Chapter Seven

She was tall, with the posture of someone who had been told they had good posture so often it had become load bearing, and dark red hair pulled over one shoulder. She had a press lanyard around her neck with a Harlow Athletics credential, a recorder in her hand, and the specific ease of someone who belonged everywhere they went and had never had reason to doubt it.

"Hi," she said, extending her hand. "Petra Voss. Senior thesis, sports journalism. I'm covering the hockey program this season."

I shook her hand. "Zara Torres."

"I know," she said. "Declan mentioned you."

I kept my face neutral. It was a skill. "Did he?"

"Said you were the journalist who got reassigned off his profile." She tilted her head. "Unfortunate timing on that. The media policy thing came from above. Briggs ' new assistant coach has strong feelings about press access apparently." She glanced at the ice, where said assistant coach, Ashford, was now standing near the boards reviewing something on a clipboard. "Anyway. I just wanted to introduce myself. I'll be around a lot."

"Good to know," I said.

She smiled not unkindly, not competitively, just the easy smile of someone with nothing to prove and stood up, pressing her lanyard back against her chest. She walked toward the ice with the confidence of someone who had been granted access and intended to use all of it.

I watched her stop at the boards exactly where I had been standing ten minutes ago.

I watched Declan skate over.

I watched him say something that made her laugh the easy, unguarded laugh of two people who had already established a rhythm, already found the frequency, already skipped the part where you don't know how to talk to each other yet.

I looked at my skates.

I focused on the laces, which required no emotional processing and gave my hands something accurate to do. Left skate. Right skate. The familiar routine of unlacing and removing and storing, performed approximately ten thousand times over fourteen years, requiring zero percent of my attention and currently receiving one hundred percent of it.

"She's good," Sofía said, appearing beside me with her own skate bag. Her voice was gentle and completely without agenda, which somehow made it worse.

"At journalism?" I said.

"At everything, from what I hear." A pause. "She's not, she's not doing it on purpose, Zara."

"Doing what?" I said.

Sofía looked at me with the patient expression of someone who loved me enough to not answer that question.

I stood up. I picked up my bag. I looked at the ice one more time at Declan running a drill now, full speed, Petra at the boards with her recorder and I thought about a text conversation that had been running for two weeks, about a sister's glitter sign and geese and seven AM honesty, and I thought about how none of that was an assignment anymore.

Which meant none of it was required.

Which meant whatever it was, it was something else.

I walked out of the rink into the cold corridor and told myself I was fine with that, and almost believed it, and then my phone buzzed.

Declan: the east lot geese are back. There are four of them now. This is an escalation.

I stood in the corridor and read it twice.

Declan: I'm choosing to see it as a sign that some things just keep coming back no matter what.

I looked at the message for a long moment.

Through the rink doors I could still hear the sound of blades on ice sharp, rhythmic, the metronome with urgency I'd come to know from a hundred early mornings. I could not tell from the sound alone whose skates were whose. I'd never needed to before.

I typed: that's either profound or you're justifying a fear of waterfowl with philosophy.

The response came in eight seconds.

Declan: why not both.

I put my phone in my pocket and walked to class and did not examine the fact that I was smiling until I was already outside, where the February air was cold enough to make almost anything feel like a reasonable excuse for whatever your face was doing.

It wasn't an excuse.

I was smiling because of a text about geese.

This was, objectively, information.

I filed it under things to examine later.

Then, for the first time, I did not add anything specifically never.

Sofía texted me at noon.

Just a name. No punctuation, no context, no elaboration of the specific economy of someone who knows you'll understand.

Petra Voss.

I stared at it for a second.

Then she sent a follow up: senior thesis profiles the subject for the full season, full access, weekly features in the campus paper.

They're doing a photoshoot on Thursday.

I typed back: okay.

Sofía: okay meaning

Me: okay meaning okay.

She sent a single punctuation mark in response.

A period.

Which from Sofía, who ended most texts with three exclamation marks minimum, was the loudest thing she'd ever said to me.

I put my phone face down on my lecture hall desk and opened my notebook to a clean page and wrote the date at the top with the precision of someone imposing order on something that was beginning, quietly and without permission, to feel slightly orderless.

Professor Hendricks had said, on the first day of class, that the best journalism came from the stories you were most afraid to tell.

I had thought she meant other people's stories.

I was beginning to suspect she hadn't