Chapter 4

THE CONSPIRACY

Coach Derrick's office smelled like stale coffee and old leather.

I had sat in this office a hundred times. After wins, after losses, after bad games and good ones. I knew the crack in the ceiling above his desk and the way his chair squeaked when he leaned back. This room had always felt like a safe place.

It did not feel safe now.

"They're saying you showed up at her apartment and threatened them," he said. He was not looking at me directly, which was worse than if he had been. He was looking at the desk. "Both of them. Same story."

"That's not what happened."

"Liam."

"Coach, I walked in and I walked out. I didn't say a single threatening word. I barely said anything at all."

He leaned back and his chair squeaked and he rubbed his face with both hands. "I believe you," he said, and he said it in the particular way that people say things when they believe you but it doesn't actually change anything. "But my hands are tied until this gets sorted out. The front office is already asking questions. Two sponsors called this morning."

"Two sponsors," I repeated.

"I have to bench you for now, temporarily. Just until the noise dies down."

I sat very still, the room felt smaller than it had a minute ago. "How long?"

"I don't know yet."

I walked out of his office and down the hallway toward the locker room, and I could feel it before I even opened the door. The shift in the air when you walk into a room full of people who have been talking about you. Conversations that stop half a second too late, eyes that move away just slightly too fast.

Darius, my left wing, gave me a short nod. A few others looked at their phones. Somebody at the back of the room said something low that I could not quite hear, and somebody else laughed quietly.

For three years, I had played with most of these guys for three years. I changed in silence and left.

The parking lot was grey and cold and I sat in my car without starting it, staring through the windshield at nothing. My phone was full of messages I had not answered. 

My name was trending on a hockey forum online, which I discovered by accident and immediately closed. The story Mia and Marcus were telling had spread far and fast, the way lies always do when they are told by attractive people with active social media accounts. A knock on my passenger window made me flinch.

Noah opened the door and got in without being invited. He was in his practice gear, clearly just finished with his own team's session at the adjacent facility. He smelled like ice and cold air.

"I heard about the benching," he said.

"News travels fast."

"I have sources." He looked straight ahead through the windshield. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet."

"Wrong answer."

I looked at him. "What do you want me to say, Noah? My girlfriend and my best friend just burned my life down and built something new on top of the ashes. My coach benched me. Half my team thinks I showed up and threatened two people, which I did not do. So forgive me if I don't have a plan yet."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he opened the car door and got out. I watched him walk back toward the facility entrance. He stopped at the door and turned around.

"Come inside," he said.

"I'm not on your team."

"I know that. Come inside anyway."

I do not know why I followed him. But I did. His team was still in the middle of cooldown drills when we walked in. A dozen heads turned. The room went noticeably quiet. A few of his players looked at me the way you look at something that should not be in the room it is currently standing in.

Noah walked to the center of the space and turned to face everyone, hands loose at his sides.

"Liam Cole did not threaten anyone," he said. His voice was level and clear and carried across the whole room without him raising it. "What's being said about him is a lie, and if I hear any of you repeating it, we'll have a problem."

Silence.. One of his players, a big defenseman named Garrett who I had clashed with in three separate games, took a step forward. "Why do we care what Cole does off the ice?"

"Because it's the right thing to care about," Noah said. "Sit down, Garrett."

Garrett did not sit down. He took another step. "You're defending a rival. In our house. That's embarrassing."

Noah looked at him for a long moment. Something shifted in the room, the kind of shift that happens right before something physical, when the air gets tight and everyone takes a half step back without realizing it.

"I said sit down."

Garrett held his gaze for another three seconds, Then he sat down. Noah turned back to me like nothing had happened.

I had played against this man for three years. I had seen him angry on the ice, cold and calculated and ruthless in the way only truly skilled players can be. I had never seen this version of him. This quiet, deliberate version that walked into a room full of his own people and said an uncomfortable truth without flinching.

I did not know what to do with it.

++

I drove home in silence, I showered. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the floor for a long time. At some point I must have fallen into a shallow, restless sleep, because when the knock at my apartment door woke me it was nearly eleven at night.

Nobody was in the hallway when I opened the door. But there was a package on the floor. Brown paper, no return address, my name written in plain block letters.

I brought it inside and opened it on the kitchen counter.

A folder, thick, worn at the edges, like it had been handled many times.

I opened it immediately. Photos, printed, dated, arranged in order. Messages, screenshotted and printed on clean white paper. Documents I did not immediately understand but felt important in a way I could not explain.

I turned to the last page.

A single handwritten note, small and neat at the bottom of the folder.

She isn't the person you think she is.

I looked at the photos again. My hands were completely still. Whoever had put this together had been collecting it for months.