5. Frankie
Frankie
“Don’t look at your phone,” Cami says, instead of hello.
“I’m looking at my phone.”
“Frankie—”
“You called my phone to tell me not to look at my phone. You get that, right? You get that structurally, that can’t work.”
It’s 7:40 in the morning and I have four hundred notifications, which even by the new situation of my life is a lot, and they are not the good sort.
The good sort say things like sobbing in a Target parking lot, thank you.
These say things like OMG and IT’S HIM and girl.
GIRL. One of them is just the knife emoji, a dozen times, which I choose not to interpret yet.
“Okay,” Cami says, in her talking-someone-off-a-ladder voice. “There’s a video.”
There’s a video.
It went up last night, and the woman who made it has a handle with both puck and prose in it, which should have been my first clue that somewhere out there my two least compatible audiences were colliding.
She’s got a nice bookshelf and the delivery of a prosecutor.
Forty-some seconds in, she holds up my book, and says the sentence, the one that’s currently doing to my life what hail does to a vineyard:
“The silver fox in Mile High is Nico Lachance, and I have proof.”
I don’t know who Nico Lachance is. God. Write that down somewhere, carve it on something, because it’s true for a few more seconds and I will never get to say it again: I did not know who Nico Lachance was.
Then the split screen loads.
On the left, a page of my book, chapter seven, highlighted in tidy pink: He rotates his wrist while he thinks, small slow circles, like the joint owes him an answer and he’s patient enough to wait for it.
On the right, hockey footage. A huge man in white and gold glides to the faceoff dot, bends, and while the referee sorts out whatever referees sort out, he rotates his wrist. Small. Slow. Circles.
My stomach understands before I do. That’s the humiliating order of operations: stomach, then skin, then the backs of my knees, my whole body assembling the knowledge while my brain stands at the front of the class insisting lots of men have wrists.
“Frankie?” Cami, tinny, far away. “You still there?”
The video keeps going. It has segments. Exhibit two: my chapter eleven, Beau Girard muttering a curse in Canadian French, low, like a prayer said backward, cut to mic’d-up footage, an enormous mustached child in a gold helmet cackling he said C?LISSE, he says it every shift, and there it is, the word, his word, in a voice I last heard against my ear in a dark that smelled like hotel soap.
Exhibit three is the timeline. She’s built a graphic.
Book written: last year, when Lachance was RETIRED.
Book hero: a retired athlete. Lachance: unretires the same month the book blows up.
She leans into the camera. “She didn’t write a fantasy about a famous man, besties.
She wrote a man nobody was looking at. That’s how you know it’s real. ”
And then, because the universe believes in thorough documentation, the clip.
An interview, dated three weeks ago. Press-conference table, gold backdrop, a wall of little shining squares behind him like the world’s smuggest wallpaper.
No ball cap. Gray at the temples, the jaw, the stillness, the whole granite situation, and a reporter asks him something I don’t hear because the man looks into the camera, exactly into it, exactly at me, and says, in the voice, the gravel-that-went-to-a-good-school voice:
“I came back to finish something. That’s all it is.”
The phone is on the floor. I don’t remember it leaving my hand.
“Frankie.” Cami’s shouting up from the carpet. “Say words.”
“The woman,” I say, out loud, to my apartment, in third person, because the first person is currently unavailable, “the woman is standing in her kitchen. The woman is fine. The woman wrote a novel about a man she met on a plane, and the man is—” and there the sentence ends.
It just ends. Eighteen months of his sentences ending like that, cliffs where verbs should be, and it turns out all this time it was contagious.
Fabio watches me from the counter, tail curled around the sugar bowl he’s not allowed near, yellow eyes tracking me the way you’d watch community theater. The woman picks up the phone, I narrate. The woman’s hands are doing a thing.
“He’s a hockey player,” I tell Cami.
“Babe.”
“He’s the hockey player. Cami. I live here. I have lived here my whole adult life. This city has one cathedral and I wrote a heat level three about the archbishop.”
“Okay, so you know who he is now.”
“The diner, Cami. The TV. The comeback, the whole restaurant went quiet, I made the weed joke, I didn’t look. He was on a screen four feet from my head, and I was smug about not looking.”
Here’s the part that needs saying, because the internet is already asking it in bold: how does a woman spend a night with the most famous face in Colorado and not know?
Like this: I don’t watch sports, any of them, I thought a power play was a business tactic until Tuesday.
He wore a cap to his eyebrows and a beard and an exhaustion that unfamouses a person.
Nobody says maybe he’s a legend about the tired man in 3B.
Famous people don’t sit next to you. Right up until they do, and confess, and lend you a hand through the turbulence, and then you go home and monetize it.
And now the whole night is re-shelving itself while I stand here, every detail walking to a new section.
The flight attendant’s double take, smoothed over fast: she knew.
The club soda in a voice that ended the transaction: a sober man, ordering the way sober men order.
The hotel that magically had a room in a blizzard, the last one, at midnight: not magic.
Money. His name opening doors without ever being said out loud.
I played a game for a living. Played. A game.
I remember thinking how modest it sounded.
It wasn’t modest. It was a man handing me the truth with the price tag broken off, and I appraised it wrong on purpose because the not-knowing was the whole romance, and then, God, then I wrote the appraisal up and published it.
Even the shoes. The funeral shoes with the graveside dirt, the grief he flew home wearing. His father. It’s in the articles, one line: his father, Réjean Lachance, a career minor-leaguer, died two years ago. A real dead man with a real name, and I gave his eulogy a subplot.
“I need you to breathe,” Cami says. “In for four.”
