TWELVE
HAYDEN
BOSTON
DECEMBER
Detective Anthony is waiting for me by the front desk with Detective Ramirez.
Without a word, they direct me down a side hallway. I ignore the stares of officers and detectives as we pass. Hissing whispers of my name and why I’m there trail behind us. They should know. They should be trying to find the man who attacked my wife.
The detectives bring me into what Detective Anthony calls an interview room. It’s cold, dark, quiet, and definitely designed to make people uneasy enough to confess their transgressions. I’m about to stand trial for my own failures.
Detective Ramirez sits at the small black desk, his fingers moving steadily across the keyboard, eyes narrowed in focus. Detective Anthony gestures for me to sit opposite him.
“Do you want coffee?” she asks, her dark eyes soft and kind as if she’s trying to brace me for what I’m about to see.
I shake my head, though more caffeine might take the edge off my exhaustion. My vision blurs, and my limbs feel sluggish. I’d only slept for a couple of hours before Emerald woke up panicked. Still, adrenaline leaves me wired, preventing a crash.
It’s an odd combination, coming in waves.
Ramirez finishes typing and turns to Anthony, nodding briefly. She returns the nod. I watch the silent conversation pass between them—the kind that only comes from years of working together. It gives me a flicker of confidence.
Anthony's gaze is warm and sympathetic, almost protective toward Emerald in the way she speaks. Ramirez remains stoic, though his eyes are hard, and his jaw clenched.
He tilts the computer toward me, and the screen shows a clear view of the outside of the arena. It’s time-stamped just about when the game ended.
Sweat breaks out everywhere despite the chill in this room. Terror claws up my spine, my heart hammering so hard it threatens to shatter my ribs.
I recognize the area on the screen—not too far from the exit that Emerald walked out of.
Just after I...
“Hayden,” Detective Anthony starts, settling in the chair next to me. “Before we start, I want to be clear for the record—you are not under investigation. You’re not in any trouble. You’re free to leave at any time. Do you understand?”
I nod.
“If at any point, it becomes too much, let us know.”
"This footage is graphic," Ramirez warns. "It's awful. Your wife is being beaten by a much bigger man. Whatever you’re imagining, it’s worse—"
“Ramirez,” the woman next to me gently chastises him, but he snaps his gaze to her.
“He needs to know.”
She sighs and nods, turning back to me. “He’s right.”
I nod.
My throat feels tight as the anxiety prickles up my spine.
“I’ll be honest, Mr. Sawyer, it’s one of the worst assaults I’ve ever witnessed,” Anthony leans forward, meeting my eyes. “It’s not weak to not want to see it. So, are you sure? ”
“Yes,” I say without hesitation, though my blood pressure skyrockets.
Detective Anthony is around Linda’s age, likely the more experienced of the two, and Ramirez looks to be about Ruby’s age, thirty-three.
If it’s the worst she’s ever seen...
“Once you see it,” Detective Ramirez warns, his voice firm and his gaze piercing. ”You can’t unsee it. Can you live with it?”
“I need to see what she survived.”
He blinks, his sharp gaze lingering on me, his eyes assessing. I hold his eyes, and after a tense moment, he nods.
Something flashes in his expression. An understanding.
He presses play.
My eyes remain glued to the computer screen. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Detective Ramirez glance away from the monitor, swallowing hard.
The camera quality is good, even with the snow falling. I can see everything perfectly, including Emerald as she stumbles into view.
My breath catches.
Her hand is over her mouth, which is what she does when she tries to muffle her crying. Emerald is a natural crier—happy, angry, sad, excited—all her emotions show as tears.
I am the reason for those tears in the video, and I hate myself for it.
My heart stutters in my chest when I see him.
It’s like watching a horror movie. Leaning forward in my chair, I push my face close to the screen as he gets nearer to her.
“Emerald,” I whisper, as if I could reach through the screen, yell at her to turn around. Jump through the screen to protect her. He comes into view more, and I finally can see what he’s wearing. “Oh my God...”
SAWYER.
44.
My jersey.
My number.
The man who brutalized my wife wore my name while he did so.
That’s why she was so scared when she woke up.
He’s a big guy, maybe a little smaller than me, but he’s solid.
And now he’s right behind her.
He must say something to get her attention because Emerald’s shoulders tense, and she turns around to face him.
He moves so fast, slamming his large fist into the center of her face, sending her to her knees. It’s the kind of punch I would only throw at another man’s face. My entire body jolts as if I’ve taken the hit myself. Bile floods the back of my throat.
I gasp out a ragged breath, my hands slamming down on the desk. My fingers curl like I’m trying to hold on, nails scraping against the wood.
It’s a helpless feeling watching this, knowing I can’t do anything to stop it. Knowing that I’m inside that fucking arena in the back and that I could have stopped it. I could have done so many things differently to prevent this from happening.
Emerald looks dazed, lifting a hand to her face and looking at it like she’s confused, before he hits her again.
He hits again. Then again. His boots slam into her ribs again and again.
