Thirty-One
The boardroom table is polished oak, long enough to seat a second line. Twelve water bottles on it. I counted while they set up.
The league brought numbers: three counsel between Brock and me, folders squared. The PA rep and the Deputy Commissioner sit across the table. Darius on my right, close enough that his suit sleeve brushes mine when he reaches for his water bottle. Brock’s agent mirrors him on the far side.
At the head of the table, the arbitrator flips through a folder she brought, tucking a strand of pin-straight brown hair behind her ear as she reads. She hasn’t looked at me once. The stenographer sits beside her, talking to her in a hushed tone.
And down the far side, Martin Westfield, flanked by two lawyers in charcoal, a legal pad in front of him.
He looks fine.
Rested. Shaved. New reading glasses, thin frames, the kind that say reasonable man.
I’ve been building this day in my head for nine weeks.
On planes. In hotel gyms. Rehearsed it on Ivy’s couch with her feet in my lap, going quiet mid-sentence until she’d nudge me back.
She’s the only one who heard all of it—the statement, the hallway, the parts I couldn’t say in Darius’s office with the recorder going.
Nine weeks, and some part of me kept casting Marty wrong for this room.
Thinner. Grayer. As if he’d be marked, somehow, by what’s coming.
He looks comfortable. He built half the rooms I’ve ever had to perform in, and he sits in this one like he built it too.
Reading a room before it reads you—that’s his special domain. First thing he ever taught me, fifteen years old, before the billet, before the shoulder. And I’m doing it right now, on reflex: who matters, who’s watching, what they want the face to be.
Then I stop. The room can want whatever it wants. I’m here to answer questions.
“We’re on,” the stenographer says.
The arbitrator looks up. “For the record. Continuation of the governance review. Mr. Thompson, whenever you’re ready.”
Brock puts both forearms on the table.
“I moved into the Westfield house at fifteen,” he says. “September to the following May. Eight months.
“There were four of us that year. Rules were posted in the kitchen. Curfew, food, when you could use the phone. Nothing weird about that part—every billet’s got a list.”
The arbitrator waits.
“The part that wasn’t on the list was the ice time.” Brock’s thumb moves once on the table edge. “Marty coached our club that season. If you crossed him at the house, you got fewer shifts on the weekend. It was never said out loud—everyone just learned it by the second month.”
“Can you give the panel a specific instance?”
“Yeah. Jimmy Finch.” A beat passes, the stenographer getting the name on record. “Jimmy was eighteen. Overager. He’d get pulled after practice—after games too, a couple of times—for extra conditioning. That was the word for it. Conditioning. To earn his ice time back.”
“Pulled by whom?”
“Marty—er, Martin Westfield.”
“And where did that take place?”
“Back of the rink, mostly. Sometimes the house.” Brock’s voice doesn’t move.
“I never went in, didn’t see anything. Not saying that to protect anyone, that’s just what happened.
We’d be in the van, or we’d be upstairs, and somebody would say Finch is getting conditioned, and that’d be the whole joke. ”
“Did anyone raise a concern?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Brock’s mouth twists into a grimace.
“After Christmas, he stopped showing up to skates. Then he was off the roster. No announcement; no questions asked.” Brock looks at the wall past the stenographer’s shoulder.
“I checked, later. When I got old enough to think about it. Finchy never made it. Not the Q, not U Sports, not even a beer league. I don’t know where he went. ”
The room is very quiet. Somewhere below us a truck backs up, the beeper faint through the glass.
“That’s my statement,” Brock says.
Finch paid in something we can’t prove and won’t say out loud with a stenographer in the room. I paid in a surgery bill nobody let me see the total on. Not the same bill. Never the same. Same man writing both.
Turning a page, the arbitrator says, “Mr. Castellano. Does Mr. Thompson’s account match your recollection of the household?”
“It does.”
“In its entirety, or in part?”
“In its entirety.”
She writes something. “Were you ever present when the phrase ‘leadership means discretion’ was used?”
“Yes.”
“Approximately how often?”
“Weekly,” I say.
“Thank you.”
Down the table, Martin Westfield is a statue.
They read my statement out loud.
I signed it in Darius’s office nine days ago, and I’ve read it maybe forty times since. I thought I knew every word by weight. Then league counsel starts, flat, no color anywhere, and it turns out I’ve never heard them before at all.
