Twenty-Nine #2
I don’t know what that’s like. Having both hands free to hold something that way. I never got the choice. Today, it doesn’t feel like the old wound—just a window I happen to be standing outside of, watching something good happen to somebody else.
I look down at the card. It’s cheap cardstock, the kind you order in bulk from an office supply place. The corners are soft from living in a pocket.
Not right now came out of my mouth, requiring no thought. But underneath it, arriving a half-second later like a pain you notice after the adrenaline drops—
I wanted to say yes.
Not someday if I get through this, or maybe when it doesn’t hurt.
Right now, in this specific morning with cold air in my lungs and coffee in my hand and my dad’s photo watching me—I actually wanted to say yes.
I don’t know what to do with that yet, but I stand with it.
I slide the card into the back pocket of my jeans.
Through the front glass, headlights cut across the parking lot. Wrong height for a news van. An SUV I don’t recognize, tinted windows catching the gray sky.
It pulls to the curb and two doors open.
Brock comes around the passenger side first, jacket open, no toque, moving like he hasn’t slowed down since sunrise.
Holt steps out from the driver’s side—captain’s stride, unhurried in the way that doesn’t mean unbothered.
Just a man who learned a long time ago that running never makes bad news arrive any slower.
The remaining reporters perk up before either of them reaches the porch. Mics swing forward, voices overlapping—Mr. Holt, can you confirm— Thompson, any comment on—
Neither of them slows. Neither of them answers.
I open the door before they reach it.
Brock stomps slush off his boots on the way through. Holt follows, and the room reorganizes around him, the way rooms do for men used to being listened to. He doesn’t take off his coat.
Gabriel’s gone still beside me. His spine straightens half an inch, something in his posture rewiring toward Holt before he catches it and brings his attention back to me.
I notice, don’t say anything.
“Statement’s done,” Brock says, pulling a stool out and dropping onto it. “PA’s got it on record. My name, my account, the billet house—all of it.”
“How’d they take it?” Gabriel asks. His voice is careful. Measured.
“Like they’d been waiting for someone to say it out loud.” Brock swivels his stool in a slow half-circle. “The rep asked me twice if I understood what I was putting on file. I told her I understood what I was putting on file years ago and it just took me this long to get to the building.”
With a slow nod, Gabriel exhales through his nostrils.
Holt pulls a stool but doesn’t sit on it, resting a hand on the bar.
“Governance review opened this morning,” he says. “Formal. League’s running it independent of the franchise.”
“Does Martin Westfield know?” I ask.
Holt nods. “Notified before we left. He can’t manage the story from inside the building anymore—the review pulls it out of his hands entirely.”
“And when it’s done?” Gabriel’s knuckles are white on the bar edge. “What happens to the team?”
“That’s the other thing.” Holt glances at me and Delilah, seems to decide we’re staying for this. “Carlisle Sports Group. Sarah Carlisle called me directly earlier—her dad’s been circling the franchise since before the Sin Bin opened. The review just gave them a door they’ve been waiting for.”
Delilah looks up from her phone. I can feel her filing this—names, connections, the shape of something institutional shifting beneath the surface.
“They want a formal meeting,” Holt continues. “You specifically, if you’re open to making a statement when Thompson does. Vancouver. League Offices. After the road trip.”
Gabriel’s quiet for a beat. Then: “Darius knows?”
“He was in the room for part of it,” Brock says. “He’ll call tonight. Nothing moves till you’re both back, so—”
“Don’t stew on it for five hours on the plane,” Gabriel finishes.
Brock almost smiles. “Something like that.”
The heater clicks once into the silence that follows.
“Vancouver,” Gabriel says, like he’s testing the word. “After the trip.”
“After the trip,” Holt confirms.
I watch Gabriel’s jaw work through something—the math of what this means, the weight of it rearranging behind his eyes. His shoulders drop a few degrees.
Whatever just landed, it helped.
Through the front glass, more headlights swing into the lot. A pickup truck, then an older SUV behind it, engine coughing exhaust into the cold.
O’Neill gets out first, Wolves hoodie, toque shoved to his eyebrows, breath pluming. Andersson rounds from the passenger side with a takeaway coffee. Forsberg falls in step beside them.
The reporters try again—phones up, voices rising—and get exactly nothing. All three of them walk straight past the cluster like it’s furniture.
I open the door.
O’Neill’s already talking on his way through. “Hey, Ivy. We saw you on the TV at Hidden Bean.” He shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it on the hook by the door like he’s done it countless times before. “Andersson said we should come see if you need anything.”
