22. Nick
Nick
We can clinch Thursday. Everybody knows it, everybody a little too loud, nobody saying the word. Sully tapes a piece of paper over the standings printout that just says SHHH. I should be enjoying every minute of it, the first playoff berth in three years. Instead, I keep checking my phone.
Three days since the tarmac. Three days of her acting like everything is fine when it clearly is not.
The laughs land a half beat early. The calls end one exchange sooner than they used to.
On Monday night she was so bright on the phone that it hurt to listen.
When I asked if she was okay, she deflected with a joke about June and Beau’s cell reception.
An answer to a question I didn’t ask. I know her tells now, and every one of them has been firing since Sunday at ten forty-one p.m.
I should ask her straight out. I’m going to.
But not before Tuesday’s game, I tell myself.
Then Tuesday we win, and the building sings, and Gwen’s cameras eat us alive in the west corridor.
No chance, no quiet. Wednesday, I decide.
Wednesday I’ll drive over with the green pen and ask her what happened on Sunday.
***
Wednesday, Gwen’s office calls me out of video at eleven a.m., and this time there’s a lawyer already in the room, and nobody offers me water.
“Barlow filed questions this morning,” Gwen says.
No warm-up. Her tablet is flat on the table, dead, which I have never once seen.
“Formal request for comment, story slated for Thursday night. Seven questions.” She slides a printout across the table, and her voice hesitates, something I’ve never seen before.
“Question four quotes from a manuscript. Her manuscript — the unpublished pages.”
I read the seven questions the way you read an MRI.
One: retirement timeline. Two: the facility.
Three: the hips, medical records, discrepancies.
Four: Can the club comment on the following passage, from an unpublished manuscript by J.M.
Sinclair obtained by this reporter: “The team announced a procedure. The sport got a press conference about his hips, and he got sixty days in the desert and a chip he keeps in a drawer, and the only two people who ever knew were the man who drove him there and the woman he told at thirty thousand feet, because she had no idea who he was, and that made her the only person he ever trusted with all of it.”
The lawyer is saying something about exposure windows. Gwen is saying something about response strategy. I’m not listening anymore.
Because I know that voice. I’d know it under anesthesia.
I have read four hundred and nine pages of that voice and slept next to the woman who makes it, and no editor wrote that, no assistant paraphrased that, that sentence has her fingerprints on every clause, the doors, the rooms, the unlocked, and it isn’t from Mile High, I’d know, I’ve read what’s in Mile High.
This is new. This is dated after the night on bathroom floor.
This is my December, my cactus, my tape tins, the things I emptied out of my pockets onto the tile at four in the morning, written up, worked, polished until they sing, in prose so good I can hear her reading it, sitting in a conference room while a lawyer talks about clauses.
“Nick.” Gwen, quiet. “There’s context you need.
Legal pulled the trade coverage this week.
Monday, an industry newsletter ran an item: her sequel, yanked from a seven-figure auction hours before it opened.
Proposal and sample pages had already gone to six publishing houses.
” She lays it out plainly and lets me do the rest, because she knows I will.
“The story Barlow has isn’t sourced from a facility, Nick.
Facilities don’t talk. It’s sourced from a manuscript.
Sample pages that have gotten around. That’s not an accusation, it’s a supply chain. ”
I think back to Sunday night on the tarmac. Ten forty-one p.m. Her phone ringing, a woman going still in all the wrong ways, telling me everything’s moving while she hid her whole hand in her pocket.
The freeze comes down over me like a rink going dark, section by section.
“Is any of it true?” the lawyer asks. Second time in my life a man in a suit has asked me that exact question on behalf of this organization.
“Because if it’s fabricated, we go scorched earth tonight, cease-and-desist, the works.
If any of it’s true, the conduct language activates and my advice changes completely, so I need to know which war I’m in. ”
And here it is, the door I told Micah I’d walk through in June, arrived early, wearing the wrong face, on the wrong terms, in the wrong room. I look at Gwen. Gwen looks at me like a woman who remembers exactly what I told her eight months ago: it’s fiction.
“Get me the questions in writing,” I say, which is stalling, which everyone in the room knows is stalling, which is its own answer, and I walk out past the Wall of Gold with my whole life going quiet at the edges.