“I was sixteen when my shoulder went at my first junior camp. The surgical consultation was arranged privately, before the public wait list called back. I did not book the procedure, schedule it, or pay for it. I never saw an invoice, an insurance claim, or a payment record. Neither did my father, Luca Castellano. I was advised there was no need to worry him with the details.”
That last line takes her four seconds to read. It took about four seconds to happen, too. Marty’s hand on the doorframe of a hospital room. No sense worrying Luca with the invoice. He’s got enough on him.
Reasonable. That’s what it was. It was so reasonable that I said thank you.
My shoulder doesn’t hurt. It hasn’t in nine years—his surgeon was excellent; his money always is. I roll it once anyway and make myself sit still.
Ten years of paying it back and nobody ever told me the number. That’s the trick: a debt with no figure attached never gets to zero. There’s no last payment. You just keep making them.
Twice in my life I’ve listened to my own words come out of something that wasn’t my mouth.
A forged thread wearing my name. My own voice on a playback speaker in a gutted bar, selling a thing I didn’t believe.
Both times, the worst part was the recognition.
This is the third time. Every word is true, every word is chosen, and it still lands like a stranger talking—some sixteen-year-old kid, too green to know he’d just co-signed.
“Mr. Castellano.” The arbitrator’s voice. “Do you affirm this statement as accurate?”
I turn my head.
Westfield’s already looking at me. Maybe he hasn’t stopped. Behind the new glasses his eyes are the same flat gray they go when he’s calculating.
The man across this table is the same who was on a team with my father and got to watch him play.
Who knew him at nineteen—before his knee went, before me and Val, before our mother chose to chase Hollywood over raising her kids.
Every story about Dad that doesn’t come out of my own memory comes out of Marty’s.
I’m closing that account today. Both of us know there’s no reopening it.
“Every word,” I say. To him, not the room.
I hold his stare past where a man is supposed to, past comfortable, until one of his lawyers glances up from a folder.
Westfield adjusts his cuff a quarter inch. Settles it against his wrist bone.
Then he looks at the wall clock behind my head, like a man checking whether he’ll make his lunch.
I’ve seen him drop a mug at a Christmas party and swear loud enough to turn heads. He’s got a temper. He’s just never once spent it on anyone who was watching.
“Noted,” counsel says. “Thank you both.”
The elevator down is glass on one side. Brock doesn’t say anything, and neither do I. Twenty-two floors of Vancouver’s waterfront sliding up past us, gray harbor, cranes, a float plane coming in low over the water.
At the ninth floor, he says, “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.” He watches the numbers. “Me neither.”
We could have driven. Darius offered a car both ways, and I said no, and Brock said no about four seconds after I did, and neither of us explained it to the other one.
So we ride the bus.
The team flew into YVR at ten this morning after four nights in California, and the charter’s booked to run everybody up the Sea-to-Sky at three, same as it always is. Bags in the belly. Gear truck ahead of us. Two hours of engine noise and Highway 99.
We take the seats we always take. Third row, driver’s side. Andersson’s four rows back arguing about a movie. Somebody’s got a speaker going, low. Forsberg is already asleep, his forehead resting on the window, with O’Neill taking photos of the Swede’s open mouth.
Brock puts his head back against the seat.
“They asked me for names,” he says.
“Of who?”
“Other families. The ones we billeted with before him, after him.” His eyes stay shut. “Other seasons, too. Not just ours. She wanted to know how far back the club records go.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Everything I could remember. Which isn’t much. I was fifteen.” A breath. “She wrote all of it down anyway.”
The bus takes the ramp onto the highway. Horseshoe Bay somewhere ahead, the water going flat and metal-colored under a low cloud.
“This isn’t ending with Marty,” I say.
“No.” Brock cracks one eye. “That bother you?”
I think about it longer than I want to.
“No,” I say, and find out I mean it.
Somewhere around Porteau Cove, O’Neill’s head appears over the seatback.
“Beanie forecast for tomorrow’s scrum. Delilah posted the schedule to the group chat. Cas, you’re up—and I quote, ‘helmet hair and all, no exemptions.’”
“I know my contract.”
“Just making sure.” He grins, dropping out of sight. Two seconds later, back over the seat: “Also Forsberg wants to know if the wolf can hold the playoff beard pool. Like a bank.”
“Tell him the wolf is not a financial institution.”
“That’s what I said. He wants it in writing.”
“On a napkin,” Forsberg adds, eyes still closed.
