Chapter Two
The elevator hummed as it descended from the press level toward the locker room corridor.
Tessa shifted her weight from one foot to the other, aware of the credential bouncing lightly against the front of her jacket with every movement.
Around her, reporters and television crews rode in comfortable silence, checking batteries, scrolling through notes and balancing equipment that looked much heavier than anything she had brought with her.
No one seemed nervous.
One camera operator rested a tripod against his shoulder and stared at the numbers above the elevator doors.
A radio reporter skimmed through a printed roster, folding the corner of one page without looking up.
Everyone moved with the quiet confidence of people who had made this trip hundreds of times before and expected to make it hundreds more.
Tessa wondered how long it would take before she stopped noticing every detail.
When the elevator doors opened, the group filed out with practiced efficiency. Nobody paused to figure out which direction to turn or waited for someone else to lead the way. They simply moved down the hallway toward the Halifax Convoy dressing room.
Tessa followed.
The corridor had already begun to fill. Camera operators unfolded tripods against one wall while reporters gathered along the other, talking about offseason trades, roster battles and summer vacations as though this were any ordinary morning.
Someone complained about the construction near the harbour.
Another reporter compared notes on which prospects had added weight during the offseason.
Tessa hovered near the back of the crowd with her notebook tucked beneath one arm, trying to look as though she belonged there while quietly studying how everyone else behaved.
Nobody rushed for position. Nobody asked when the doors would open. There appeared to be an unwritten order to the entire process, one that everyone had absorbed over years on the beat and no one had thought to explain to her.
A strip of gray tape ran across the floor a few feet from the dressing room entrance. Tessa noticed it only after nearly stepping over it. The reporters remained behind the line without being told, leaving the hallway clear for trainers and team employees moving in and out of the room.
She stepped back before anyone could correct her.
Behind the closed doors, the Convoy were finishing the first off-ice session of training camp. Tessa could hear occasional bursts of laughter through the walls, followed by the dull thud of a barbell hitting the rubber floor and the scrape of something heavy being dragged across it.
It was strange to think that a few feet away sat NHL players she had watched on television for years.
In another minute or two, it would simply be her job to walk into their dressing room and ask them questions.
She tightened her grip on the notebook.
Tessa had interviewed plenty of hockey players before.
She had spoken with junior prospects, high school captains and teenagers who had suddenly become local celebrities after a championship run.
She knew how to fill silence, how to ask a follow-up without repeating herself and how to rescue an interview when the first answer led nowhere.
This felt different.
The players on the other side of the door were established professionals.
Many of them had been answering questions longer than she had been asking them.
They knew how to speak for several minutes without offering a single usable sentence, and they understood exactly how quickly one careless phrase could escape the room and spread across the country.
The hallway slowly grew quieter as the minutes passed. Casual conversations ended. Phones disappeared into pockets. Camera operators lifted their equipment into position.
A member of the Convoy's communications staff appeared from around the corner with a clipboard tucked beneath one arm.
“We're open.”
The room seemed to shift all at once. The dressing room door swung outward, and the crowd moved forward in a loose wave that was more orderly than Tessa expected but faster than she was prepared for.
She drew in a breath and stepped through the doorway for the first time.
The dressing room was brighter than she'd imagined.
A wide aisle ran through the centre of the room, with wooden stalls curving around the perimeter.
Equipment bags rested beneath benches, jerseys hung neatly above each nameplate and trainers moved between players.
The air carried a mixture of detergent, coffee, athletic tape and the faint trace of sweat that no amount of industrial ventilation could completely erase.
For a moment, Tessa forgot why she was there.
She had seen NHL dressing rooms on television hundreds of times.
They were the backdrop for Stanley Cup celebrations, emotional postgame interviews and tearful retirement announcements.
They were places where seasons ended, captains were named and careers were reduced to cardboard boxes packed after the final game.
Standing inside one felt different.
It was less polished than television made it look.
More crowded. More ordinary. A row of sandals sat crooked beneath one stall.
A half-eaten protein bar rested beside a pile of tape at another.
Someone had abandoned a sweatshirt on the floor, and a trainer collected it and put it into the laundry bin as he passed.
The room felt lived in.
Human.
Conversations bounced between stalls. One player laughed with a trainer while peeling tape from his wrists.
Two defensemen stood shoulder to shoulder beneath the television at the front of the room, watching highlights on SportsCentre and quietly arguing about whether a goal should have counted.
Music drifted from a speaker somewhere near the back, loud enough to fill the spaces between conversations but not loud enough to overpower them.
Nobody seemed particularly interested in the media entering the room.
Tessa supposed that was probably the point.
The players had done this too many times to care. Reporters were simply another part of the workday, no different from the trainers collecting laundry or the cameras mounted near the benches.
She scanned the nameplates above the stalls until she found the one she'd been looking for.
MATVEI BELOV
He sat in the far corner of the room, half-turned toward goaltending coach Pat McLean.
Belov wore a black Convoy workout shirt that stretched across his broad shoulders, and damp brown hair curled slightly around his ears.
A white towel rested around the back of his neck, one end moving absently through his hand as he listened to whatever McLean was saying.
Even seated, Belov looked large.
Tessa knew he was listed at six-foot-four, but numbers on a roster hadn't prepared her for the reality of him. His legs stretched far enough from the stall that teammates had to step around them as they passed. His shoulders made the wooden space behind him appear narrower than the others.
Then he laughed.
It wasn't the restrained smile of someone who knew a camera might be pointed in his direction. He tilted his head back and laughed openly, the sound carrying across the room and prompting a defenseman nearby to laugh too, even though he clearly hadn't heard the beginning of the conversation.
Tessa frowned.
That wasn't the man she'd spent the previous evening reading about.
Nearly every article she had found described Matvei Belov the same way.
Aloof. Difficult. Cold. One columnist had called him “the least engaging interview in professional hockey” during his second season.
Another had described him only a few years earlier as “perpetually annoyed by the existence of the media.”
The descriptions had repeated often enough that she'd begun to picture him as someone who moved through the building in a permanent bad mood, tolerating everyone around him only because his contract required it.
None of the stories had mentioned that he seemed perfectly capable of enjoying himself.
The younger goaltender seated beside him stood and headed toward the showers. Belov bumped fists with him as he passed, then called something after him that drew another laugh from two players across the aisle.
A trainer stopped beside Belov's stall to ask a question. Belov answered without hesitation. Whatever he said made the trainer smile and shake his head before continuing toward the equipment room.
Interesting.
Maybe the articles had exaggerated.
Tessa watched as McLean stood and gathered an iPad from the floor. The change was subtle, but Belov's expression shifted when he glanced toward the media scattered around the room. The smile disappeared. His shoulders straightened slightly, and something in his face closed.
It happened so quickly that Tessa might not have noticed if she hadn't already been looking directly at him.
A member of the communications staff glanced around the room.
“Matvei's available.”
A few reporters lifted their heads, but none of them immediately moved.
Tessa hesitated. She had expected everyone to descend on Belov the moment he became available, especially after the season he'd had. Instead, the more experienced reporters continued speaking with other players or checking their phones, almost as though they hadn't heard the announcement.
It seemed like an opportunity.
She could speak with him before a crowd formed. Without several other reporters competing for his attention, she might even have enough time to ask the follow-ups she'd prepared.
Perfect.
Tessa slipped her notebook from beneath her arm and started across the room. She had made it only a few steps when Rick Calloway noticed where she was headed.
“You going to Belly?”
She turned back toward him.
“Yeah.”
Rick opened his mouth as though he intended to say something else. For a moment, she thought he might offer advice about Belov or warn her that the goaltender had somewhere else to be.