Epilogue
Jenna
The piece won an award.
I'll say that in one sentence and then move past it, because the award is the least interesting thing that happened, and I've never trusted writers who lead with their trophies.
There's a plaque. It's in a drawer. Cole keeps threatening to put it on my wall, "next to the string," and I keep threatening to write a follow-up profile titled The Man Who Calls Eggs Fine, and we have reached a peaceful détente.
Four months later, I'm back in the press box.
It's the playoffs. I'm covering the Wolves' run for a feature — a different feature, a real one, about a team chasing the thing teams chase — and I'm back in the building where a lot of things changed, in the narrow blue-lit room where the most important of them changed, and I'd be lying if I said I could sit in here at night without thinking about it.
I think about it.
Then I write four hundred clean words about the penalty kill, because I'm a professional, and the penalty kill doesn't care about my interior life.
Down on the ice, Cole gives the media exactly what he always gave them.
Controlled. Specific. Professional. He answers Doug's question about the power play in a complete, quotable sentence, and Doug still hasn't recovered from the change, two seasons in, Doug walks around looking faintly betrayed by it.
Nobody in the press corps knows a single thing about us.
We're careful. We're so careful it's almost a bit, at this point, a private joke we play in public.
I covered a Tuesday at the literacy program last week.
With a photographer this time — Cole signed off, the parents signed off, the kids who could write signed their own permission slips with enormous serious signatures.
The girl in the red cardigan is in second grade now and has moved on from dragons to a series about a detective dog, and last Tuesday she informed me, gravely, that the dog's owner is the real criminal.
"You don't know that," I told her. "You're on chapter four."
"I have a feeling," she said.
"You can't just decide and stop. You have to keep reading to find out if you're right."
She looked at me like I'd said something extremely obvious. "I KNOW," she said. "Coach Cole already told me that one."
Coach Cole. They call him Coach Cole now.
After tonight's game — a Wolves win, the series goes to 2-0, the building loud and happy and emptying slow — I'm the last journalist out, because I'm always the last journalist out, it's a sickness. I take the service exit because it's closer to my car and the main concourse is a zoo.
Cole is in the corridor.
Which is either a coincidence or it isn't, and after four months I've learned that with him it's never a coincidence, he scouts everything, he's known my exit route since the first week, he's standing in the one hallway in this building where the cameras don't reach and there's a reason for that and the reason is me.
"Good game to cover," he says.
"Good game to play."
"We're still not on the record."
"I know."
"Good," he says.
He walks past me in the corridor. And as he passes — just for a second, just enough, the whole thing deniable, the whole thing ours — his hand brushes mine.
That's it. That's the entire public record of us, two seasons running: a hand brushing a hand in a corridor where the cameras don't reach.
I keep walking. He keeps walking. We go to separate cars like two professionals who happen to share a hallway, and I drive home through the city to the apartment we mostly share now, where there's a printout on the coffee table he's read at least eleven times and a string on the wall I finally let him add a thing to, and I'm already thinking about the next story.
My next story is going to be very good. I know it the way I know things — early, certain, the stove feeling but inverted, the feeling of being right and feeling great about it.
I have never had better material.
I'll keep reading to find out if I'm right.
I have a feeling.