I slid out from under his hand finger by finger, and he muttered something, reaching for the warm spot where I’d been. I tucked the duvet against his side and descended the stairs in the dark.
I went to the office. I turned on the lamp and opened my laptop. Easton had been out of the game for over a decade, but it was hard to hide in the digital world. I found out that he was in British Columbia. He ran a community rink in a small town. They had learn-to-skate lessons on Saturday mornings and a beer league at night.
The man who told the room I belonged had spent fifteen years on the outside, but he was still part of hockey.
I opened a blank message. I sat there with the rink in British Columbia open behind it, and I typed the first words I’d said to Alan Easton since I was twenty-one years old.
Chapter seventeen
Varga
Rook was on the phone with Mark, and he had it on speaker.
In the past, he made every hard call with the phone to his ear, standing in the office or by the back door. Now, it was out in the open, like Mark was in the room with us.
“Yeah,” Rook said. “We want to get ahead of something.”
“Okay.” Mark’s voice was dry, and I saw the clipboard beside him in my head. “Get ahead of what? Help me out, Rook, because something is the word guys use right before I find out from a viral Instagram post.”
“It’s not that kind of something.”
“Is it a hockey thing or a not-hockey thing?”
“Not hockey.”
A pause on Mark’s end.”Is anybody hurt? “ Is there a—do I need to call legal, is what I’m asking. Tell me now, and it’s still a good day. Don’t tell me, and I’ll worry.”
“Nobody’s hurt.” Rook glanced at me. “Nobody’s in trouble. It’s nothing like that. It’s good, Mark, and it’s just ours. We want to do it right.”
“Ours.” A beat while Mark sat with the pronoun. He decided not to touch it. “All right. What do you need from me?”
“Time. A few days before anything moves. PR ready, not surprised. And I need it to stay in your office until we give the word.”
“That part’s easy.” Paper shifting. “When you say a few days, are you building toward something with a date on it, or am I just supposed to sleep badly until you call?”
“There’s a date. You’ll have it before you need it.”
“That’s not as comforting as you think it is.” His voice was slow and careful. “Okay. I’ll get the room ready on my end, and I won’t ask the question I want to ask. Whatever it is, you’ve got the runway. I’ll protect it.”
“I know you will. Thank you, Mark.”
“Have a good day, Rook. Tell—“ He stopped himself. “Take care.”
He hung up. He set the phone down, and I understood that we’d crossed a line. We couldn’t undo the conversation with Mark.
“That’s the first one,” Rook said.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I jumped off something.” He briefly smiled. “Before I checked for a safety net.”
“There’s a safety net.”
“I’ll do my best to believe you.”
I walked around the island and put my hand on the back of his neck. His shoulders relaxed. I kissed him.
“Two more,” he said.