My phone shows two missed calls from her. 11:14. 11:31. While I was in the room. While the excerpt was being slid across the table, she was calling, and there’s a text underneath: I need to see you tonight. It’s important.
Three days of every tell she owns firing at once, and now it’s important.
Now, with Barlow ready to publish and her own sentences sitting on a conference table with my desert in them, now it’s important.
I stand in the concourse doing the thing I swore in a church basement I’d stopped doing: building the case for the worst version of her, because the worst version asks nothing of me.
The worst version and I go way back. The worst version says: Micah called it in a parking garage in December.
She’s got a job, and the job is you. Says: the auction was Sunday, the stillness was Sunday, the count is off by exactly one seven-figure secret.
Says: you are forty-one years old and you handed a professional storyteller the only thing you had left that wasn’t inventory, and she did what the writer in her does, the one she told you herself she can’t turn off, and the only reason it got pulled back Sunday is somebody got nervous, and the only reason she needs to see you tonight is the story runs tomorrow.
The other version is quieter. The other version says: the woman on the bathroom floor.
The Kansas call. The hand with no pen in it.
It says there’s an explanation, in her voice, and I want to believe it so badly that the wanting itself feels like the old wanting, the paper-cup wanting, warm and familiar and offering to make the pain quiet, and that’s the moment the whole thing curdles, right there in the concourse, because I no longer trust the want.
A man in recovery learns exactly one skill above all others: when the craving talks, you don’t negotiate with it.
I never learned the difference between craving and faith. Nobody taught me that.
I don’t call her back. I text: Game tomorrow.
After. Three words. I watch the typing dots come up and stop, come up and stop, three times, a professional writer unable to answer three words from me.
Whatever that struggle means, it fits both stories, the innocent one and the guilty one.
That’s the trap. I put the phone in my bag, go back into the video room, and stare at the screen for two hours without seeing a single frame.
Thursday we clinch.
It should be the sentence of the season.
It’s a home game against a desperate team, we’re down one in the second, and the building is deafening.
Rory ties it on a pass I thread through two defenders.
Then, four minutes left in the third, tie game, we’re a man down, and the puck comes around the boards to me.
I’m alone from the red line in, eighteen thousand people on their feet, a desperate goalie coming out to challenge.
I do not think about Barlow, or the excerpt, or her.
And that absence, that pure blank nothing, is the closest thing to the pills I’ve felt in two years.
I score. The horn drowns out everything.
The room after is beer and towels and Sully dancing on a bench with his shirt off, and Rory hugging everyone in rotation like it’s a wedding, twice for me, and Micah sitting in his stall in full gear watching his team be young, and me in the middle of it with my face doing captain things while my phone, in my bag, on the shelf, does what it’s been doing all night.
Buzzing.
I shower last, dress slow, let the room empty.
Then I sit in my stall in the quiet with a towel around my neck, and I take the phone out, and there it is.
Barlow’s tease, posted an hour before puck drop, forty thousand shares and climbing: THURSDAY NIGHT: The story the Summit doesn’t want told.
It’s not about hockey. It never was. And under it, over it, around it, six missed calls spread across the evening, her name, her name, her name, her name, her name, her name, and one voicemail, forty seconds long, unplayed.
My thumb hovers over the voicemail the way I hovered over a search bar in October, back when the worst thing she could be was a stranger who wrote a book.
Here’s what I know at eleven p.m. on the best team night in three years, alone in a room that smells like champagne someone else opened: if I play that voicemail and her voice breaks in it, I’ll drive to her building tonight and believe whatever she tells me, because I love her, and I have always been a man who wants too badly to believe.
The pills knew that about me before she did.
And if I play it and her voice is composed, the writer, the professional, managing me in perfect sentences, I will know that too, and I can’t, I cannot know that tonight, with Barlow loaded and eighteen thousand gold squares hanging over a season I have finally, actually promised somebody.
So I do the thing I do from before her. The thing the desert never fixed because I never once let anyone far enough in for it to matter.
I let it ring silent. I put the phone face-down in the bag and zip it shut.
I sit in the empty room with my forearms on my knees.
Somewhere across town, a woman is sitting outside a gate I built for exactly this moment.
And the last thing I think, before I drive home alone and hollow on the night we won, is that Micah had it backward all along.
The secret was never what kept me locked up. The habit of shutting people out is.
Trap, sprung. From the inside, by the animal himself.