Chapter 35
Nola POV
The packaging tape gun screeched against the cardboard flaps, a sharp, tearing rasp that echoed off the bare plaster walls of my bedroom.
It was twenty to six on Monday morning. The room was stripped down to its bones: the mattress pulled bare to its blue-striped ticking, the dresser drawers standing open and hollow, and three brown boxes stacked beside the radiator.
Outside the high double-hung window, a heavy freezing mist hung over the deserted alleys of Duluth, cloaking the brick chimneys in a blanket of dull slate gray.
I knelt on the cold pine floorboards, pressing the clear adhesive down with the heel of my hand.
My stomach gave a slow, sickening lurch, a persistent knot of morning nausea tightening at the base of my throat. I swallowed hard, forcing down the sour bile with a sip of cold water from the bottle between my boots.
My limbs felt leaden, weighed down by forty-eight hours of sleepless shock, but my pulse sat slow, heavy, and steady in my ribs.
I stood up to check the bottom of the small closet.
Behind the wire hangers on the floor sat a heavy ball of dark fabric.
My hands reached down on instinct, lifting the bundle into the dim morning light.
It was his charcoal Vandermark Athletics fleece.
The heavy cotton hung limp in my hands, GUZMAN stitched across the shoulders in faded gold thread.
The fabric hit my senses with the concussive force of an open-ice collision. It smelled of crushed cedar shavings, sharp rink frost, fresh laundry soap, and the deep, clean musk of his skin that had lived in my lungs for three weeks.
My throat locked in a violent, dry convulsion.
My ribcage seized, pulling tight against a sudden, burning ache that threatened to buckle my knees to the floorboards.
The phantom memory of his hands—the rough calluses that had cradled my jaw, the deep, gravelly promises he had whispered against my mouth while the storm battered his loft—clawed at the lining of my chest.
I did not let the tears spill.
I forced my lungs to draw in the cold draft from the window. I smoothed the fleece flat against my knees, folded the thick sleeves with deliberate, mechanical precision, and laid it at the bottom of the final cardboard box beneath three heavy orthopedic anatomy binders.
I brought the flaps together.
I dragged the tape across the seam, sealing the box shut with a sharp, violent snap that cut the scent off from the room.
The ghost was buried.
* * *
Boots clattered on the front porch stairs, followed by the soft click of the apartment door latching open.
Maya walked into the empty bedroom, wearing a heavy navy parka and woolen gloves, carrying two paper cups from the corner bakery and a box of plain crackers.
She stopped in the doorway, her dark eyes scanning the stripped room, the three taped boxes, and the small overnight duffel sitting beside my snow boots.
Her gaze drifted down to me.
She clocked the hollow pallor of my skin, the dark purple bruises beneath my lower lashes, and the rigid, defensive line of my spine.
She didn't speak. She walked across the floorboards, set the paper cups on the radiator, and held out the box of crackers.
I took one, biting into the dry salt, chewing slowly until the cold nausea in my esophagus settled.
My left hand drifted down, resting flat, motionless, and protective over the lower curve of my abdomen beneath the heavy wool of my trench coat.
Maya’s gaze tracked the movement.
Her eyes dropped to my hand resting over my stomach, lingering there for three long, silent seconds.
The room went completely still save for the hum of the mist outside.
Maya didn't ask for a clinical confirmation. She didn't demand an explanation. The investigative reporter who lived to expose athletic corruption vanished, replaced by an iron wall of unyielding, unconditional loyalty.
She stepped forward, her gloved hands coming up to grip my upper arms with firm, grounding pressure.
"The registrar processed the emergency transfer paperwork an hour ago," Maya said, her voice low, steady, and sharp as flint.
"Your academic credits and research standing have been reassigned to the independent study annex at the state research station in Marquette.
You have a private lab desk and a student stipend waiting. "
A breath left my lips in a soft, trembling rush.
"Miller called my desk at the student paper at five this morning," Maya continued, her eyes burning straight into mine. "He wanted your forwarding address. He said Carter Ross was demanding to verify your compliance credentials."
My knuckles tightened against my coat. "What did you tell him?"
"I told him you had withdrawn from the university on personal leave, that your records were sealed by the dean of students, and that if he or Ross ever called my phone again, I would publish every financial record from the booster gala on the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune."
Maya squeezed my arms, her jaw setting into a line of pure granite.
"No one from this campus gets your address, Nola. Not Miller. Not Harlan Sterling. Not Marcus Guzman. And Chase Guzman doesn't exist anymore."
The name hit my sternum, but the hollow ache didn't pull me under.
The raw, bleeding grief of Saturday afternoon had hardened into something cold, dense, and impenetrable.
A mother’s spine had replaced a broken girl’s tears.
There was a life growing beneath my heart—a fragile, sacred life that had no defense against the venom of athletic scandals, extortion dossiers, and men who broke the world to protect their own pride. That life depended on my strength, my silence, and my distance.
I couldn't afford to bleed in Duluth.
"Let's load the car," I said, my voice flat, calm, and steady as an iron rail.
* * *
Maya’s beat-up Subaru hatchback was idling in the snowy alley, exhaust pluming white into the freezing dawn air.
We loaded the three cardboard boxes and my leather bag into the cargo space, slamming the rear hatch shut with a dull, heavy thud.
I climbed into the passenger seat, pulling the heavy door shut, sealing out the sub-zero draft.
Maya backed the car out of the rutted alley, turning onto East Fourth Street and heading south toward the highway bypass.
I looked in the side mirror.
The skyline of the university fell away in the distance: the brick bell tower, the arched roof of the library archives where Carter Ross had dropped his poison, and the massive, four-story floodlight stanchions of Kehoe Pavilion, their steel girders standing gray and cold against the morning sky.
Beside the harbor, the brick warehouse district where Chase’s loft looked out over the bluffs vanished behind a curtain of heavy, freezing fog.
I pulled my phone from the pocket of my wool coat.
The screen lit up with eight missed calls from unsaved athletic department numbers and three unplayed voicemails from Director Miller’s office.
There was nothing from Chase.
I didn't open the voicemail app.
I opened the message thread, selected his name, and tapped Delete Conversation.
Then I reached into my bag, pulled out a small silver paperclip, and jammed the wire into the pinhole on the side of the device.
The tiny plastic SIM tray popped out with a quiet click.
I took the small gold-plated chip between my thumbs, bent the plastic until the contacts snapped clean in half, and dropped the ruined pieces into the bottom of my empty paper tea cup.
The signal bars on the top of the display disappeared, replaced by four gray letters: NO SERVICE.
The line was dead.
The past was severed.
I turned my head, resting my temple against the cold, vibrating glass of the passenger window as the car hit the open highway, watching the snowbanks of northern Minnesota blur into endless sheets of white.
My right hand slid inside the front of my heavy wool coat, my palm flattening firmly over the lower curve of my abdomen.
Beneath the denim, the skin was warm, soft, and still.
"Just you and me, sweetheart," I whispered into the cold glass, my breath leaving a tiny, fading circle of fog against the pane. "I've got you."
The car accelerated north into the void, leaving the broken arena far behind.