30. Tyler #2
"Tyler," the GM says finally. "I'm going to be straight with you.
The captain wants you off this team. He came in this morning making a case.
He didn't get any traction, in part because every man on your line vouched for you within an hour of practice ending yesterday.
Coach has documented the behavior in question for months, and the board reviewed his notes last night.
We are not going to support the captain's position, but we are also not going to be seen ignoring an assault on team property.
The notice you received this morning is the minimum we could do without further investigation. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Ms. Collins is barred indefinitely. The relationship is, at this point, public.
We will release a statement this afternoon.
You will not be quoted in it, and you will not speak to the media without clearance from this office for the next two weeks.
The story will pass. It will pass faster if you give it nothing to feed on. Understood?"
"Yes."
"Good. Practice at one. Don't be late. We are done."
I leave the office. Coach catches up with me in the hallway.
"Tyler."
I stop. I'm not sure I have anything to say to him, though.
"For what it's worth," he says, looking somewhere past my shoulder.
"I should have shut him down a year ago.
I didn't, because I was a coward, because keeping the captain happy was easier than doing my job.
That's on me. Not on her, and not on you.
The cameras really were on a maintenance cycle.
I checked. But, I was prepared to lie if they hadn't been. "
I look at him. He looks tired and old.
"Thank you," I say, because I don't know what else to say.
"Don't thank me yet," he says. "Reaper's still in that locker room. He's going to be quieter, but he's not going to be different."
"I know."
"Handle that part."
"I will."
He nods once and walks away.
Practice is the strangest thing I've ever skated through.
I walk into the locker room, and the conversation doesn't stop.
It just adjusts. Danny looks up. "Heard about the email.
That's bullshit. Sorry, man." Then Liam says, "We got you.
Just so you know." Carter—the veteran defenseman who's barely spoken to me in six months—nods at me and goes back to taping his stick.
Rodriguez claps my shoulder on his way past.
Reaper is in his stall on the far side. He doesn't look up. He doesn't say anything. The team has rearranged itself around him in a way I can feel but can't see—guys who used to drift toward his stall are sitting elsewhere, pretending to look at their phones.
He's not gone. He's still the captain. He's still going to be a problem. But the room has shifted, and he can feel it too. I can see it in the set of his shoulders.
Coach runs us through drills. Reaper stays away from me on the ice. He passes when he should pass and doesn’t make a run at me. He doesn’t acknowledge me. He plays like a man going through the motions of his job while everyone watches him do it.
Yesterday made something visible that’s been true for months. Coach knew. The board knew. The GM knew. They just didn’t want to say it out loud until they had to.
Yesterday I cracked something. The crack is what I have to work with.
Practice ends at four. Most of the guys peel off to the showers, then home, on a quick turnaround for tomorrow's game. I stay in the locker room longer than usual. Reaper does too, because he always does.
Eventually, it's just the two of us and the equipment manager doing rounds.
I wait until the equipment manager leaves.
"Reaper."
He doesn't look up. "Not interested, West."
“Wasn’t asking if you were.”
I cross the room and sit on the bench across from his stall. Not in his space, but close enough that he can hear me without raising my voice.
He has the choice to walk out.
He doesn’t.
“You and I are going to talk for two minutes,” I say. “Then I’ll let you go home, and I won’t bring this up again. If you want to walk out, walk out. But I’m only doing this once, so decide whether you want to hear it from me here or from someone else later.”
He sets down the wrap in his hands and crosses his arms.
“I have eight months of video. Not just yesterday. The Boston board. The cross-checks during home opener week. The hits during the scrimmage, you thought nobody was filming.”
I lean back against the wall.
“Practice cameras don’t always catch audio, and they don’t always get the right angles, but they get enough. I have all of it.”
His expression doesn’t change.
“I also have six months of notes,” I continue. “Dates. Times. Which coaches were in the building, every conversation I had with Coach about you, and every conversation he avoided having with me. I have photos of the bruises. Medical records. Texts from teammates saying what you did was fucked up.”
I tick them off one at a time.
“Liam in October. Danny in December. Carter last week.”
I let that sit for a second.
