Chapter Twenty-Four
SAINT
I decided during the second period of game two, between a glove save and a faceoff, which is where I make all my real decisions, because the crease is the only office I have ever trusted.
For two days I had been doing it everyone else’s way.
Statements were drafted and lawyered and shredded.
Rich proposed a joint press release and cried lightly while proposing it.
The league sent a media relations consultant named Craig who used the word “narrative” nine times in one call, and I counted, because counting was a thing my hands could do while the rest of me stood in a tunnel where a laugh used to live.
Every plan on the table was made of paper, and paper was how this started, and Barb had already handed me the whole answer in a hallway and I had been too flat to spend it.
Fix the other thing after. Not with a statement.
And Junie was not answering, and I understood why she was not answering, I had finally, at terrible cost, done the reading.
She had watched me go quiet on the worst morning of her life and heard a verdict, because a man in Dallas spent two years teaching her that silence is where the math gets done on her.
There was no text that could fix it, because texts are quiet.
There was no call that could fix it, because she would let it ring, and she would be reasonable to let it ring.
The only thing that could fix it was the opposite of silence, at scale, in public, with receipts, from the one man alive whose silence was the entire evidence against her.
I hate the scrum. That was the point. It had to cost me or it wouldn’t count.
Game two, for the record, since I keep the hockey honest even in the middle of my own biography: 3 to 0, thirty-three saves, the second playoff shutout in franchise history, both mine, both that week, which the broadcast called unbelievable and Barb called “fine.” The building was sold out again and the booth was empty again and the chant came again in the third, SUN-SHINE, and this time I was not flat, this time I heard every rep of it like a bell, because I had made the decision in the second period and a man with a plan can afford his ears.
Horn. Handshakes deferred, it was only game two.
The room, the crate of retrievers, Pickle weeping freely into his terrible mustache.
And then the media hour opened, and the scrum assembled in the hallway outside our room the way it always does, and Val from communications began her nightly ritual of explaining that the goaltender does not do availability, and I walked past her, showered, in my good jacket, the one Junie once said made me look like a Scandinavian bank commercial, and I stepped up to the podium and pulled the microphone to my height.
The hallway went so quiet you could hear a camera autofocus hunting.
I had a printout in my pocket. I want that detail preserved: I printed it, at home, on paper, because the document deserved to be a physical object at least once in its life.
I unfolded it on the podium and smoothed the crease flat, and I looked up at maybe forty people whose job was to be talked at by athletes, none of whom had ever once been talked at by me, and I said:
“I’m going to read you a document. It’s the one from the podcast. The whole thing, not the screenshots. Then I’ll say four sentences of my own, and then I’m going back to my routine, because game three is Sunday.”
And I read the Rulebook aloud.
All of it. “Operation Sweetheart: Terms and Conditions.” Rule 1, nobody lies to the team, and I looked up and said, “Nobody ever did. The room knew by day three. Ask any of them, they’ve been insufferable about it since January.
” Rule 4, no kissing except where cameras are, and its amendment, definition of “where cameras are” pending, and I said, “The definition is still pending. We got distracted.” Rule 5, the sweetheart approval, adopted unanimous, both voters.
Rule 6a, the door, and I did not explain 6a, and I never will, some clauses are load-bearing in private.
Rule 7. I read rule 7 slowly, no real feelings, this is a load-bearing rule, and I read the amendment from the storm, the 11:52 timestamp, the sunset clause, the no rollover minutes, out loud, in my own flat voice, into forty recorders, and let them have it clean, because you cannot leak what a man has already said on camera, and because a private joke read with love sounds nothing like a private joke read with a smirk, and I wanted both versions in the world so people could hear the difference for themselves.
Rule 8, I said, was blank. “It’s been blank for fifteen months. We were saving it. That’s on the record now too.”
Then rule 9. I read it the way it was written, which is to say quietly.
“Rule 9. Nobody makes Junie feel like a lot.” And I looked up and gave them the metadata, because I am my brother’s brother and receipts run in the family.
“Added January 24, 11:07 p.m. Author, L. Lindell. That’s me.
Eleven days after I met her. You can check the file history, the team has offered the document to any outlet that wants forensics.
