Chapter 1
Jenna
"I'm going to say this one more time, and then I'm going to let it go forever," I tell my editor, in the doorway of his office, with my coat half on. "This is a bad idea."
"You said that already."
"I said it was a bad idea. I haven't said it was a bad idea one more time. This is the one more time."
Frank doesn't look up from his screen. Frank has been an editor for thirty years and has perfected the art of not looking up, which is its own kind of power. "The history is the point, Jenna."
"The history is the problem. I wrote a piece about a guy that ended his relationship with the press, and now you want me to embed with his team for eight weeks. He's going to stonewall me. He's going to make every other source nervous. The access gets worse, not better."
"Or," Frank says, "the most interesting thing about a team is the person inside it with the most reasons to keep his mouth shut, and you happen to be the one journalist alive who can make him want to open it."
"That's a quote you've rehearsed."
"I rehearse everything. It's why I sound so natural." He finally looks up. "Eight weeks. Team culture. The whole ecosystem. You go in, you do the work, and if Weston bites your head off, that's color. That's a scene. You can write a man biting your head off better than anyone in this building."
"That's not a compliment."
"It wasn't supposed to be one. Go to Clearwater."
So I go to Clearwater.
The Wolves' facility is the kind of building that costs more than a small town and is decorated to make you forget that.
Glass, wood, a lobby with a trophy case lit like a chapel.
There's a smell of fresh ice and floor cleaner and, faintly, the protein-shake funk of any place where large men sweat for a living.
I've been in twenty of these. They all smell the same. It's weirdly comforting.
A media relations woman named Priya meets me with a lanyard and a binder.
"You read the binder?" she asks.
"I read the binder."
"You actually read it, or you read it the way people say they read terms and conditions?"
"I actually read it. Page nine has a typo. 'Locker room access is granted at the discretion of the head coach and is subject to revocation at the descretion of the head coach.'"
Priya blinks. "You read it."
"I read everything. It's a sickness."
The first two days are easy, which makes me nervous, because in my experience easy is just a thing that happens right before hard.
I interview the strength coach, who talks about hip mobility with the passion most people reserve for their children.
I interview the equipment manager, who has been with the team for nineteen years and refers to the players collectively as "my idiots" with enormous tenderness.
I interview a rookie defenseman so polite I want to call his mother and tell her she did a great job.
I do not interview Cole Weston.
I see him, though. You can't not. The first time is in the corridor outside the weight room. He's coming one way, I'm going the other, and there's a moment — I clock it, I'm a professional, I clock everything — where he registers exactly who I am.
I brace for it. I've been braced for it since Frank said the word Clearwater. The cold shoulder, the muttered thing, the conspicuous turn.
I get none of it. He looks at me. He looks away. He keeps walking. The whole thing takes under a second and contains less drama than a dropped pen.
It is, somehow, worse than if he'd said something.
On day two I'm in the media availability room, and he's at the front taking questions, and a beat guy asks him about the power play, and Cole answers in the flat, complete, deeply boring sentences of a man who has decided that the safest thing to be in front of a microphone is unquotable.
He's good at it. He's clearly been good at it for two years.
He looks at the room when he answers and his eyes pass over me the way they'd pass over a fire extinguisher — something present, something noted, something with no bearing on his day.
"He's not going to give you anything," murmurs the beat guy next to me, a veteran named Doug who smells like the inside of a thermos. "He hasn't given anyone anything since—" Doug stops. Looks at me. "Oh. Right. Since you."
"Since me," I agree.
"No offense."
"None taken, Doug. I did it on purpose."
What I don't tell Doug, what I don't tell anyone, is that I am already collecting things that don't fit.
The way the locker room sounds when Cole comes in — a notch warmer, a degree louder, the specific noise of a room that likes the person who entered it.
The way the equipment manager, my idiots and all, said Cole's name with something different in his voice.
And then, on the second afternoon, the thing I can't stop turning over.
I'm near the players' lounge, just outside it, and I'm not eavesdropping, except that listening is my entire job and the door is open.
Theo Pardoe — veteran, defenseman, the kind of guy every team has exactly one of, the connective tissue — is telling a story.
I don't catch the start. I catch the middle.
"—and Westy doesn't say a word about it, right, doesn't post it, doesn't tell anybody, and I only find out because my cousin works at the place and she's like, 'Your teammate's been coming in every Tuesday for like three years,' and I go, 'What teammate,' and she says—"
The door swings, somebody crosses the room, and the story is gone.
I stand in the corridor with my recorder off and a notebook I don't open.
Three years. Every Tuesday. Doesn't post it, doesn't tell anybody.
That is not a sentence about the man I wrote.
That night there's an evening practice, optional, the kind of skate that empties out fast because optional means optional.
I'm up in the press box because I like the press box, I like the height, I like seeing the whole sheet at once, the geometry of it.
I'm packing up. The ice is nearly empty.
The cleaning crew is starting their loop.
And one guy is still out there.
Cole Weston, alone, running a sequence — receive, cut, release, again. Receive, cut, release, again. No coach. No audience. No reason except the thing inside him that needs the puck to go exactly where he tells it to.
I watch for a while. I don't write anything down.
I check the time, because checking the time is a reflex, and the time is 9:47 p.m., and the building is empty, and a man the public thinks they know is doing the most private thing a person can do, which is work hard at something when no one is supposed to be looking.
I close my notebook.
I do not write: I think I got this wrong.
But I think it. For the first time in two years, sitting in an empty press box at 9:47 on a Tuesday — and it's a Tuesday, I notice that too — I think it.