Chapter 30: Eleanor Vance

Eleanor Vance had the quality that separated genuinely excellent journalists from merely competent ones: she made you feel understood before she had asked a single real question. It wasn't manipulation in any cynical sense. It was skill, which was its own distinct thing, even when the effect from the outside looked similar to manipulation.

She appeared at the morning skate on a credentialed media day, moving through the room with professional warmth, asking good questions and listening to the answers with evident real attention. She was thorough with everyone and no one felt processed or managed. I watched her work from the ice and understood how someone lasted sixteen years in a field that tended to make people smaller over time rather than larger.

In the corridor after the skate, she was there when I came out of the tunnel, positioned as if by the reasonable coincidence of two people moving in the same direction at the same time.

"Leo Valdez." The smile was close to genuine. "I've been hoping to catch you properly. The piece last month was wonderful but it felt like it only reached the surface of what's actually interesting about you."

"The writer was thorough," I said.

"He covers the game excellently. I cover the people inside the game. There's a meaningful distinction between those two approaches." A slight tilt of her head. "Would you have fifteen minutes sometime this week?"

"I can check with our media liaison and come back to you through proper channels."

"Of course, I'd expect nothing less." A brief deliberate pause. "You and Jax Thorne make a fascinating partnership. On the ice certainly, but I'm more interested in how that developed, given the circumstances of your arrival here."

The phrase given the circumstances was carrying a great deal of weight inside very little space.

"We have a solid captain-winger relationship," I said. "Functional line chemistry. Nothing unusual for a well-run team."

"From the outside it reads as considerably more than functional." Warm, framed as observation rather than challenge. "The trust between you. The communication. It's something worth writing about on its own terms." She clicked a recorder once, a gesture rather than a recording. "I'm also picking up background noise about a league investigation into certain categories of performance compounds. Nothing specific yet. You wouldn't have any context on that?"

My pulse stayed exactly where I had set it. Years of practice for this.

"The league office would be the right contact for anything at that level," I said. "It's well above my pay grade."

She laughed, brief and warm. "Of course." A card appeared between two fingers. "For your media liaison. Or for you directly, if you ever want a conversation entirely on your own terms." She held my gaze for one extra beat. "I'm not in the business of causing damage, Leo. I'm interested in real stories, which are almost always more interesting than the harmful version anyway."

I took the card. I held my expression through the handshake. She moved on to her next conversation as naturally as if the exchange had been entirely routine.

I stood in the corridor and turned the card over and thought carefully about what she had and had not said. The investigation comment was not accidental. The phrase your own terms was chosen deliberately. She had sources and a thread and she was offering me the chance to be the person who held the needle rather than the person being threaded by someone else entirely.

I found Jax before he left the building. I told him everything she had said, in order, without my own interpretation attached.

He listened without interrupting. Then: "She's been developing something for three months. I have a contact at her publication. She pitched a feature on Omega athletes in professional sports, specifically the systemic conditions that make secrecy feel like the only viable option." He held my gaze. "The framing, by all accounts, is advocacy. Not exposure. She's looking for a willing subject rather than a reluctant one."

The distinction between those two things reorganized everything she had said to me.

"She doesn't know it's me specifically," I said.

"She may be starting to suspect. The investigation comment was a test, checking whether you move toward her or away from her." He waited. "I'm telling you so you can decide what to do with this information. Not because I have a preference about what you decide."

I turned the card over one more time. Eleanor Vance. Sports and Society.

"I need to think," I said.

"Take whatever time you need." He said it without any pressure attached, which was itself a significant indication of how far things had traveled since September. In September every conversation between us had been a directed move in a larger game. This was a man giving another person actual room to think.

I drove home turning the exchange over in my mind, thinking about stories. About the difference between the story that happened to you without your consent and the story you chose to tell in your own language, for your own reasons, in your own time. That difference was enormous. It was possibly everything. I thought about it all the way home and into the evening and lying in the dark, and by the time I fell asleep I already knew which way I was leaning.

What she had offered was the specific thing I had never been given before: the chance to be the one holding the pen. Not the subject of someone else's curiosity. Not a rumor to be chased. A person who chose to speak on their own terms, in their own time, with their own words. The arrangement of that was so foreign to how I had lived for fourteen years that it took the entire drive home just to let the shape of it settle into something I could hold.