was safe once. I remember it in flashes that feel too bright to look at for long—my parents in the front seats, my mother turning around to smile at me in the backseat like the world couldn’t reach us if we stayed inside that car. My father’s hand on the wheel.
Then the accident. The hospital.
Months where the ceiling became my sky.
Then, foster homes. Temporary bedrooms. New rules. New faces. Adults who smiled like they cared and then disappeared.
It took more than a year for the state to find Uncle Ernie.
He showed up, and he didn’t recoil from my silence or my anger. He packed what little I had left and moved me across the country like he was pulling me out of a burning house. He did his best. He was good. He was kind. He gave me structure and told me I was safe.
He couldn’t give me my parents back. He couldn’t give me that feeling that things stayed. All he could do was teach me survival.
He gave me hockey, thinking it would heal me. I poured everything into it because my dad loved hockey. Then, because the puck did what physics said it would do. Because effort mattered. Because I could control something in a world that had taken control away from me.
And now—
Now, hockey is my identity.
Unfortunately, men in suits decide where I exist.
“Why bother,” I say, voice quieter, “when I don’t do stability?”
“Monty.” Conrad Pierce’s tone shifts—persuasion mode sliding into place. “You’re going to a team that wants the Cup now. They’re not rebuilding. They’re not waiting. They want you to be the guy.”
I clench my jaw. “I already am the guy.”
“You’re going to be the guy on a team that can actually finish,” he pushes.
That hits a tender place inside me. A place that has wanted one thing for years and never admitted it out loud because wanting makes you vulnerable.
Sure, I want that Cup. Not as much as I want Vesper, but I do want it.
I want it in my bones, in my hands, in the muscle memory of every practice and every bruise and every night I went home alone because obsession is easier than intimacy.
I want it because the Cup is proof.
Proof you mattered.
Proof the suffering made something.
Proof you weren’t just a body on skates wearing a mask and rituals that make people laugh until they realize those rituals are the only thing keeping you sane.
I fucking want it.
That doesn’t mean I want to be moved like furniture to get it.
“Who am I being traded for?” I ask because I need something concrete, something I can grab before anger turns into something that scares me.
He gives me names. Prospects. Picks. A forward with potential. A defenseman Portland doesn’t want to lose, but will. It’s all numbers dressed up as strategy.
“You need to remember,” he says, “this is management. This is the cap. This is—”
“This is them deciding I don’t belong,” I cut in.
“Monty, that’s not—”
“Fuck, but it is,” I interrupt him, wanting to throw my phone, wanting to fire him. Wanting to . . . I’m so fucking done with this shit.