1
Felix
The thing about starting over is that nobody tells you how much it smells like fresh paint and desperation.
I stood in the arena lobby, the stiff lanyard around my neck, my name—Felix Grant—staring up at me beneath the Colorado Dragons logo. Social Media Manager. My contract ink was barely dry, and I could already taste the anxiety of walking into a room full of strangers.
Well. That wasn’t entirely true. I knew names. I’d done my homework—you don’t land a job with an NHL franchise, even one clawing its way back from a betting scandal, without memorizing the roster, the coaching staff, the front office hierarchy. I knew that Theron Kincaid ran his bench like a man with something to prove. I knew Max Renaud wore the C and Cole Armstrong was the kind of generational talent that made my job either very easy or very hard, depending on whether he’d give me more than three words for a post-game clip.
What I didn’t know, because the universe had a sick fucking sense of humor, was that the assistant coach listed on the staff page as M. Bouchard was going to be that M. Bouchard.
No, that was a lie. Of course I did.
Denver’s dry air cut through my lungs as I’d driven from my new Capitol Hill apartment. New city. New job. New me, if I could believe at least that lie for ten minutes longer. Priya, the media relations coordinator with a dazzling lanyard collection of her own, met me at security. She talked so fast I barely registered her words, mentally marking the nearest exit. We wound through corridors—media suite, weight room, and the hallway of framed jerseys.
“You’ve got your own desk and dual monitors. Kincaid wants to meet new hires after the tour.“
Priya smiled like I’d aced some invisible audition. “Optional morning skate at ten, if you want content.”
“I’ll have my camera ready,“
I said. That was why I was here. The Dragons’ social channels had been a wasteland of generic graphics and recycled NHL promo clips since the scandal broke. That was exactly why they’d hired me. I was good at making broken things look shiny.
By nine forty-five, I was set up at my desk with my camera bag, my laptop, and the industrial-strength coffee Priya had pressed into my hands like a benediction. I pulled up the team’s Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok dashboards, grimacing at the engagement metrics. Whoever had been running things before me had all the creative instincts of a parking meter.
I grabbed my camera and headed for the tunnel. The scrape of blades and crack of pucks greeted me before the cold did. I found a spot at the glass near the bench and started shooting: Armstrong’s explosive release in slow motion, Renaud barking orders. This was the part I loved—behind the camera, I could vanish.
I was tracking Keegan Steel through the viewfinder—the kid moved like liquid mercury, all effortless acceleration and preternatural awareness—when someone stepped into my peripheral vision on the bench side of the glass.
Tall. Broad shoulders. Dark hair that fell just past his jaw.
My finger froze on the shutter button.
I lowered the camera slowly, the way you might lower a shield when you realize the thing you’re facing isn’t going to be stopped by it anyway.
He was standing fifteen feet away, clipboard in hand, watching the ice with an expression of focused concentration that I recognized in my bones. Fifteen years had changed him—filled out the angles of his face, added muscle to a frame that had once been all gangly teenage limbs—but the way he stood, weight slightly forward, head tilted like he was listening to something no one else could hear, that was exactly the same. That was Marc.
Marc Bouchard. My best friend. The boy who vanished between a Tuesday and a Wednesday when I was seventeen, leaving my world rewired. He spoke to a trainer—French-Canadian lilt intact—and my hands shook.
I stepped back, hiding behind a column. My heart slammed. Fifteen years since I’d knocked on his front door on a Wednesday morning to walk to school together, the way I’d done every single day since we were twelve, and found it answered by a realtor who told me the Bouchards had moved. Not moving. Had moved. Past tense. Done. Gone. The house half-empty, a FOR SALE sign appeared a day later staked in the front yard like a headstone.
No text. No call. No email. No explanation. Just—absence. A Marc-shaped hole in the world that I’d spent the better part of fifteen years trying not to fall into.
I’d looked for him. Of course I’d looked for him. I’d called every Bouchard within a two-hundred-mile radius until my mother gently took the phone away from me. I’d searched online with the obsessive focus of a teenager who didn’t yet understand that some people leave because they want to. I’d written notes to his old email address that bounced back undelivered. Eventually, I’d stopped looking, because the alternative was accepting that I hadn’t mattered enough to warrant a goodbye, and that acceptance was its own kind of wound that I’d learned to carry so long it had become part of me.
And now he was here. Fifteen feet away. Wearing a Colorado Dragons sweater and holding a clipboard and acting like a man who existed in the normal, linear flow of time, as if he hadn’t ripped a hole in mine.
A whistle blew. Players regrouped. Marc—Coach Bouchard, I reminded myself—turned slightly. He looked settled, comfortable, as if our friendship had really ended. Anger flickered in my chest. Anger was a wall I could trust to lean against.
I raised my camera and shot twenty frames of a passing drill, hands steadied at last. Practice wrapped at ten-forty-five. I retreated to the media room, downloaded footage, and told myself I could quit. But I wasn’t seventeen anymore, and I’d claimed this job—a chance to rebuild a narrative—for myself. I’d spent years flipping between jobs. I wanted to settle down. I wanted lots of things. Besides, he probably didn’t even remember me.
