3. Colton
COLTON
Morning came gray through the window.
I had not slept. I had finished the bourbon somewhere around three and stopped myself from opening another one, and spent the remaining hours at the kitchen table with my jacket still on and my phone face down in front of me.
Outside, the city hummed the way it always did.
I turned the phone over at six forty-five.
Thirty-one missed notifications. I turned it back over.
I made coffee. I did not drink it.
Marcus Chen called at nine.
I had known Marcus for eleven years. He had been the Titans’ general manager for eight of them and before that he had been in the front office long enough that I had watched him grow into the job the same way I had grown into mine.
We were not friends exactly, but we were something more than colleagues.
The kind of men who had been in enough rooms together that you knew what the other one was going to say before he opened his mouth.
“Can you come in?” he asked. Not good morning. Just that.
“Yes,” I said.
I showered and put on a suit and took a car to the arena.
Same route I had taken for twenty years.
Past the same coffee shop on Forty-Ninth where I had stopped every morning for a decade until the owner retired and his son changed the menu and I stopped going.
Past the same parking structure where I had backed into a pillar in 2019 and never told anyone.
Past the same intersections I had stopped counting long ago.
The driver had sports radio on low. I did not ask him to change it.
Marcus met me in the conference room on the executive floor, not his office. His office was where we had conversations. The conference room was where the organization made decisions.
He closed the door. We sat across from each other at a table built for twelve. He had a folder in front of him that he did not open. I noticed he had not brought coffee for either of us, which told me this was not going to be a long meeting.
“I want you to know,” he said, “that I pushed back.”
“I know.”
“The board moved faster than I expected. Gerald Hargrove made three calls before nine this morning and once he made those calls there was nothing I could —” He stopped. Pressed his mouth together. Started again. “I want you to know I pushed back.”
“I heard you the first time, Marcus.”
He looked at me. The kind of look that had a lot behind it and wasn’t going to say any of it out loud because we were both professionals and this was a conference room and not the place for the things that actually needed saying. “The statement will go out at noon. We’re calling it mutual.”
“Okay.”
“Your buyout will be processed by end of week. Full amount, no conditions.” A pause. “That was non-negotiable on my end.”
“I appreciate it.”
He nodded. Looked at the folder he still hadn’t opened. “Twenty years is a long time, Colton.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
Neither of us said anything else for a while.
Outside the conference room windows the city was doing what it always did, moving and indifferent and completely unaware that in this particular room on this particular morning, something that had taken two decades to build was being quietly disassembled by men in suits who were very good at making it look like nobody’s fault.
Marcus stood first. He held out his hand.
I shook it.
He walked me to the elevator himself. We rode down in silence and parted ways in the lobby without making promises to stay in touch that neither of us would keep.
I walked out through the front doors of the building I had walked into almost every day for twenty years and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, not going anywhere in particular.
The city moved around me. Cabs and foot traffic and someone on a bike cutting too close to the curb. Nobody looked at me. Nobody knew. The statement wasn’t out yet.
I hailed a cab and went home.
The statement hit the wire at noon exactly. I read it at my kitchen table with the same coffee I still hadn’t touched, cold now, pushed to the side. Mutual decision. Best interests of the franchise. I read it twice. Put the phone face down. Sat there and looked at the wall.
That was the part nobody told you about.
Not the scandal itself. I had braced for that, had stood in that corridor running the math before I ever picked up Dave’s call.
What I hadn’t braced for was the texture of what came after.
The way the phone stopped ringing not because things had calmed down but because everyone who mattered had already said what they needed to say and stopped waiting.
The way twenty years could just stop. No ceremony.
No real conversation. A statement issued on your behalf while you sat alone in your kitchen and found out about it the same way everyone else did.
I sat at that table for a long time after.
I kept thinking about the photograph in the catering corridor.
Madison Square Garden, 1970s. I had walked past that photograph more times than I could count and never once stopped to look at it.
I had been too busy going somewhere. Now I had nowhere to go and all I could think about was a photograph I had never paid attention to.
I poured a bourbon at two in the afternoon. First time in three years I had done that.
I told myself it was a one-time thing.
By the end of that first week, Lydia Hargrove’s name had appeared in forty-seven separate articles.
None of which she had agreed to. I knew because I counted.
It was a stupid thing to do and I did it anyway, same way I kept checking the score of a game I already knew I had lost. I thought about calling her.
Picked up the phone twice. Put it back down both times.
There was nothing I could say that would take her name out of a single one of those articles, and calling would only give someone something new to photograph.
I poured a bourbon instead. Told myself it was the last one for the day.
It wasn’t.
The job offers came around week two. Two of them, from franchises I would have laughed at taking six months ago.
The first meeting was in a glass office in Midtown with a general manager who had a firm handshake and a lot of enthusiasm and hadn’t won a playoff series in four years.
He talked about culture. He talked about rebuilding.
He slid a contract across the table with a number on it that was decent and a title that was not and looked at me like I should be grateful.
I looked at the number. I looked at him. I thanked him for his time and left.
The second meeting was worse. A conference call, three men on the other end who kept talking over each other, a franchise that had changed head coaches four times in six years. They used the words fresh start eleven times. I counted that too.
I turned them both down. Dave told me I was losing my mind.
“You have no leverage,” he said. “You understand that, right? Zero. You cannot afford to be selective right now.”
“I turned down two jobs, Dave. That’s not selective, that’s having standards.”
“Colton.” His voice dropped into the particular register he used when he was genuinely worried rather than just frustrated.
“You have been sitting in that apartment for two weeks. You are not sleeping. You are drinking too much and I know you are because you answer my calls differently when you’ve had a few and you’ve had a few every time I’ve called in the last ten days. ”
I didn’t say anything.
