The End of Maya
EASTON
The building sounds the way it always does at forty minutes to puck drop.
I come up the tunnel with my stick over my shoulder, and the noise comes down to meet me. Vendors, the PA doing a mic check, eighteen thousand people finding their seats. I’ve walked into this exact wall of sound more times than I can count. But today, it sounds different.
Like I shouldn’t be here.
I push the feelings down and step onto the ice for warm-ups, and my eyes go up and left.
They do it before I’ve had a thought. Nine rows up behind our bench, the family section, and I’m scanning it the way I scanned it in Chicago and the way I’ve scanned it every home game since the preseason opener, looking for her. The way she smiles with the camera at her face.
My chest tightens, and the dull ache starts.
Quinn’s there. Emma’s there too, on her lap.
And the next seat, the one that’s been Riley's since September, there’s a man in a green sweater eating nachos.
I look away. I drag in a deep breath to ease the pain, but it doesn’t go away.
I take a lap. I take another one. I fire a puck at the empty net from the hash marks, and it goes in, because that’s the one thing in my life that still works.
But the moment is ruined when the photo from seven days ago flashes into my head.
I saw it the morning after she left. I was still on the kitchen floor. Hadn’t moved from it. The sun had come up over the canyon, and my phone had been going for twenty minutes on the tile beside me before I picked it up.
Riley, with Preston’s arm around her waist. Her hand resting on his chest so the ring caught the light.
The headline was something about a private matter resolved. Gratitude for everyone’s patience during a difficult season.
She was smiling in it.
That’s the part I can’t get past. I’ve looked at that smile until my eyes burned, and I know that smile. I’ve had the real one across a kitchen island at six in the morning, and this isn't it.
Except I would think that, wouldn’t I?
Any man would. Every man who’s ever been left tells himself exactly that.
Warm-ups are fine.
The anthem follows, then the drop and the game starts.
I know it’s going to be a shitty one from the first puck drop.
In Chicago I was late. Tonight I’m not here at all.
My body is doing the job but my mind is still on that photo, and the smile. The ring too, sitting on her finger like a mockery of what I thought we had.
I’m running behind, and by the second shift Kai has started calling for the puck twice, because I can’t seem to keep up.
I get bumped off the puck by a winger forty pounds lighter than me. I ice it on a power play.
I take a lazy hooking penalty in the neutral zone because I’m out of position and can’t be bothered to skate the four strides that would have fixed it. I sit in the box for two minutes with eighteen thousand people behind me, and I don’t hear one of them.
They score on the power play.
Wyatt says something to me on the bench after. Some joke, some shake it off, big man. I look at him, and whatever’s on my face makes him stop mid-sentence and turn around to stare at the ice.
Second period. We’re down two.
I get a shift with eleven minutes left, and I have the puck at their blue line with Kai driving wide. I make a decision I’m going to think about for a long time. I try to force it through a defenseman’s stick instead of chipping it deep like a professional.
He picks it clean.
It goes the other way two-on-one, and it’s my man. I’m three strides behind him the whole way because I turned late, and I watch it happen from behind, regret hitting me late.
Their winger buries it in the top corner.
Three-nothing.
I skate to the bench, and Coach shoots me a look. One that means I’ll hear about it later, and I’m benched till the game ends.
Twelve minutes into the third, he leans down.
“Blake.”
I look at him.
“You’re done. Go get changed.”
His voice is tight, and he’s already looking back at the ice before he’s finished the sentence.
I get up, legs feeling weaker than ever. They carry me down the tunnel with my helmet in my hand while the game goes on above me, and it’s the first time in my adult life that anyone has taken hockey away from me.
We lose four to one.
I’m dressed and sitting in front of my stall with my forearms on my knees when the room fills up, and nobody says a word to me, which is its own verdict. Kai puts a hand on the back of my neck as he goes past. Wyatt keeps his mouth shut for what may be the first time in his life.
The team files out to meet the media, but I stay put.
I’m in the corridor with my bag over my shoulder twenty minutes later when Theo comes out.
He’s got his coat on and his phone in hand.
He stops.
He puts a hand on my shoulder, and squeezes. “Fight for what you want, Easton. It won’t always be handed to you.”
He squeezes once again, takes his hand back, and walks off toward the parking garage without looking back to see what it did.
I watch him leave, and his last words ring in my head.
It won’t always be handed to you.
In that moment, there’s only one thing I want. To be free. To be free of everything that has led to this moment. Everything I’ve been holding onto in the past nine months.
The videos. The blackmail from Maya. Keeping it from Diane, even when she asked directly. Indirectly lying to Riley. Keeping Mason in the dark.
All of it.
I rise to my feet, turn around, and walk back into the building.
Diane Mercer is in the office she uses on game nights, coat on, bag on her shoulder, halfway out the door. Coach Brennan is with her, which saves me a trip.
“Easton.” Her eyebrows go up. “It’s eleven o’clock.” Her way of telling me I shouldn’t be there, or bothering her by this hour.
“I need twenty minutes. And I need the team lawyer on the phone.”
Something in my voice does the work. She sets her bag down.
Coach shuts the door. He’s yet to speak to me since the game and I know I deserve it. So, I don’t look at him. My attention zeroes in on Diane.
I don’t sit.
“Nine months ago, after the championship, there was a party,” I start.
“The usual team celebratory parties after a win with the guys. There, I met a woman named Maya. I took drugs with her. Cocaine. It was the first and only time. She filmed it, and she filmed what happened after, and she’s had that footage ever since. ”
Diane’s face tightens. She’s about to lash out, but I raise my palm to continue.
“She’s been taking money from me since March. Small amounts. Nothing anyone could take to a court. I stopped paying three months ago.”
I make myself keep going because I suddenly realize how stupid I’ve been, but I need to get it all out. “There are photographs as well as video. My face is clear in all of it, and she’s threatening to sell them to the media.”
Coach sits down on the edge of the desk like his legs have gone out from under him.
“You sat in my office,” Diane says slowly, voice sharp. “... and I asked you…”
“I know what you asked me. I lied to you.”
I hold her gaze because she deserves at least that much. “I lied because I wasn't ready to face the truth on top of everything that was happening with the Sinclairs. It felt like too much.”
I let out a slow breath. “I thought... I thought I could carry it on my own.”
Nobody says anything.
Diane takes out her phone.
“Sit down, Easton. This is a legal problem, and we’ll handle it from here on out.”
What happens next takes three hours.
They ask me everything. Dates, amounts, the bank, the party, who else was in the room. The team lawyer joins on video from her kitchen in a bathrobe and asks the same questions four different ways and writes all of it down.
I answer every one.
At two in the morning I walk out into the players’ lot alone.
There’s a good chance I’ve just ended my career. I understand that. Diane’s face said as much about ninety minutes in, when she stopped taking notes and just listened.
But I also know one thing for certain: the Maya situation is over. For good. She has nothing left to hold over me.
I stand next to my car in the cold and wait for the panic.
It doesn’t come.
If anything, I feel empty.
I’m scraped out. Empty in a way I’ve never been in my life.
But I feel free too. And gutted. Because no matter what, nothing I’ve done will bring her back.