Him—like there was a him to tell, and Heath knew it.
***
The drive home was forty minutes, and I don’t remember thirty of them.
I exited the expressway into the ‘burbs, where nobody knew us, and that was the point. The garage door went up on the first tap. Rook fixed it without saying a word about it. He knew I’d find out when the door went up clean.
He was at the kitchen table with two plates already made up. It was leftover chicken salad from the fridge. My plate had a little extra. It always did.
“Good goal,” he said.
“Everybody keeps saying that.” I set my bag down. “It was Rafe’s goal.”
“It was your goal. Rafe got an assist. You buried it.”
I got a beer from the fridge, sat down, and ate a few bites before I said anything. He waited. Rook could out-wait a glacier.
“I saw Heath in the garage,” I said. “It made me a little late.”
“No problem.”
“He asked how you were.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t know,” I said.
Rook set his fork down on the edge of the plate.
“And then he saidtell him I said hi.Him, Rook. He said him.”
Rook was quiet.
“I think Heath knows,” I said.
“Heath has always known.”
He said it in a flat, emotionless voice.
We’d spent five years hiding it. We made our cleaner sign an NDA, and we drove separate cars. Rook taught me to start lowering the garage door before I was all the way inside. He said I should assume someone was watching.
And Heath had known the whole time. Of course he had. He’d been out since high school; he knew exactly what two guys being careful looked like because he’d been one of them.
He sat with Kieran in the locker room with their rings on. Pratt introduced us to Sully when they started dating like it was nothing. The league absorbed all of them, and the world kept turning.
I set my fork down.
“Then why are we still doing this?”
Chapter seven
Rook
I’d spent two days telling myself I had a plan. I’d find out what Kovac wanted and then decide how much of it to share with Varga. If I didn’t see any imminent danger, I didn’t need to talk about meeting Kovac six years ago at all.
The danger had already arrived. I’d said no, denying Varga’s existence to Kovac.
Now, Varga was pushing, whether or not he knew it.Then why are we still doing this?