O’Neill drops back down for good. Nobody on this bus asks where Brock and I were this morning. Every one of them knows. That’s the thing with this crew: sometime in January, between demo shifts at the bar, they established that they were the kind that shows up and shuts up.
My phone buzzes against my thigh.
Ivy: how’d the suits treat you
Ivy: don’t answer that yet. wolf says hi first
Attached, a photo: the mechanical wolf in The Penalty Box beanie, somebody’s aviators balanced on his snout.
I look at it longer than a picture of an animatronic wolf in sunglasses deserves.
She could have sent how did it go, and I’d have typed fine, and we’d both have hated it. She knows what today is. So she sent me the wolf. And that is one of the reasons why the math I do on road trips now runs down instead of back. Days left, not days since.
Me: the aviators are a good look. tell him
Me: i’ll drop by at six
Three dots. Then: door’s unlocked. and don’t lecture me about that. I own a bar, I know better.
I’m still looking at the screen when Val’s face and name appear.
I’ve got one, maybe two, bars of cell service. I take the call before I’ve decided to, phone to my ear, elbow against the cold window.
“Hi.” Bright, and pitched about a half-step up from where her voice actually sits. “Is this a bad time? You’re traveling, I can hear the—”
“It’s fine. What’s up?”
“Nothing! Everything’s good.” A rustle, like she’s switching hands.
The bus goes through a rock cut and the sound drops out and comes back.
“I ended it with Rafael. It’s fine. It was very mutual, very adult, we both—” She stops.
Starts again, quicker. “I’ve been selling some things.
Not sad things! Just, the furniture doesn’t make sense to ship, and the studio lease is up in April anyway, so honestly the timing is kind of perfect when you think about it. ”
My hand’s already got the phone half away from my ear, thumb moving toward the airline app. I can have her in Vancouver by Saturday. I can wire whatever the deposit is. I can call somebody about the furniture.
I know exactly how to make this stop being a problem.
I put the phone back against my ear and let my hand fall into my lap.
“Val.”
“Yeah?”
“How are you?”
Nothing.
The engine drones. Somebody laughs four rows back. Brock’s head comes around a fraction, then goes back to the window.
The silence goes on long enough that a year ago I’d have filled it three times over.
“Not great,” she says finally, and her voice comes apart on the second word. “Gabe, I’m not great.”
“Okay.”
And then she tells me. All of it, out of order, doubling back, the fight in November she never mentioned and the thing his mother said at Christmas and how she’s been sleeping on a friend’s couch in Siena for the last two weeks.
I don’t interrupt. I say yeah and okay and once, that’s a shitty thing for her to say, which makes a wet noise come out of Val that’s half a laugh.
Then she goes quiet in a different way. Unsure.
“Can I come stay with you? For a bit.” Fast, before I can answer. “I’d get a job, I’m not going to just—I mean I’d figure out my own thing, obviously, it wouldn’t be forever, I know you’ve got the season and—”
“Stay as long as you want.”
“—and I don’t want to be in your—” She stops. “Wait, what?”
“Stay as long as you want,” I say again.
“Okay,” she says. Very small.
“Okay.”
“Okay.” A breath that shakes coming out. “I’ll figure out flights and let you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Gabe?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for asking. The thing you asked.”
I look at the guardrail going past, and the drop past it, and the water.
“Don’t mention it. Hey, the highway’s choppy here,” I say as the bus winds around the carved mountainside. “Text you later—not the twelve-word version.”
She laughs properly then, surprised, and expresses her love with smacking kiss sounds before ending the call.
Brock waits about a minute.
“Val okay?”
“No.” I turn the phone over in my hand. “But she will be.”
He nods. “For what it’s worth, I never liked how she talked about that guy.”
I turn.
“You knew about Rafael?”
“She told me in the fall.” He shrugs one shoulder, eyes fixed on the road, mild as anything. “She tells me stuff, man. Has since she was about twelve.”
Brock doesn’t make it a lesson; his attention returns out the window at the fjord.
The highway starts to climb between the shoulders of the mountains, and the cloud comes down to meet the treeline.
My phone’s dark in my hand. The airline app is right there. Two taps and the whole thing is solved by Saturday.
I put it face-down on my thigh and leave it there.
There’s a room in that penthouse I’ve never slept in. Boxes stacked against one wall since September, still taped, my name on them in somebody else’s handwriting. Blinds I’ve never opened. A bed nobody’s ever used.
I don’t plan how to clear it out. I don’t make a list.
I just sit with my hands empty and let the bus carry us up.