I press my lips together, trying not to laugh. “All right. Try to enjoy it. It’s a nice summer day, at least.”
She hangs up without saying goodbye, and a mix of hollowness and guilt sinks into my chest.
Putting her in a home wasn’t an easy decision. We’re all one another has—family, friend, or confidante. We’re both loners, but we’ve always had each other. Moving her into the home was gut-wrenching, not to mention a stark reminder that I can lose her at any moment.
Focusing on work after our call is a struggle. I know I’m not doing a great job at sorting these interviews, but honestly, nothing sounds that interesting to me. What do hockey fans want to read about? Favorite stick tape? Favorite smoothie flavor? Who knows.
I try my best to concentrate, but my mind keeps drifting to the one player I didn’t even interview yesterday: Baptiste Marchand.
There’s just something extra annoying about that guy. I don’t know if it’s his cool attitude, his easy smile, or the way people seem drawn to him. He had one of the longest lines of reporters yesterday, everyone wanting to talk to him and get his perspective.
Finally, curiosity gets the best of me. I open a tab on my browser and type in his name.
Baptiste Marchand. Age 30, born in France but moved to the US at 19 to play in Florida. Now has dual citizenship in the USA and France.
He seems to have a pretty impressive resume, with lots of boring stats and trophies. All of the articles I come across mention his hockey prowess, but I’m not seeing anything about the man himself. It’s like he doesn’t have a personality outside of hockey—which, to be fair, could be true—no family, no hobbies, nothing.
I spend the next few minutes digging, and irritation starts to gnaw at me like a tiny rodent with a caffeine addiction.
Why can’t I find a single fact about his personal life? An old flame, a favorite restaurant, anything! This doesn’t make sense.
I let out a frustrated groan. “Ugh, why do I even care?”
Because you care about anything you can’t find, whispers a small voice in my head.
She’s not wrong.
When I look for something and can’t find it, alarm bells go off. And it’s like I’ve just been personally challenged to uncover the truth.
Like in ninth grade when I stumbled on a school budget report that listed funds for “new sports equipment,” but I noticed that the basketball team was still dribbling on warped floors and tossing duct-taped balls through mended baskets. Two weeks later, an article in my school paper on how the superintendent used that money to repaint her office got published, and the rest is history.
Since then, I haven’t come across a single mystery I couldn’t solve.
Remember when I said I was good at my job, and my boss benching me was basically the peak of injustice? That’s the truth.
Once I set my eyes on something that doesn’t add up, I don’t stop until I have everything I need to expose it.
It’s called dedication—I even got an award for it.
Finally, after twenty pages of search results, I find an older article about him. Baptiste looks young in the picture, clean-shaven and wide-eyed, like a kid on Christmas morning. He talks about growing up in Strasbourg, France, in the foster care system. He insists he had a happy childhood despite not having any family of his own, his foster family having welcomed him into a loving home and even getting him into hockey.
Uh, hold on. Mr. Celebrity was a foster kid?
I would have never guessed that.
He seems more like the type who grew up spoiled rotten—the kid who got a Lambo for his sixteenth birthday and had a whole room just for video games—when in a way, we had a somewhat similar experience.
There must be more to this story; there always is.
You’d never believe what kind of skeletons people have in their closets.
Professional athletes usually have something they’re trying to keep from the press. An ex. A messy contract dispute. A questionable investment. A cousin who runs their “foundation” and siphons money. A cryptic tweet. A lawsuit that got buried. But something always slips through the cracks. You just need to know where to look.
I start typing furiously on my keyboard, then stop myself.
Nope.
I need to quit—now. I don’t care about stupid Mr. Celebrity and what he might be hiding.
