Chapter 5

THE SECRET FILE

I did not sleep. I sat at my kitchen counter with the folder open in front of me and I went through every single page. Once, then twice, then a third time because my brain kept refusing to fully process what my eyes were reading.

The photos were dated. The earliest one was from fourteen months ago. Mia outside a restaurant in the city center, laughing, her hand on the arm of a man I did not recognize. 

The next photo was from a week later. Same man, different location, then more. A hotel lobby, and a parking garage. A coffee shop where she and I had gone on our first date, which felt like a specific kind of cruelty.

I turned to the printed messages.

They were between Mia and the same man. I read through them slowly. My chest felt like something was sitting on it, heavy and immovable. The messages were not ambiguous. They were not friendly. They were the messages of two people who had been deeply involved for a long time, and woven through them, in ways that took me a few pages to fully understand, was my name.

Not affectionately but strategically.

He has no idea. He's too focused on the game.

The scouts love him right now. Stay close.

When the time is right we move. Just not yet.

I set the page down. I picked it up again and read that last line three more times.

I flipped to the back section of the folder where the documents were. One of them was a professional profile, printed from what looked like a sports management database. 

The man in the photos had a name. Raymond Holt,  Forty-three years old. Worked for a major hockey agency as a senior talent scout. Had placed four players in top league contracts in the last two years.

Had been in contact with my coach's office six months ago about my contract prospects. I closed the folder.

I sat in the silence of my apartment for a long time, the refrigerator hummed. A car passed outside. I thought about three years of Sunday mornings and away games and coming home tired and her being there, warm and familiar, and I tried to locate the exact place where real life had ended and performance had begun. I could not find it. That was the worst part. I could not find the line.

I picked up my phone and called Noah.

He answered on the second ring, which meant he was awake, which meant either he could not sleep either or he had been waiting.

"The scout," I said. "Raymond Holt. You knew."

Silence.

"Noah."

"Come to the rink tomorrow," he said. "The charity scrimmage. You're cleared to play, the benching was lifted an hour ago. Coach called me."

"He called you? Why is my coach calling you?"

"Come to the rink." He hung up.

I stared at my phone. Then I put the folder in my bag and went to bed and lay there with my eyes open until morning.

++

The charity scrimmage was a yearly thing, both our teams on the same ice for one afternoon, mixed drills and a loosely structured game that was supposed to be friendly and was never actually friendly. The stands had a decent crowd for it. Families, sponsors, a few journalists with cameras.

I laced up without talking to anyone.

The first half of the scrimmage was fine. Controlled. I played hard because I always played hard and the ice did what it always did. It cleared my head and narrowed everything down to movement and instinct and the clean geometry of the game.

Then Garrett hit me from behind on a play that had no business being that physical in a charity scrimmage.

I went into the boards hard. My shoulder took the impact and I felt it radiating down my arm as I straightened up. The crowd noise shifted.

"Careful, Cole," Garrett said, skating past. "Unstable players get hurt."

Something snapped.

I dropped my stick and grabbed him and we went down together, both of us hitting the ice in a tangle of limbs and sharp words, and then everyone was shouting and skates were everywhere and someone was pulling at my jersey from behind, trying to separate us.

I spun around.

Noah.

"Get off me," I said.

"Stop," he said.

"He said it on purpose, you heard him, he said it to my face."

"I know." His voice was low and tight. "I know he did. Stop."

"Tell me who sent the folder." I was breathing hard, not just from the fight. From everything, from fourteen months of photos and a man named Raymond Holt and a relationship that might have been a transaction from the very beginning. "Tell me right now. You knew about the scout. You knew about all of it. How long, Noah? How long have you been watching this?"

"This is not the place."

"Then when? When is the place? Because you keep showing up and you keep saying things and then you disappear behind some wall and I am standing here with a folder full of proof that the last three years of my life were a lie and I need somebody to tell me something real."

My voice broke on the last word, I hated it. I hated that it happened in front of him, in front of everyone, in the middle of the ice with cameras in the stands.

Noah looked at me, Something moved behind his eyes, something I had never seen there before, something unguarded and almost painful.

He reached out and grabbed the front of my jersey. His grip was tight but his voice when he spoke was quiet, quiet enough that only I could hear it over the noise of the rink settling back down around us.

"You want the truth?"

I looked at him. "Yes."

His jaw tightened. A muscle moved along the side of his face. He held my gaze and for once he did not look away, did not retreat behind the flat steady expression he wore like armor.

"I've been in love with you for three years."