“And Carter doesn’t talk to anybody.”
Silence fills the locker room.
“I haven’t done anything with it,” I say finally. “Because for months I’ve been trying to figure out whether reporting it would do more damage than just absorbing it.”
I look him dead in the eye.
“That’s been the calculation every morning I drive into this building.”
My voice stays even.
“Today, the calculation changed.”
His jaw shifts once.
“Yesterday, my girlfriend slapped you because she got tired of waiting for me to do something. She did the thing I should’ve been ready to do months ago.”
I shake my head once.
“And I’m not taking it back. I’m not apologizing for it either.”
I lean forward, forearms braced on my knees.
“But she’s not going to need to do it again.”
He finally looks at me directly.
“Because the next time you take a cheap shot at me, I’m going to the league office. Not Coach. Not the GM. The league.”
My stare doesn’t move.
“With everything.”
The room goes quiet enough that I can hear someone laughing faintly down the hall.
“And you can guess what happens to a captain in his thirteenth year when the league gets handed eight months of footage.”
He still doesn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to like me,” I say. “You don’t have to pass to me. You can ice me out for the rest of the season. Fine. That’s hockey. That’s locker room politics.”
I shrug once.
“I don’t need you to be my friend.”
My voice hardens on the next sentence.
“I need you to keep your hands and your stick to yourself. And I need you to understand that the only thing standing between you and a real disciplinary investigation right now is my willingness not to file.”
I stand slowly.
“That willingness is conditional.”
I hold his stare another second.
“From here on out, every shift, every practice, every hit gets measured against it.”
Silence.
“You good with that?”
He looks at me for a moment, and I can see the moment a muscle jumps in his jaw.
"You think you have leverage," he says finally. "Because your girlfriend embarrassed me."
"No. I think I have leverage because I have eight months of documentation. She just made me realize I was sitting on it for the wrong reason."
"Which is?"
"I thought I deserved it."
The honest answer surprises him. I see it on his face. It surprises me too—I didn't know I was going to say it. But it's true, and it's the only piece of this entire situation that he was ever going to understand.
"Why didn't you? Why didn't you take a swing at me, West? Before. You had cause."
"Because I came here trying to be a better man than I was, and taking a swing at the captain was a thing the man I used to be would do." I stand up. "Yesterday, my girlfriend did the thing she should never have had to do. So now I'm doing the thing I should have done ages ago. We clear?"
He doesn't answer. Instead, he picks up the wrap and goes back to his hands.
"Reaper."
"We're clear, West."
I walk out.
I drive home with my hands shaking on the wheel and a strange light feeling in my chest that I don't have a name for yet.
Nora's at the kitchen counter when I walk in. Harper's in the bouncer at her feet. The kitchen smells like garlic and onions and something good in the oven.
She looks up, reading my face.
"You okay?"
"Yeah."
"How did the meeting go?"
"You're barred indefinitely. Statement goes out this afternoon. The relationship is public by tomorrow."
"Okay."
"And I talked to Reaper after practice."
She pauses. "Talked?"
"With words. No slapping. He listened."
A small, dry smile starts at the corner of her mouth.
"And?"
"And I told him what I should've told him months ago." I lean against the counter, suddenly tired in a way that has nothing to do with the day. "I think it's going to be okay. Not easy. But okay."
She crosses the kitchen and puts her arms around me, careful of my ribs the way she always is, and I hold her there for a long minute while Harper babbles below us about something only she understands.
"You're good," Nora mumbles into my chest. "You know that, right?"
"I'm working on knowing it."
"Work harder."
I laugh and press a kiss to the top of her head.
The team is going to spend a week being uncomfortable. The story is going to run. Reaper is still going to be the captain, and I'm going to be the player whose girlfriend slapped him, and that's a thing I'm going to carry for a while.
But she's in my kitchen, and Harper is in the bouncer. Reaper knows where I stand, and Coach knows where he stands, and the GM knows where I stand, and the man I used to be is—slowly, slowly—getting smaller in the rearview.
Yesterday, something cracked open.
And the strangest part is, today, I think I might actually know how to walk through it.