6. Rhett
Rhett
The night before the home opener, I’m in the film room at midnight, and so is she, because neither of us knows how to go home.
I’ve got tape running with the sound off.
She’s got her laptop and the draft of the speech I’m supposed to give the crowd tomorrow, the one where I stand at center ice under my own banner and tell twenty thousand people the season starts now.
We’ve been at it two hours. The building’s empty.
The only light is the projector and her screen, and the only sound is the soft click of her typing and the skate-cut hiss off the tape.
I’ve run this same tape four times tonight.
The same nineteen-year-olds making the same read a half-second late, the same defenseman turning the wrong way, the same power play that moves the puck like it’s apologizing for having it.
I can fix it. That’s the thing nobody believes about a team this young, it’s all fixable, every bit of it, if you can get them to stop flinching long enough to learn.
The tape is the easy part. The hard part is that the building has already decided what this season is, and there’s a banner in the rafters telling everyone I peaked decades ago, and tomorrow night I have to stand under it and convince twenty thousand people otherwise with nothing but my voice.
The headline’s been sitting between us all night. Neither of us has said it out loud. Mercer & Son. Can the father-coach and the kid GM survive a losing streak. A whole article about the thing I don’t talk about, run in the city where I can’t get away from it.
“Cut the line about family,” I say.
She looks up. “It’s a good line. The crowd will —”
“Cut it.”
She doesn’t argue. That’s how I know she read the piece too. She deletes the line and doesn’t make me explain it, and the not-making-me-explain is worse than if she’d asked, because it means she already knows, and I’d rather a stranger didn’t know the shape of that.
“You don’t have to mention him tomorrow,” she says, careful. “We can keep it about the team.”
“He hired me.” I keep my eyes on the tape. “Whole city’s wondering why. Me too, some nights.”
It comes out before I decide to let it. I don’t do that. I’ve spent five years not doing that. But it’s midnight and she cut the line without a word and the room is dark, and something in me is loose tonight that should be bolted down.
The truth is I don’t know why he hired me, and the not-knowing is the loudest thing in my life.
A business decision, the optics of a legend on the bench, a bump in renewals, that’s the version I can survive.
The other version, the one where my son reached across nine years of silence because some part of him still wanted his father in the building, is the one I can’t look at straight on.
Because if it’s that one, and I get this wrong, I don’t lose a job. I lose the last door there is.
She closes the laptop halfway. “Why’d you say yes?”
“To the job?”
“To Caden. He called you. You hadn’t really talked in years. You could’ve said no and stayed at the lake.” She’s watching me now, not the screen. “Why’d you say yes?”
I should give her the line. The competitor’s line, the one I gave the room at the press conference, I came back to win.
It’s even true. But she’s looking at me like she actually wants the answer and not the quote, and nobody’s looked at me like that in a long time, and I’m tired, and the tape is just men chasing a puck in the dark.
“Because he asked me for something,” I say. “First time in nine years. I wasn’t going to be the man who said no to it.”
The room is very quiet.
She doesn’t do the thing people do. No soft face, no that’s so meaningful, Rhett. She just takes it, the way you take a pass you weren’t expecting, clean, and holds it.
“That’s not in your file,” she says finally.
“No.”
“It should be. It’s the only thing in there that explains you.”
I look at her then, full on, and I shouldn’t, because she’s lit blue from the laptop and her hair’s down and she stopped performing somewhere around eleven o’clock, and what’s left when Maren Hale stops performing is a problem I have no business wanting.
She holds the look. She doesn’t retreat. That’s the thing about her that’s going to ruin me, she meets it.
“You keep doing that,” she says, quiet.
“Doing what.”
“Looking at me like I’m the tape. Like you’re reading something.” Her voice isn’t steady the way it is in the daylight. “It’s distracting. I’m trying to write your speech.”
“Then write my speech.”
“I can’t, because you’re looking at me.”
“Then stop looking back.”
She doesn’t. I don’t. The space between us has gotten smaller without either of us deciding to move, the way ice gives under weight before it cracks, slow and then not.
She’s close enough now that I can see her swallow.
Close enough that the smart move, the only move, is to stand up and turn the lights on and be the adult in the room, because I am, by twenty-five years, the adult in the room.
I don’t stand up.
“Maren,” I say, and it isn’t a warning, it’s the opposite of a warning, and she hears it.
She leans in. Or I do. It stopped being clear about a second ago. I can feel the warmth coming off her, the breath of her, the whole bad idea of her about three inches away and closing, and every cell I’ve got that’s still nineteen and stupid is leaning into it —
— and the part of me that’s fifty-three stops.
Because she’s twenty-eight. Because she works for my son.
Because the headline on her phone tonight is about a family I already broke once, and the surest way to break it for good is sitting right here doing exactly what I’m about to do.
I have spent my whole life choosing the thing I wanted in the moment over the people it would cost later.
I did it to a marriage. I did it to a kid.
I know exactly what this is, and I know exactly who pays, and it isn’t going to be me.
My ex-wife has a word for what I’m doing right now, the pulling back.
She’d say it’s the first proof in thirty years that I’m capable of it.
She wouldn’t be wrong. That’s the cruel timing of it, I learned restraint the exact season I finally found something I didn’t want to restrain, and there’s no one left to hand the report card to, because the people who needed me to learn it are already gone.
I pull back. An inch. It costs more than the knee ever has.
“This is a bad idea,” I say. Low. “For you more than me. You know that.”
Her eyes are still on my mouth. “I know that.”
“You’d lose the account. Maybe the career. I’m your boss’s father. I’m —” I don’t say old enough to be yours. It’s true and it’s ugly and she knows the math. “I’m not going to be the reason something happens to you.”
She breathes out, shaky, and pulls back her own inch, and we sit there a foot apart in the blue light having not done it, which somehow feels more dangerous than if we had.
“For the record,” she says, and her voice is finding its daylight footing again, “I make my own bad decisions. I don’t need you protecting me from them.”
“I know. I’m protecting me.” It’s the most honest thing I’ve said all night. “I’ve done enough damage to people who work for Mercers.”
Her phone lights up on the table between us.
CADEN, the screen says. 12:47 a.m.
We both look at it. We both go still. It’s just a phone, just my son calling his comms lead at midnight the night before the opener because he never sleeps either, and there is nothing on either of our faces that a phone could see, and still it lands in the middle of the table like the building caught us.
She answers it. “Hey. Yeah. Still here.” A pause. Her eyes flick to me, then away. “No, just finishing the opener remarks. I’ll have them to you by seven.” Another pause. “Yeah. He’s good. He’s ready.”
He’s good. She says it looking at the table.
I’m sitting three feet away being talked about in the third person to the one man who can’t ever know what almost happened, and I find I don’t like it, the lying, even the lying by leaving things out.
I’ve been on the wrong side of secrets in this family before.
She hangs up. Doesn’t look at me right away.
“He wanted to know if you were ready for tomorrow,” she says.
“You told him I was good.”
“You are good.” Now she looks at me. “That’s the problem.”
She gathers her things faster than she needs to. Laptop, bag, the coffee she never drinks. At the door she stops, and I wait for it, the soft line, the thing we do. She doesn’t give it to me. She just stands there a second with her hand on the frame, and what she says isn’t soft at all.
“We’re going to pretend this didn’t happen,” she says. “Because we have to. But I’m not going to insult us both by pretending I don’t know it did.”
Then she’s gone, and I sit alone in the blue light with the tape still running, men chasing a puck in the dark, and I think about the fact that I just chose the people over the thing I wanted, maybe for the first time in my life, and it didn’t feel like growth.
It felt like losing.