Chapter 2 #2
“Wes,” Pete said, “with respect — and I say this with love — you are the backup goalie.”
“I am aware.”
“You are not — I mean, the campaign needs —”
“I know what the campaign needs, Pete. Pitch me.”
There was a beat. Ada heard Pete take a breath in like he was going to argue with him, and then she heard Pete let the breath out like he had thought better of it, and then Pete said, very quietly, “Wes, you’d have to be photographed with Ada.”
“I am aware of that, too.”
“For six weeks.”
“Yes.”
“You would have to fake-date Ada Halloran in front of Marin Pell, the Mercer Bay Reporter, and a sponsor-appointed photographer who is going to ask for a kiss on the dressing-room cam.”
“Pete,” Wes said, with the same neutral voice. “Ask the photographer not to do that.”
Another beat. Pete’s voice came back smaller.
“You’d really do this,” Pete said.
“I will do it,” Wes said, “if Ada agrees. Not before. Not unless. You do not pitch me to Marin Pell unless Ada has heard the pitch first and said yes.”
Pete made a noise.
“Pete,” Wes said.
“Yes.”
“This is your one chance to do this in the right order. Do it in the right order. I am telling you because I love you, Pete.”
“Okay,” Pete whispered. “Okay. I am — I am going to go drink coffee. I am going to go drink coffee and prepare myself to go talk to a woman who turned me down four hours ago. Okay.”
“Don’t lead with fake-date,” Wes said.
“Don’t lead with fake-date,” Pete agreed.
“Lead with Tidemark wants a couple story, Theo is the wrong choice for ten reasons, here is a different choice, the choice is up to you.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay.”
Pete walked away from the front desk in the loose-limbed shamble of a man who needed both a granola bar and a hug and would accept neither. Wes did not watch him go. Wes stayed where he was, both hands flat on the counter, breathing once, evenly, like a goalie before the second period.
Then he turned his head, very slowly, toward the pillar Ada was standing behind.
“Halloran,” he said. Quiet. Not unkind.
She stepped out from behind the pillar.
She did not bother to pretend she had not heard. She was, among other things, allergic to performing a small dishonesty when the room was full of larger ones.
“Berglund,” she said.
He looked at her. He had the kind of pale eyes that should have looked cold and didn’t, which always slightly annoyed her. He had the kind of mouth that was either very serious or very nearly smiling, with not much space in between.
“You heard,” he said.
“I heard.”
“I’d like you to take the time you want,” he said. “I’d like Pete to do it the way I told him. But if you want to skip Pete, here I am.”
“You didn’t volunteer,” she said carefully. “You — re-routed Pete. You stopped him from asking Theo.”
“I stopped Pete from making the problem worse,” Wes said. “Volunteering is the second step. You’re step one.”
She looked at him.
He looked back at her.
She had, she thought, distantly, the wrong relationship with this man for a fake-dating campaign.
She did not know him. She did not have, hovering in the air between them, the comfortable awkwardness of people who had been friends and might lean into something more.
She had a quiet morning acquaintance with a goalie who was always in the building before her, who waved with a wrench, who fixed the thermostat without asking, who had apparently spent the last hour talking Pete down from setting the entire campaign on fire.
“Why,” she said. Just the word.
He took a long second to answer.
“The rink needs the money,” he said. “That’s the first reason. It’s the cleanest one to say out loud.”
“And the next ones.”
“The next ones are not for here,” he said. “They are not — they are not pitch reasons. They are reasons that are mine. They are fine. They will not, I promise you, make this weirder than it needs to be.”
“Berglund.”
“Yes.”
“Are you about to tell me you have a thing.”
“I am not,” he said, “about to tell you that. No. I am telling you that I have thought about whether I am the right person to volunteer for this and I have arrived at the answer yes, if you are willing. We can talk through the rest later. Or never. Whichever feels right. The terms are yours.”
She had not been asked anything with terms in two years, by anyone, except her physical therapist. The terms are yours was such a foreign sentence in her professional ear that she almost laughed.
“What if I say no,” she said.
“Then Pete keeps solving the problem. Probably badly. I keep my mouth shut. Tidemark goes to another rink. We figure out a different bridge.”
“And you and I keep saying Halloran and Berglund in hallways.”
“And we keep saying Halloran and Berglund in hallways,” he agreed.
She considered him.
He had not crossed his arms. He had not leaned forward. He was standing with his hands still on the counter and his weight on his back leg in the easy way of a tall man who was used to making himself appear smaller for the convenience of others.
She thought about Joanna’s voicemails, stacking up unanswered.
She thought about Eilis’s question: what does the rink need that you can give it without giving anyone Theo Carmichael back.
There was the notebook in her bag, three weeks unopened.
And there was the fact that the warm wing of the lobby was sixty-three degrees because Wes Berglund had thought to adjust a thermostat this morning, and her hip had thanked him for it without her permission.
“I want to think about it,” she said.
“That is the right answer,” Wes said. “Take your time.”
“I’ll call Joanna tonight.”
“Joanna will be relieved.”
“And — Berglund.”
“Yes.”
“If I say yes,” she said, “we are going to have rules.”
“I would be deeply suspicious of you,” he said gravely, “if you didn’t.”
Her mouth did, briefly, an unauthorized small thing. Not quite a smile. The first preliminary sketch of a smile, perhaps, like a kid drawing a circle on the way to drawing a face.
She turned away. She did not say Berglund again.
She did not say thank you. She went into the staff kitchenette and refilled her thermos with hot water and dropped in a fresh teabag.
Her hands were steady. The kettle was loud.
Outside the kitchenette window, beyond the parking lot and the chain-link and the road, the bay had gone the color of beaten pewter, because the sun was about to drop behind the headland.
She had been very good, since coming home, at not falling apart in public.
She was going to need to be very good at it for six more weeks.
In her bag, the notebook waited.