Page 55 of Thin Ice

"She wanted to know if the cake carries over." He leaned against the fender of Elias's SUV as if it were his. "If we lose, does the cake still count, or does she have to bake a new one for Game Six? Jen ruled that it carries over."

"Tell her I agree," I said. "Tell her the candle count keeps going either way. That's how it works."

He looked at me for a second, and then out at the lot. "You know what this reminds me of? Winnipeg, the year we lost eleven straight. You'd come off the ice after another one, and you had this face, like you personally had lost all eleven by yourself."

"I was a plus player that year."

"You were. That's my point." He pushed off the fender. "One draw and one rim. I counted. The rest of it was the ice tilting. Go home and sleep."

He rapped a knuckle twice on the SUV's hood, nodded once at Elias, and walked back to his truck. I watched his taillights leave the lot.

The blue was all still up—the ribbons on the planters, strings of Christmas lights on the awnings, and the sheet with the Wheel on it—but the rooms behind the windows had gone dark.

Neither of us had said anything on the drive back to the Colchester.

The hip stiffened on the drive, with the game's adrenaline fading. When we got back to the condo, I unfolded the mat by the recliner because floor work waits for no man's mood. I worked through the sequence while Elias stood at the window with coffee, looking down at the street.

He turned around to face me. "Nolan."

"Yeah?"

"Use both locks from here on out, even when we're inside."

He'd started to say something else, but the locks came out.

"Two locks," I echoed.

He set the coffee on the island. "I need to make a Seattle call. I'll take a walk around the block while I do it. Sleep, Nolan. Game Six is coming."

He picked up his phone off the sofa arm, left his work bag where it always sat, and let himself out. I heard the two locks turn from the outside.

I put myself to bed and did not sleep. I lay in the dark, re-running the night in my head.

At one-forty I gave up on sleep and reached for my phone to see how miserable the comments were on the team's group chat. The screen remained black.

Dead. It was fully charged when we left for the arena, and then it must have drowned in messages: my mother, my agent, the group chat. A loss like tonight's burns a battery like nothing else.

Any other night I'd have left it dead till morning, but the alarm was on my phone. I needed it during a Cup Final.

My cable was in the bedroom wall where it always was, on my side. I plugged in, and the phone didn't charge. The cable had been fraying at the neck for a month, and I'd been meaning to replace it.

Elias had a charger in his work bag. I'd watched him pull it out of the side pocket at a red light that morning. It already felt like weeks ago.

The bag sat at the end of the sofa. He was down on the street somewhere, walking the block. We shared a bed. I'd had his heartbeat against my back at dawn. Borrowing a cable from a man who slept in your bed was nothing. It happened daily between people who shared living space.

I dug into the bag looking for a phone charger and nothing else. I found the cable in the side pocket by feel, neatly coiled. When I drew it out, something came with it: a slim folder halfway out before the cable pulled free.

I started to push the folder back down. It had come out crooked, with one page riding up out of it, and the lamplight fell across the top third of that page.

It had a seal, embossed, official. I'd seen that seal many times in my working life. It was standard on contracts and letters like the one that named me an All-Star.

The letterhead under the seal was some law firm, three names long. It didn't read The Guardians. Next was a line in bold caps: CONFIDENTIAL — INVESTIGATION.

I froze for two beats.

I didn't push the folder back down. I drew the page the rest of the way out and read it under the lamp. My eyes caught on names, and I couldn't process the rest of the text. First was Halloran, and then Hawkins.

For a moment, I couldn't breathe. Hawkins. That was Ty, the rookie we lost thirteen years ago.