It’s timestamped before the first kiss. It’s timestamped before everything. ”
Somebody’s phone hit the floor somewhere in the back. Nobody picked it up.
“Four sentences,” I said. “Then I’m done.”
I had built them at 4:40 that morning, over oatmeal, the way Olle built things, measured twice. I gave them one at a time, at scrum pace, no rush.
“The contract was fake. The wrist tape was real. Rule seven was broken by February, by me first. And rule nine was never fake for one minute.”
The hallway made a sound like a save, that inhale a building does. Hands went up everywhere, forty questions being born at once, and I ignored all of them, because I had one item left and it was not for anyone in that hallway.
I looked into the main camera, the one with the network light, the one whose footage gets captioned within the hour, because there is a common room at a school on South Congress where my sixteen-year-old brother was, per his last text, watching with his entire floor, and there was also a woman across town who had spent her lunch hours in a library learning to read hands, and I raised mine.
I signed it big, the size of the sentiment, the way Theo signs when it matters. Family.
Then I folded the printout, put it back in my pocket, said, “Barb had us ready, next one Sunday,” and walked off the podium past Val, who was holding her clipboard over her mouth, and past Mason, who was filming me with his phone in open violation of nine media policies and whispering “committee business,” and I went down the tunnel and got my bag.
What the clip did after that is a matter of public record, and I heard most of it secondhand, later, in a doorway, but the shape of it belongs here.
Eleven hours. That’s what it took. Junie ran the forensics herself eventually, out of professional curiosity and personal vengeance, and eleven hours was her number, podium to rubble.
The internet that had shipped us in January, that had built the hashtag before either of us consented to anything, took one look at the file history and decided the story had been theirs all along and Deacon had merely been vandalizing it.
The rule 9 metadata screenshot became the most shared image in franchise history inside of three hours, surpassing, and I say this with real regret, the cat in the taco bed.
The 11:52 storm amendment, re-read in my voice, turned his smirking table read into evidence of tampering with a love story.
Lip readers and Deaf creators had the sign identified and captioned in fourteen minutes, and the school’s alumni account posted a clip of a common room full of teenagers absolutely losing their minds, one of whom, tall, familiar eyebrows, was standing on a couch signing MY brOTHER, MY brOTHER at the ceiling, and if the league fines me for the tampering I will pay it annually, forever, like a subscription.
Deacon posted a response at midnight. Seventeen minutes, him alone at his desk doing the concerned face, and the number that mattered was in the corner: nobody came.
The internet had moved to the better party.
By morning his own comments were just the word “receipts” followed by a little printer emoji, thousands deep, and an account that tracks such things confirmed his episode was being outperformed by a nine-second clip of Pickle saying “families have bad weeks.” Small.
As promised, as always, small. You do not beat a man like that with a lawyer.
You beat him with a better true story, and then you stop thinking about him, which is the part he can’t survive.
I know all of that now. That night I knew none of it, because that night I did the last item on the plan, which was the only item on the plan that mattered and the only one with no script.
I turned off my phone. Off, all the way, playoff week, an act Craig the consultant would have called irresponsible and Olle would have called overdue.
The clip could do its work or not do its work.
The podium was cover fire, the record corrected at the same scale it was vandalized, but the actual thing, the thing itself, does not happen on a podium, and I had learned that the hard way at 6 a.m. on Wednesday when I chose film study over a kitchen across town.
I drove to her building through late Austin, windows down, the bats just back under the bridge for the season, the city smelling like rain that hadn’t committed yet.
I parked crooked. I want the crooked parking in the record, me, a man who has never parked crooked in his life, across two spots like a rookie.
Her light was on. Third floor, the one with the balcony wind chime.
I climbed the stairs, and I stood in front of her door, and for the first time in a documented lifetime of preparation, of oatmeal at 4:40 and taped wrists and printed documents and four sentences built like furniture, I had nothing.
No script, no terms, no clauses, no plan B, no film on the opponent, nothing in my hands and nothing in my pockets but a folded piece of paper that had already done its job.
I knocked. Twice, left of center. Then twice, right.
The left side of a door is older. Somewhere, a welder from Duluth did not ask me to explain.