Priya’s knock preceded her entrance. “Felix! Coaching staff here for intros.“
Two men followed. The first, a video coordinator. The second was Marc. His clipboard froze mid-air when he saw me. I watched as recognition crossed his face—shock, pain, quick blankness.
“Felix. It’s been... a long time.”
“Fifteen years,“
I said, because I was apparently incapable of not keeping count. “Give or take.”
The silence that followed was dense and sharp-edged, filling the space between us like poured concrete. Priya’s smile faltered. The video coordinator whose name I’d already forgotten shifted his weight and suddenly found something fascinating about the ceiling tiles.
“Well,“
Priya said, with the determined brightness of someone trying to steer a car that had already left the road, “that’s wonderful that you have a connection already. Marc’s been with the organization for three seasons now—he’s an incredible resource for understanding team dynamics, player personalities, all the stuff that’ll help you create authentic content.”
“I’m sure he is,“
I said. Authentic.
Marc extended his hand. It was such a bizarrely formal gesture for someone who’d once held my head over a toilet when I had the flu at fourteen, who’d fallen asleep on my shoulder during every single bus ride home from school, whose terrible singing I could still hear in my sleep on the bad nights, that I almost—almost—laughed.
I took it. His grip was warm and firm and brief, and I felt the contact like a static shock that traveled up my arm and lodged somewhere behind my sternum. His hand was bigger than I remembered. Of course it was. We’d been children.
“Welcome to the Dragons,“
Marc said. His voice had found its professional register—smooth, controlled, the accent barely there unless you knew to listen for it. And I knew. God, I knew. “If you need anything for the social channels—player access, practice footage approvals—my door’s open.”
Your door’s open. I wanted to say something cruel. I wanted to ask him if his door had been open fifteen years ago, when I’d stood on his porch in the cold and learned from a stranger that my best friend had evaporated from the face of the earth. I wanted to ask him how a person could share every secret, every silence, every stupid inside joke that made a friendship feel like its own country, and then just—leave. Emigrate without a forwarding address.
I didn’t say any of that. I said, “Appreciate it. I’ll be sure to go through proper channels.”
Something moved behind his eyes. A flinch, maybe, buried deep enough that someone who didn’t know his face like their own handwriting might have missed it. But I had spent five years of my adolescence studying Marc Bouchard the way other kids studied hockey stats—with devotion, with obsessive attention to detail, with the unspoken understanding that this knowledge was important in a way I wasn’t ready to name.
He nodded once. Turned to Priya. “I need to get back—I want to review the power play footage before this afternoon.“
And then he was gone, moving through the door with a stride that was longer than it used to be, and I was left standing in the media room with my heart hammering and my professional smile still fixed in place like a mask nailed to the wall.
“He’s great,“
Priya said, oblivious or kind enough to pretend. “Really dedicated. The players love him.”
Priya steered me down the hall to Kincaid’s office. Inside, organized chaos: whiteboards, film binders, a war-tested desk. Kincaid stood and shook my hand. “Grant. Sit. Priya says you’ll make us look less like a dumpster fire online.”
“That’s the goal, coach.”
“I looked at your Bears rebrand. You understand narrative.”
“I know people follow stories, not teams. The Dragons’ redemption arc is genuine if you own it.”
He studied me. “Honest is dangerous around here.”
“People crave authenticity,“
I said. “Show them the grind, the rebuild.”
He nodded. “You’ll have rink-side access at practices and games. Coordinate media with Bouchard—he knows players’ schedules and moods.”
“Coordinate with Bouchard,“
I repeated, forcing calm. “No problem.”
Kincaid’s final look was one of approval. “Welcome to the Dragons, Grant. Don’t make us look stupid.”
I left with my stoic fa?ade intact while the fire alarms rang inside. In the media room, I sat for a beat, breathing as my therapist taught. Coordinate with Bouchard. Of course. The universe wasn’t done tossing me grenades.
I opened my laptop and scrubbed through footage—Armstrong’s power, Renaud’s grit—and laid out a content calendar. I drafted three posts and outlined a series, then sent Priya the best first-day strategy I’d ever produced. But Marc’s whispered “Felix“
haunted me.
I went for more coffee. The empty break room’s espresso machine dared me to argue. I made a double shot and sipped it. My phone buzzed: Mom. How’s the first day? Making friends? I texted back a lie: Great coffee, office nice. I couldn’t admit why I felt suddenly seventeen again.
The door opened. Marc stood at the threshold, bottle in hand, hesitating like a man entering a minefield. He didn’t look at me, but the air shifted. I gripped my cup.
“Sorry,“
he said. “I was just getting water.”
“It’s a shared space,“
I said, toward the sink. “Help yourself.”
He moved carefully, eyes fixed elsewhere. Silence swelled—fifteen years of unsaid things pressing in.
He drank, then turned. “Felix, I know this is—“
“Don’t.“
The single word cut through the room. I set down my cup. “We’re colleagues. I need to coordinate with you on media availability. That’s it.”
His jaw twitched. For a heartbeat, raw emotion surfaced before he sealed it away. His eyes flicked to mine, and I chose not to look away first.
He nodded once. I left the room before either of us could say more. I’d spent fifteen years building my walls. I wasn’t about to start tearing them down now.