“He told me things.” My voice has gone very small and very fast at the same time, which shouldn’t be possible, I know about pacing.
“Cami, he told me things because I was nobody. I was safe because I was nobody, and I was nobody because he was nobody, and we were both lying, except neither of us was, except look at it now, look what it—”
“Frankie. In for four.”
I breathe in for four. Fabio knocks the sugar bowl off the counter, evenly, like a metronome keeping me company.
Cami stays on the line while I do the thing you should never do, which is research your own catastrophe.
It takes one long scroll to learn what the rest of the city was issued at birth.
Nico Lachance, called Nick by teammates and le Capitaine by a fan base that has feelings about it.
Two-way center, whatever that is, except I stopped saying whatever that is partway down the scroll.
Everything about this man is a load he carries at both ends of the ice.
It’s the entire job description. It’s in every article.
Captain of the Denver Summit for nine years.
Retired two years ago, hips. Un-retired three weeks ago to a press event the local paper called, without irony, the Resurrection.
There is a wall at the arena made of gold squares, one for every season ticket sold on the strength of his name, and it filled in nine days, and there are eighteen thousand of them.
Eighteen thousand people bet on this man’s face. As of this morning, eleven million have watched a video suggesting I’ve seen it on a pillow.
“Okay,” Cami says, when I go quiet the wrong way. “What.”
Because here’s what the internet doesn’t have, and what’s crawling up my spine with cold little hands while I scroll.
The internet has a wrist and a curse word.
Cute, deniable, a parlor game. The internet hasn’t connected chapter nineteen yet.
It doesn’t know that the retirement everyone mourned has a version with a facility in it, sixty days, a desert, a press release about hips.
Nobody knows that but him, and whoever loves him enough to lie for him, and one romance novelist who dressed it in a fictional name and sold it at number four in the country.
They think I wrote his wrist. I wrote his ruin, and I’m the only one who knows it’s in the book.
“I have to take it down,” I hear myself say. “The book. Cami. They can pull books, right? They pulled that thriller with the plagiarism, they can—”
“Frankie, it’s number four in the—”
“Then I’ll say it’s fiction. It is fiction. Ninety-six percent of it is certified fiction, I made up a sport-free sport, I gave him a sailboat—”
“Babe. Beat sheet it,” Cami says, the way other people say sit down, because she knows how the engine runs. “What happens next. Structurally.”
Structurally. I close my eyes and hate that it works, my pulse dropping to workshop speed. “Inciting incident: the video. Rising action: the denial doesn’t land because denials are confirmation now. Midpoint—” and I stop, because the midpoint walks through the wall while I’m saying it.
The midpoint is that he finds out.
A man who told a stranger the worst thing about himself in the dark, because she was safe, because she was nobody, opens a book with a gold plane on the cover and reads his own sixty days wearing a costume.
That’s the midpoint. He confessed to a stranger because a stranger felt safe, and I turned the confession into the thing that can hurt him most.
By mid-morning the siege is general. Four unknown numbers.
A podcast called Between the Sheets requesting “J.M. at their earliest convenience.” My publicist, a nice young woman I’ve exchanged nine total emails with, has sent three in an hour, subject lines evolving from Exciting momentum!
to Checking in to Please call when you can, which in publishing is the emotional equivalent of sirens.
Somewhere out there, eighteen thousand gold squares are refreshing their feeds.
The DM arrives at 11:15, while Cami’s still on speaker and I’m on the floor with Fabio purring on my sternum like a defibrillator that loves me.
Verified account. Real name, blue check, a headshot with a smile I don’t trust. Dane Barlow. His bio says hockey reporter. bring me your secrets. DMs open. The message is four sentences and I feel each one arrive in a different organ.
Working on a story about MILE HIGH and the Summit. I know J.M. Sinclair is a Denver-based writer. I have a photo from a certain convention signing table, and I’d love to confirm some details before I run with what I have. Better for you if we talk first, Frankie.
Frankie. Not Sinclair. Frankie.
“The lanyard,” I say, out of a dry mouth.
Eighteen months ago, a ballroom, four books, a woman who thought I was somebody else, and I signed anyway.
There’s a photo somewhere. There was always a photo somewhere.
Anonymity was never a vault, it was a bet that nobody would care enough to look, and the whole world just started caring at once.
“Don’t answer him,” Cami says, all the play gone out of her voice. “Frankie. Do not answer a man whose bio asks for secrets, Frankie. Don’t hand him receipts.”
“He knows my name.”
“He knows a name. Don’t hand him the face to go with it.”
I’m still staring at the message when the phone lights up over top of it, and for one unforgivable second my whole body goes hot, because some ancient stupid part of me thinks it’s him, thinks no last names got repealed by the news cycle, thinks the man from 3B is calling to say something in a gravelly voice.
It’s Becca. Of course it’s Becca. My agent can smell money coming, and her timing is never wrong.
“Frankie,” she says, and I can almost hear the skyline behind her, I can hear her ambition steaming like a racehorse, and I know exactly what she’s going to say and stand there anyway, in my kitchen, in the ruins of my quiet little pen name, holding the phone with both hands like it might buck. “Frankie. This is huge.”
The woman closes her eyes, I narrate, silently, because Fabio’s heard enough today. The woman understands that everyone in her life is about to use that word, and that not one of them will mean it the way she does. Huge like a wave is huge, when you’re the shore.
“Becca,” I say. “I think I need a lawyer, a bunker, and a time machine.”
“What you need,” says my agent, delighted, dangerous, already three moves ahead, “is to not cancel Saturday.”