Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Creed
Now . . .
The cab smells like rain, coffee, and whatever pine-scented cleaning product New York cab drivers use when they want to convince passengers that no one has ever thrown up in their back seat.
I don’t buy it.
I sit behind the driver with one hand around a paper cup gone lukewarm and the other rolling a quarter across my knuckles.
Over. Under. Catch. Repeat. The coin belonged to no one important until forty minutes ago, when I fished it out of the console in the team car because my hands needed something to do and I was tired of tearing at the tape around my wrist like a rookie with nerves.
The driver’s name is Manny. He told me that when I got in, along with three facts I didn’t ask for: he grew up in Queens, his ex-wife hates hockey, and his cousin once sold a used treadmill to a Night Hawks assistant coach who tipped badly. Probably Bobby, he’s a cheapskate.
I said, “Yeah.”
He took that as encouragement.
People often do.
“So what do you think?” Manny asks, glancing at me in the rearview. “You really retiring?”
The question follows me everywhere now.
Reporters throw it at me in hallways. Analysts dress it up as concern.
Coaches pretend they aren’t measuring my ice time like it’s a pulse.
My body asks it every morning before I get out of bed, every time my hip complains, every time my shoulder catches wrong, every time a kid ten years younger than me recovers from a hit faster than I blink.
You really retiring?
Like retirement is a door.
Like I know what’s on the other side.
I roll the quarter over my index finger. “You a Night Hawks fan, Manny?”
“Depends who’s winning.”
“Smart.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“No.”
“No, you’re not retiring?”
“No, I didn’t answer.”
Manny laughs like I gave him something worth keeping. “You hockey guys are weird.”
“Occupational hazard.”
Outside the window, Manhattan runs wet and silver beneath the cab lights. People move along the sidewalks with collars up, umbrellas tilted, heads bent against the rain. Every face has somewhere to go. Every window looks like a life seen from the wrong side of glass.
I got nowhere else to go.
That’s what I said to the reporter, because I’m apparently a sentimental idiot when concussed by adrenaline and two missed shots on goal.
I meant it as a joke.
Everyone laughed.
That’s the thing about telling the truth in public. If you make it dry enough, people think you’re entertaining.
I take a sip of coffee and regret it immediately. Burned. Bitter. Bought from the arena lounge fifteen minutes after someone from media relations asked me if I wanted to soften the retirement response before it got clipped online.
No, I told him.
He looked at me like I was making his evening harder.
Good.
The quarter moves across my knuckles again.
Over. Under. Catch.
My hands have always been the problem after games. Not during. During, everything knows where to go. Stick. Boards. Shoulder. Ice. Puck. Breath. The body understands violence when it has rules. It understands impact when a whistle decides where pain begins and ends.
Afterward, though?
Afterward, my hands remember they were built for other things too.
That is where the trouble starts.
I flex my fingers around the coin.
I don’t let myself think about Hal’s old apartment.
I don’t let myself think about the couch, the takeout we lived on for weeks, Livia’s bare foot tucked under Hal’s thigh like she belonged there because she did.
I don’t let myself think about the way Halston used to bend toward me with that unbearable patience in his eyes, the look that made me feel seen before I was ready to be touched.
I don’t let myself think about Livia’s fingers against my jaw, her laugh catching when Hal kissed me, her body between ours like she had known before either of us how to make three people into one home.
I don’t let myself think about our wedding—it wasn’t real.
It was paper. It was them. It was all the law would let us have.
We took it, and we celebrated it, and afterward we walked back to the apartment that was supposed to be ours and ate cold pizza on the floor at midnight and laughed about how we’d gotten away with something.
Something. Like we hadn’t just made a vow that would outlast the law.
Which means, naturally, I think about it every fucking day.
I look at my wrist where the tattoo is and think if they still have them. Wonder if I’m an idiot for not going to a clinic and having a doctor laser it. Maybe the memories will stop haunting me that way. Maybe the connection I feel will be over—like us.
Manny changes lanes and says, “You played good tonight.”
“Thanks.”
“That pass in overtime?” He whistles. “Beautiful.”
I grunt.
He glances at me again. “You’re always this chatty?”
“Only when moved.”
“By what?”
“Silence.”
Manny laughs again. “My ex-wife would’ve loved you. She hated talking too.”
I almost smile.
Almost.