“Let me take a meeting,” he said. “There’s a guy in —”
“What meeting?”
“It’s nothing yet, just exploratory —”
“Dave. What meeting.”
He told me. It was with a franchise I had specifically told him three weeks ago I had no interest in. He had set it up anyway, quietly, without telling me, because he had decided I needed to be managed right now and managing me meant making decisions on my behalf and presenting them as a done deal.
“You’re fired,” I said.
“Colton —”
“Good night, Dave.”
I hung up. I turned my phone face down. I poured a bourbon and sat at the kitchen table in the dark and did not answer his calls for four days.
On day four I answered because I had seventeen voicemails from numbers I didn’t recognize and the league office had called twice and I was running out of patience for doing it myself. Dave answered on the first ring like he always did.
“You’re rehired,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I’ll call the league back.”
Neither of us mentioned the firing. That was the thing about Dave. Fifteen years. He knew which parts of a conversation were worth having.
The weeks after that were quieter. Which sounds like it should be better. It wasn’t.
I developed a routine. That was the word I used for it.
Routine. Up at seven because my body still ran on a coach’s schedule even when there was nothing to coach.
Coffee. Shower. Sit at the kitchen table and look at the phone.
Go for a walk that took me past the arena without meaning to, or meaning to and not admitting it.
Come back. Pour a bourbon somewhere between two and four, depending on how the walk went.
Eat something, usually not enough. Sit at the table until it got dark. Go to bed. Do it again.
On a Thursday in week three I walked past a newsstand and saw my own face on a back page.
Not the scandal story, that had already cycled out.
This was a column. Some writer I’d never heard of with an opinion about the state of coaching in professional hockey.
My name appeared in the third paragraph, between a reference to a coach who’d been fired for throwing a clipboard and a broader point about accountability.
I was an example now. A cautionary tale in somebody’s weekly column.
I bought the paper. Read the whole column standing on the sidewalk. Folded it up. Dropped it in the next trash can I passed.
Poured a bourbon at noon that day. Told myself it was a one-time thing.
On a Saturday in week four I ran into a guy I used to play with.
We had come up through juniors together, roomed on the road in our first two seasons, lost touch the way you lost touch in this league when someone got traded and time moved faster than either of you expected.
He was out with his kids. Two of them, a boy and a girl, maybe eight and ten.
He saw me first and something crossed his face before he smoothed it over and stuck out his hand.
“Mercer,” he said. “Hell of a thing.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We stood there for a second. His kids were looking at me. I wondered if they knew who I was. If they had seen the story. If their dad had explained it to them or changed the channel.
“You’ll land somewhere,” he said. The way people said things they hoped were true.
“Sure,” I said.
We shook hands again and went our separate ways. I walked home and poured a bourbon and sat at the kitchen table and did not think about his kids or the way he had smoothed his face over before he stuck out his hand.
I thought about it for three hours.
The weeks after that were quieter.
I told myself I would stop.
I told myself a lot of things that month.
The bottles accumulated on the counter. I stopped counting those too.
It was a Tuesday night, or maybe Wednesday morning, when I finally ran out.
Not just the bourbon. The bourbon I could have fixed with a car service and twenty minutes.
I mean the particular energy it took to keep sitting at that table telling myself tomorrow was going to be different.
The story had run its course. I had turned down both jobs.
I had fired and rehired Dave. I had counted forty-seven articles and stopped counting.
I had drunk more in six weeks than I had in the previous three years combined and I had nothing to show for it except a counter full of empty bottles and a body that ached in a way that had nothing to do with being forty years old.
I stood at the kitchen counter at two in the morning in the dark and looked at the bottles lined up there and felt, for the first time since the gala, something that wasn’t grief or anger or the specific numbness that came from drinking just enough to not feel either of those things.
I felt tired.
Not sleepy. Not the kind of tired a good night’s rest fixed. The kind that came from spending six weeks fighting a version of yourself you were losing to anyway.
I picked up the bottles one at a time and put them in the recycling. All of them. It took two trips.
Then I went to the counter by the window where I had been putting the mail I wasn’t opening and I picked up my phone.
Victoria Caldwell’s number was still in my recent calls from three weeks ago, when she had called me out of nowhere on a Wednesday afternoon and I had let it go to voicemail.
Then called her back twenty minutes later because something about the way she left a message made me think she was not the kind of woman who called twice.
I took the phone to the table. Sat down in the dark.
Pulled up the voicemail and played it properly for the first time, not the way I had been playing it, half listening and arguing with it and stopping it before she finished. Actually listened.
She wasn’t asking me to be grateful. She wasn’t offering me charity dressed up as opportunity.
She was telling me she had a team that was ready and a city that was hungry and a job that needed doing, and she believed I was the man to do it.
They had just come up from the minors, she said.
Four years old. Still finding their footing.
She needed someone who had actually won something to show them what winning looked like.
No apology for the scandal. No acknowledgment of it at all, actually, which I had taken as an oversight the first time I heard it and understood now was completely intentional.
She didn’t care about the scandal. She cared about what I could do on the ice.
I set the phone down.
Sat there for a while longer in the dark.
Then I picked up my phone and called Dave.
He answered on the second ring, which meant I had woken him up but he had seen my name and answered anyway. That was the thing about Dave.
“Tell her yes,” I said.
A beat of silence. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll call her in the morning.”
“Tonight.”
Another beat. “Colton, it’s two in the morning.”
“Tonight, Dave.”
He exhaled. “Yeah, okay. Tonight.”
I hung up. Put the phone down. Looked at the empty counter where the bottles had been.
Then I went to bed for the first time in six weeks and actually slept.