He was already in a booth when I arrived. A half-empty coffee cup sat in front of him, beside a closed notebook. When he saw me, he stood.
I shook his hand. The place was loud in a good way. People stood four deep in a line at the counter, explaining their orders to the barista. A table of women in workout clothes laughed as they shared stories. Nobody looked at Daniel and me.
“Mattias. Thanks for meeting me. Truly.” He sat back down. “Can I get you something? I’m buying.”
“I’ll get my own.”
The line moved quickly, and I ordered my coffee black. Kovac had aged six years since Toronto, but he had the same eyes.
“You drove in,” he said. “I’d have done it by phone. You didn’t have to—“
“What do you want, Daniel?”
I didn’t want to waste time, but my words were sharper than I intended. He took it without flinching.
“Fair.” He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table. “The piece. I told you, and I told Mark, and it’s true, so I’ll just say it again. I’m interested in long careers, the guys who kept playing. When you play fifteen years in one league, most of it in one place, it’s easy for those later years to get lost. I want to know what it costs to stick around. That’s the piece. You’re the cleanest example I’ve got.”
“That’s a flattering way to say I’m old.”
“It’s an accurate way to say you’re an anchor of the team.” He offered a small smile. “Anchor is Cross’s word for you, by the way. Not mine. He gave me twenty minutes, and eleven of them were about you, which I’m told is the most he’s said about anyone since his wedding.”
I didn’t smile back. I wanted to, but I couldn’t show Kovac that he’d gotten to me.
“I’ve been talking to people,” he said. “People who knew you early. I want the arc to be real, not the press-kit version. I looked up your old coach at Maine. I also found a guy named Coombs from your first team. He said you used to stay after every practice, and he thought you were going to skate yourself into the boards.” Kovac watched me. “Said you were the most serious twenty-one-year-old he’d ever met.”
I exhaled. He hadn’t said the name I was afraid of. He’d said Coombs, who was kind, forgettable, and probably coaching a winter rec league somewhere now. There was someone else on that first NHL team, and Kovac cracked the door open enough for me to remember what I’d tried to forget.
I made that roster by a whisker. I was a late-round, longshot kid from Maine who knew every day that I was one terrible month from a bus to the minors. Alan Easton was a veteran on that team. He was eleven years in and near the end of his career. He told the room that I deserved to be there. Those words from a man like that could make the difference between sticking around and getting sent down for good.
And then something about Easton got out. I never knew the specifics. What spread around was that he’d been seen with a man. I never knew more than that, and I’m not sure there was more than that to know. It didn’t matter whether it was true. It moved through the room in three days.
By February, Easton was a healthy scratch. By the deadline he was gone, sent somewhere that sent him somewhere else, and inside two years he was out of hockey entirely. I never heard his name again.
I said nothing against him, but I didn’t defend him either. I just stopped sitting in the stall next to his. The most decent man in the room was quietly erased for being seen, and I didn’t try tostop it. I decided nobody was ever going to see the same thing in me. It worked. I got to stay, and he didn’t.
”—Mattias?”
“I’m here,” I said. “Coombs. Sure. He was a good guy.”
“There’s another source.” Kovac said it evenly. “I won’t name them. I want to be straight with you about the fact that they exist, and straight with you that I won’t say who.”
The back of my neck prickled. I’d spent five years building a life with all potential leaks managed. Now Kovac had an unnamed source, a leak I didn’t know.
“That’s a lot of digging for a piece about a defensive system,” I said.
“It’s not a piece about a defensive system. I told you that part already.” He looked into my eyes. “I’d rather have you in it than write around you, Mattias. I mean that. Writing around a man always shows.”
I said nothing.
He looked down at his unopened notebook and spoke without looking at me. “I remember the night we met in Toronto.” He turned the cup again. “I want you to know that I’ve always been careful with that conversation. That’s all. I’m not—“ He stopped, and for the first time, he looked like a man who didn’t entirely like his own job. “I’m not bringing it to the table, but I didn’t want to sit across from you and pretend I’d forgotten it.”
“What are you writing?” I said. “About me, specifically.”
“Nothing about your personal life.” He spoke plainly, letting me decide whether to believe him.
I didn’t. He saw that on my face.
“Mattias.” He set both hands flat on the table. “Nobody gave me evidence. Nobody came to me with a story. There’s no photo or document with your name on it. That is not what’s happening here. You need to hear that, because I can see you doing the math, and the math you’re doing is wrong.”