The cab turns uptown. My phone buzzes against my thigh.
I ignore it. It’s probably Fitzhenry, my agent, sending some version of we need to discuss messaging, which means he wants me to consider an interview where I say I’m grateful, focused, taking it one day at a time, and whatever other phrases athletes use when people want access to your fear but not your truth.
Another buzz.
Vesper.
I check the screen despite myself.
Saw the clip. “Nowhere else to go”??? Very subtle cry for help, old man.
A second message follows.
Also, Cally says your face looked “tragically constipated.” His words, not mine.
I stare at the text.
A laugh moves in my chest, small and unwelcome.
I don’t let it out.
Vesper has always been annoying in a precise way.
She can find a bruise from three thousand miles away and press on it with a glitter pen.
Her relationship cuts me deep because she’s with two men who adore her and adore each other.
That was my dream and now . . . I got nothing.
Only memories of what never happened and a future that I’ll never have.
My sister was a kid when everything happened. Not young enough to miss that I came home wrong, not old enough to understand why. She asked questions for a while. Then she stopped, probably because I trained everyone around me to stop asking before they got close enough to hear the answer.
My sister deserved better than that.
Most people did.
I type: Tell Cally I’ll remember that next time he needs tickets.
Vesper responds immediately.
He says you’re emotionally stunted but useful.
Useful.
Yeah.
That tracks.
Manny pulls up in front of my building fifteen minutes later. I tip too much because I always tip too much when I’ve been quiet. Like money can apologize for being bad company.
“Good luck, Lafontaine,” he says as I get out.
I look back.
He grins. “With retirement. Or not retirement. Or whatever tragic hockey monk thing you’ve got going on.”
This time, the laugh escapes. Barely.
“Night, Manny.”
The doorman greets me by name. I nod, because that’s the version of warmth I am willing to offer after midnight.
The elevator takes too long. It always does after games, when my body finally admits everything hurts.
My shoulder. My hip. The old rib. My jaw, where someone’s elbow caught me in the second period.
I stand in the mirrored box and look at the man staring back. His hair is damp, his mouth cut, his suit too expensive for someone who looks this tired. His eyes are dim, like someone forgot to turn a light on behind them. People call me controlled.
They don’t understand control is just panic with better posture.
The doors open.
My apartment waits at the end of the hallway, dark and expensive and silent in the way expensive things are allowed to be silent.
No noise from the neighbor. No laughter through walls.
No dog barking. No one waiting on the other side of the door, asking why I’m late, why I’m bleeding, why I refuse to admit that every season takes something I don’t get back.
I unlock the door.
Step inside, but don’t turn on the lights. For one full minute, I stand in the dark.
I do this sometimes after games. I tell myself it is because my eyes need the rest after arena lights and cameras. It’s bullshit. I stand in the dark because, for sixty seconds, the apartment is not empty.
It is only unseen.
There’s a difference.
In the dark, I can pretend the couch has Livia curled in the corner with a pencil behind her ear and a sketchbook in her lap, muttering about our future and how betrayal should be color-coded.
I can pretend Halston is in the kitchen opening wine; he’ll pretend it didn't cost too much. He won’t drink anyway because he has an early meeting.
He was afraid of drinking. An unfounded fear that comes from a toxic family filled with addicts.
His shirt sleeves rolled up, his attention split between us and whatever disaster his family tried to bury that day.
I can pretend I'm not coming home to a place that has never once forgiven me for calling it home.
Sixty seconds later, I turn on the lamp.
The apartment becomes what it is.
Clean lines. Dark wood. Art chosen by a consultant. A couch no one has ever slept on by accident. A kitchen with two mugs, even though I only use one. A place built for a man who doesn’t plan on staying anywhere long enough to be known by the walls.
I drop my keys in the ceramic bowl by the door.
The sound cuts through the room—too loud.
I set the coffee on the counter, shrug out of my coat, and loosen my tie. My phone buzzes again. This time, I expect Vesper or Everhart.
Unknown number.
It’s a 203 area code. Not New York. Not a number I recognize at first glance.
I stare at it.
The phone keeps vibrating.
Unknown numbers don’t usually make it to me. Everhart filters most of the nonsense. The team filters the rest. If someone gets through, they either know somebody or they are selling something no sane person should buy after midnight.
The phone goes quiet.
I exhale.
Then it rings again.
Same number.