I stare, unblinking, as Emerald throws up her arm as a desperate defense. He stomps, breaking the fingers I love kissing, the fingers I felt so proud to slip that pretty diamond on when I got my first big paycheck .
Seeing her try to shield herself rips something open inside me.
He just stops, tired. His shoulders move up and down like he’s breathing heavy.
Emerald lies on the cold ground, bruised and bloody.
Then he lifts his leg and stomps right on my wife’s face, breaking her jaw.
The sound that tears from my throat is a strangled, broken scream.
There’s always a measure of restraint I use on the ice when I’m fighting somebody.
Sometimes other players get mouthy, but I’m constantly aware of my strength.
I know what I can do to someone. I fight, but I stay in control.
Despite my nickname, I never cross the line of knocking someone completely unconscious.
I know I could.
I have.
Back when I was fourteen and unaware of my own growing strength. I threw a hard right and knocked out another player. Those minutes after he hit the ice hard, lying motionless on the ground while his coaches and the medical staff woke him up, were some of the scariest of my young life.
I thought I killed him.
Over the years, I maintain control and hit hard enough to knock them down, but not out.
There was no restraint used against Emerald.
The world goes deathly silent. Every sound has been sucked away, leaving only a high-pitched ringing in my ears. I just watched a man brutally assault my wife while wearing my jersey. A fan of mine who felt the need to batter my wife, and for what reason?
The man crouches, looking at Emerald’s face, poking at her a couple of times like he’s seeing if she’s still alive. He looks around again before he grabs Emerald by her right arm and literally fucking drags her across the concrete.
Detective Anthony clears her throat, and that small noise cracks through the silence.
“You can see that once he realizes she’s unconscious, he panics,” she says, pointing at him to follow his path. The cameras shift from one angle to another, following his trail to where he finally dumps Emerald. “Drags her, and leaves her there.”
Right where I found her.
The man looks worried—scared, even—hands on his head, looking left and right, and up at the snowfall. Like reality has just set in. His head drops down to look at Emerald’s body. He stares for a long moment before he turns and flees.
Ramirez fast-forwards the video. Time passes quickly. The snow keeps falling, covering my wife in a cold blanket for a whole fucking hour. It doesn’t seem long, but in the cold, it must have felt like days.
“I believe she lost consciousness fairly quickly,” Denise’s words come to mind. Maybe it’s a mercy that losing consciousness spared the worst of the cold’s teeth. But my brain tunnels around the image of her lying abandoned, time passing, as she bleeds and hurts.
I think about what I was doing inside the looming arena in the background. Forcing laughter with fans, signing autographs, talking to the media, and taking photos. That last one with Britney sticks in my brain like a splinter.
I took my time walking into the locker room, talking with DeMar about crawling back to my wife. Hindsight is twenty/twenty, but now, watching my wife alone in the freezing snow, I want to scream.
“And this is where you find her,” Detective Anthony says as I finally see myself and DeMar running out of the arena and coming across her body.
They stop the video just as I collapse to my knees next to her.
“We tried to follow his trail with the surrounding cameras, but low visibility and camera quality caused his trail to go cold around Garland Park.”
The words barely register to me.
“Do you recognize him at all, Hayden?”
“I don’t.”
He’s just another Bullies fan. Wearing my number. Cheering for blood. When he didn’t get it, he took it from my wife.
“Play it again,” I hiss.
The detectives share a look.
“Are you—”
My patience snaps.
“Play. It. Again,” I snarl through gritted teeth, cutting off Ramirez’s words.
He doesn’t flinch, just sighs, rewinds, and hits play.
My eyes memorize every single detail of the man beating my wife.
Dark red hair. Jeans. Tall. Solid build. Heavy boots that kick Emerald, breaking her ribs and puncturing her lung, then stomp on her face. The video ends once more.
“Again.”
“Hayden, come on,” Anthony says, shaking her head. “It’s enough—”
“It’s not,” I growl. “Again.”
I keep my eyes on Emerald this time.
My wife looks so goddamn small compared to him .
How the fuck could anyone see her and want to harm her?
“Again.”
“No,” Ramirez says, moving to turn the screen away. “It’s enough.”
My exhaustion makes me reckless, and my hand slams the desk.
“Play it.”
Ramirez sighs and turns the computer back to me, Anthony scrubs her hands down her face, and excuses herself from the room. Ramirez watches with me this time, his eyes narrowed on the screen like he’s looking for something new.
The fourth time feels like being scalded with boiling water.
It’s not enough.
I want every single moment of this attack seared like a brand behind my eyes. I want to memorize every agonizing moment my wife went through. I want to feel it all like I’m feeling her pain.
This time, I watch the arena, knowing that I’m inside, not far away. Completely unaware of the brutality my wife faces as Rick puppeteers me for the cameras. No one is around, the people in the background sprint to their cars, to their destinations, as unaware as I am of an assault happening.
The fifth time feels like being skinned alive, and with it comes the tears. Some feeling is finally seeping through the cracks.
Agony.
There it is.
As I watch it for the sixth time, something inside me changes.
The horror of it doesn’t fade; it just settles into something that I can control.
“Again.”