Chapter 3: On the Record

"You're recording, right?" Ethan dropped into the chair across from me in the empty film room, elbows on his knees, every inch the captain doing his media obligations. "Don't want Julian saying I went off script."

"You've never once stayed on script." I set my phone between us, recorder running, and did not think about the text still sitting unanswered in my messages. You're blaming the wrong person. I'd read it so many times overnight that I'd started hearing it in his voice instead of a stranger's. "Let's start easy. How's the team looking heading into the season?"

"Deep. Faster than last year. We lost two seniors on defense but picked up a transfer who's been solid in camp." He said it easily, professional, exactly the kind of quote Julian wanted, and I wrote it down and did not look up at him for longer than the question required.

He tapped two fingers against the edge of the table, a small restless rhythm, the kind of thing his hands did when the rest of him was performing calm better than his hands could manage.

"That's a very rehearsed answer for someone who claims he never stays on script."

"Some things I rehearse on purpose." His eyes stayed on me a beat too long, and I felt it land somewhere I didn't want it to. "You look like you didn't sleep."

"I'm fine."

"You said that yesterday too. Right before you told me not to say a name I hadn't even said yet."

"Can we stick to hockey, please."

"Sure." He leaned back, arms crossed, and something in his posture told me he was going to obey the letter of that request and nothing else. "Draft projections. People want to know if this is the year."

"People always want to know if this is the year." I wrote it down without looking up, though my pen had stopped moving somewhere around the second word, hovering over the same line for longer than any real quote required. The silence that followed stretched longer than it needed to, both of us very carefully not saying anything about the conversation we'd left unfinished on the quad.

"You didn't answer the actual question."

"What question?"

"Whether you slept." His eyes dropped once, briefly, to my notebook, to the single line I'd written in the last five minutes. "You haven't written anything down since the second question, either."

"That's not a hockey question either."

"No. But I asked it anyway." He almost smiled, the first real one since he'd sat down, and it undid something in my chest I'd been trying to keep carefully fastened all morning.

"Lily."

"That's not a hockey question."

"No. It isn't." He waited until I finally looked at him, and whatever he saw on my face made his own expression soften in a way I didn't trust. "I meant what I said yesterday. I don't know what you think happened. I know something happened, because you wouldn't be like this otherwise, but I don't know what."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

I set my pen down, because my hand had started doing something unsteady, and I hated that he'd noticed enough about me in three years of silence to still be able to read exactly when I was rattled.

"Someone texted me last night," I said, before I'd fully decided to say it. "From a number I don't recognize."

That got his attention fully, the easy captain posture dropping away entirely. "Saying what?"

"That I'm blaming the wrong person."

Whatever reaction I expected, it wasn't the one I got. Ethan went very still, jaw tight, eyes flicking toward the door like he was checking who might be close enough to hear, and for a second I saw something that looked less like confusion and more like recognition.

"Show me."

"Excuse me?"

"The text. Show me." He held out a hand, and when I didn't move fast enough he added, quieter, "Please, Lily. This matters more than you think it does."

I unlocked my phone and turned the screen toward him rather than handing it over outright, some instinct keeping the device in my own grip even as I let him read it. His eyes moved over the words twice, and something in his expression closed off entirely by the time he looked back up.

"Do you know who sent it?"

"No. That's why I'm asking you."

"I don't know either." He said it fast, too fast, and I filed the speed of it away the same way I'd been filing away every small inconsistency about him since the moment he caught up to me outside the library. "Lily, whoever's sending you things like that, I need you to tell me. Immediately. Not sit on it."

"Why? Are you scared of what a stranger might tell me that you won't?"

"I'm scared of a lot of things right now that have nothing to do with you and I still can't explain any of them." His voice had gone low, urgent, the guarded look I'd first seen at Coach Reynolds's warning settling over his face again. "I need you to trust me on this one thing, even if you don't trust me on anything else. Whoever's texting you isn't doing it to help you."

"How would you know that if you don't know who it is?"

He didn't answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough that I heard the clock on the wall ticking, the same one that ran four minutes fast in the newsroom, the whole building apparently conspiring to remind me that time kept moving even when neither of us seemed capable of finishing a single conversation honestly.

"Because if someone actually wanted to help you, they would've talked to you three years ago, not hidden behind a number you can't call back." His voice had dropped, rougher than before, like the words were costing him something specific. "People who care about you don't play games like this. I know that better than I'd like to."

"Is that supposed to be reassuring?"

"It's supposed to be true."

The door opened before I could push further, and Mason leaned in, gym bag already over his shoulder, completely unaware of the particular silence he'd just walked into for the second time in two days.

"Coach wants you, Carter. Now, apparently, not whenever you finish being interesting for once." Mason grinned at me, easy, oblivious. "You almost done, Lil?"

"Almost."

"Good. Dinner's at six Sunday, don't forget." He was already turning, already halfway out the door, entirely unaware that his best friend hadn't moved from the bench, hadn't looked away from me, hadn't finished a single sentence that actually mattered.

"Go," I said. "Coach is waiting."

"This conversation isn't over."

"You said that yesterday too."

"I meant it yesterday too." He stood, slow, reluctant, gym bag forgotten on the floor beside him. "Delete the number if you can. Don't respond to it. And if it texts you again, tell me. Please."

He left before I could ask him why a stranger's opinion about who was to blame for a three-year-old heartbreak had him looking more frightened than anything Coach Reynolds or Mason or an entire season of scouting reports ever had, and I sat alone in the film room a long moment, recorder still running, notebook still mostly blank.

I looked down at my phone, at the thread with the unknown number still sitting there, unanswered, and typed out a single question before I could talk myself out of it.

Wrong about what?

I didn't send it. I stared at it a long moment, thumb hovering, and then deleted it entirely, because some instinct told me that whoever was watching closely enough to know exactly which nerve to hit didn't deserve the satisfaction of knowing they'd hit it.

I was reaching for my bag when the phone buzzed again in my hand.

Unknown Number.

He still hasn't told you the worst part.

I stood completely still, the film room suddenly very quiet around me, the projector's hum the only sound left once my own pulse stopped drowning everything else out.