“I said we should finish eating first,” Andersson corrects, setting his coffee down. “O’Neill was already in the truck.”
“You were in the truck before me.”
“I had my food with me.”
O’Neill ignores this and turns to Gabriel. “You see that Braxton Hicks thing? Someone cut the footage from the launch with Westfield losing his mind and put a sea shanty over the whole thing. Four million views. Forsberg sent it to the group chat at three in the morning.”
“It was very well edited,” Forsberg says, with the sincerity of a man delivering a genuine compliment.
O’Neill’s already moving. He drifts toward the back hallway and stops at the utility closet—gray panel, open face, wiring spilling out from Reza’s preliminary teardown.
“Hey, Hayes.” His voice comes back flat and practical. “You get quotes yet on the demo?”
“Demo’s the part I can do myself,” I say. “It’s the install that needs a licensed trade.”
He reappears in the doorway, toque pushed back, looking about fourteen despite being thirty-one.
“My dad’s been running a contracting crew out of Galway for twenty years.
Gutted half the pubs in the city. I spent every summer I wasn’t at hockey camp on job sites.
” He says it like he’s reading the weather.
“The demo—ripping the old box out, clearing the space, prepping for the licensed guys—doesn’t need a ticket.
Just someone who knows what they’re doing.
” One shoulder lifts. “I know what I’m doing. ”
The room sharpens. Brock’s thumb stops on his phone. Delilah lowers hers a fraction. Gabriel pushes off the bar.
Forsberg turns and looks at me directly. “I laid tile in Gothenburg when I was seventeen. My cousin’s bathroom. Very small, very complicated. I did not make any mistakes.”
The earnestness lands so completely that Delilah makes a noise into her coffee cup.
“Half these guys grew up doing this,” O’Neill says. “Demo, rough framing, prep work. We clear it and prep it, you pay for the licensed trades’ time.”
He pauses, like something just connected. “The parts—panel and backflow. What’s actually backordered, or is it both?”
“Both,” I say. “Reza’s been calling suppliers since before Christmas. Nobody in BC’s got either one before March.”
“What’s the spec?”
Delilah’s already got her phone out, thumb scrolling. “Reza emailed the model numbers back in—here.” She turns the screen toward O’Neill. “Send your dad this.”
O’Neill leans in, squints, takes a photo of her screen. “Smart. I’d have butchered ‘backflow preventer’ in a Galway accent at midnight anyway.”
He checks the time, does the math on his fingers. “Half ten over there. Dad’s still up—doesn’t sleep before midnight, never has.” He looks at me. “Thirty years of trade suppliers across Ireland and the UK. Parts backordered here aren’t necessarily backordered there. Worth a shot?”
“Call him,” I say.
He steps toward the back hallway, phone already to his ear, voice dropping into something faster and warmer the second the call connects—a different register entirely, the vowels rounding out, going home.
I do the math without meaning to. Seventy-five thousand for the parts—but if O’Neill’s dad can source them through European suppliers, that number shifts. The demo labor the guys are donating shrinks Reza’s billable hours down to just the licensed work. And—
“Second installment from the Wolves contract,” Delilah says, without looking up, like she’s reading my mind and the delivery schedule at the same time. “Posts January eighth. Net seven after probation closes.”
The numbers rearrange themselves behind my eyes—parts potentially sourced at trade pricing, labor cut, sponsorship money landing in a week—and for the first time since December twenty-second, the figure on the other side of the equation doesn’t make my stomach drop.
It’s still a mountain. But I can see the trail now.
My chest tightens and swells at the same time.
O’Neill’s voice carries faintly from the hallway—something about amperage, a short laugh, a name I don’t catch. A few minutes later he reappears, phone already pocketed, grin settled into something more satisfied than excited.
“He’s calling around in the morning. Says don’t get attached to a timeline yet, but he’s got a guy.” O’Neill shrugs. “His words. ‘I’ve got a guy.’ Man’s had a guy for everything since 1987.”
Forsberg gives the room one last look and doesn’t say anything, which after the last twenty minutes feels like its own kind of compliment.
Andersson checks his watch. “Wheels up tomorrow,” he says. “We should get going.”
The three of them leave the way they came—O’Neill’s lips still moving slightly, running specs over in his head; Andersson disposing of his own takeaway cup neatly by the door; Forsberg pausing on the porch to zip his jacket against the cold, face already set against the reporters who’ve regrouped on the sidewalk.