My entire nervous system leaves my body.
“Talia.”
“I’m only saying what your face has been screaming since you saw him again. You know what’s fascinating?”
“No.”
“You say Max’s full name every time you’re emotionally compromised.”
I grab the edge of her monitor and shove it downwards.
She gasps. “Workplace violence.”
In the car, I sit for three minutes before I start the engine. I keep coming back to one thing: he watched himself in the clip. Not Calloway. Not the linesmen. The frustration aimed inward felt authentic. He felt it.
For two weeks, I’ve been reading Max Stevens. My professional reasons for knowing about him are dwindling. I start the engine.
The clip has four million views by the time I get home to change. Half called him a hero. The other half had already drafted their takes about liability and league optics. Someone has already made a compilation of his biggest fights set to a song I refuse to look up. The league’s official account has posted a statement about the ongoing review process.
My father left a voicemail.
I don’t listen to it tonight.
I already know what it says.
Chapter Seven
Max Stevens
Post-game press is my least favorite part of the job. Thirty minutes of answering the same three questions in a different order while someone points a camera at my split lip. Tonight’s split lip is a good one — Calloway landed one before the linesmen got there, and the cut has that throb that means it’ll be colorful by morning. The PR guy, Sully, has been circling me since the tunnel with his clipboard and his blood pressure.
“Short answers,” he says. “Nothing about the fight. Focus on the win.”
“Sully. Have you met me?”
“Max, please.”
I’m adjusting my collar in the mirror when I catch movement in the doorway behind me. The mirror reveals the press area filling up, cameras positioningthemselves, and there’s Toni. NHL badge. iPad. Standing at the periphery where the compliance box is, because apparently her job tonight includes monitoring whether I say something catastrophic to Sports Illustrated. I look at myself in the mirror. At her in the mirror. She is not looking at me, seemingly absorbed in her work.
Sully taps my arm. “Ready?”
“Born ready.”
The press conference is a table, four mics, and fifteen reporters who all want the same clip. I sit. Toni moves beside the media platform to speak discreetly with Sully before the conference starts. When she steps past me, her knee brushes mine under the table. Barely there. Tiny contact. My entire nervous system wakes up at once. She makes no eye contact or any sign of knowing that she just jolted me out of the cool, calm exterior I was practicing in the mirror.
I do the short answers. The win was a team effort. The call was the right call. Knox is fine. I’m fine. Everything is fine. I say the word fine six times and mean it zero times, and the reporters nod and write it down because that’s the deal. Then someone asks about the compliance program. I feel Sully go still to my left.
“The league’s oversight initiative,”
the reporter says.
“Can you speak to how that’s been going? Working with the performanceofficer?”
Short answer.
“It’s been productive.”
That’s the answer. Sully has his pen ready to award me a gold star. I look at the back of the room. At Toni, still on her tablet, absolutely not watching this press conference.
