Page 73 of Thin Ice

I got to the hardest part and made myself push through.

"I saw it coming, Elias. You need to understand that because everything the league said and all the newspaper reports pointed in the opposite direction. They said nobody saw it coming. I did. I've always been great at reading people. Something was wrong with Ty, but I told myself it wasn't my problem to fix. I was twenty-one and had my contract to focus on. I reasoned that rocking the boat could cost me, so I told myself Ty was fine." I breathed deeply, and my ribs complained.

Elias poured us two cups of coffee and brought them to the table.

"In early March, we had a road game in Pittsburgh, and we lost it. We had nineteen hours before the next game in Philadelphia. It was enough time for five hours of sleep and then a short hop flight early in the morning. It was a quarter past eleven. I remember checking the clock in my room before I went for ice. I needed it for my shoulder. When I came back with the bucket full, Ty was standing in the hallway outside my door. He didn't knock. He just stood there wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants."

"Did he say anything?"

"I said, 'hey bud,' and he said, 'hey.' I asked if he was okay, and he said he was, but he hadn't been sleeping great. I have the next exact words in my memory. I'll never forget them. He said, 'I'm not sure I'm okay.' I asked him what he meant. Then he said he didn't know, and it was probably nothing. He said he knew he wanted to ask me something, but he couldn't remember what it was."

Elias wrapped his hands tightly around his coffee.

"I stood there with my bucket of ice in my hands. Elias, I've never told anyone all of this. I looked at him, and I saw it. He was right. Something big was wrong, but I can't give details that would make sense in a report. I thought, 'I knew to do something about this, but I can do it in the morning. I have a shoulder to ice.'"

"Did he leave?"

"I said, 'Get some sleep, bud. We'll grab breakfast. I'll meet you in the lobby at eight.' He said, 'Okay, yeah, that sounds good." Then he stood there for one more beat. Looking back, that's the last time the door was open. Then he walked back down the hallway to his room. I iced my shoulder and then slept."

I had my hands on my thighs beneath the table, and they were remarkably steady. My voice was calm.

"He didn't meet me, and then he didn't come down for the bus. The assistant coach went up at nine, and he found Ty. I was in the lobby when the coach walked out of the elevator. He didn't have to say anything. I saw it in his face. I realized my gut knew the night before." I looked up at Elias for the first time since I'd started talking. "Undiagnosed cardiac event. His jersey hung in the stall at home and traveled with us for the rest of the year."

"That's rough for a team to absorb."

"In thirteen years, I've been to the grave four times. I've flown to Thunder Bay each time just for that, and I don't bring flowers because I think they would be presumptuous on my part. I'm just a teammate who doesn't want to forget. His mom's still alive. I've never met her, and I'm fairly sure she doesn't know my name. I'm grateful for that." My story came to a close. "I've held onto that for thirteen years, and now I know that Ray Halloran died trying to contact me. I don't know what he had to say, and I'll regret that for the next twenty years."

Elias was quiet for a few moments.

He didn't share a verdict. He didn't tell me it wasn't my fault. Part of it still felt like it was. I knew something I didn't share.

He asked me a question.

"If it had been you that night in Pittsburgh. If you were nineteen and knew something was wrong that you couldn't name, whose door would you have gone to?"

I answered honestly. "Nobody's."

Elias nodded. "That's what I thought." He paused. "Ty had a door to go to, Nolan. He knew that. You didn't bring him inside, and you'll remember that, but you should also remember what you were to him. You opened up enough to give him a place to go."

Elias eventually stood, and I did the same. I reached out for him, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. "Come here," I said.

The bedroom was as nondescript as the rest of the house. I unbuttoned Elias's shirt one-handed because my ribs complained when I lifted the other arm. When it slid off his shoulders, I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart beat steady and slow under my palm.

He undressed me carefully, slowly pulling my T-shirt off over my head. He looked at the damage left by the car. I had a bruise that was eggplant purple from the eighth rib down to my hip. He didn't wince, but he didn't ignore it either. He rested fingertips on the skin just above the rest of it. After a minute or so, he moved on.

I got onto the bed, leading with my good leg and hip, lowering myself instead of lying down. I turned onto my side, and Elias climbed in against my back. He was hard against me, but neither of us did anything about it.

When I reached back for him, he pushed my hand back forward and folded it into his, resting it over my heart, with our fingers laced together.

"This," he said low into my hair. "Just this tonight."

***

Hunger made us wake around ten p.m., and Elias ordered my food.

We ate fried chicken at the counter. Mac and Michael were on speaker from Seattle with the volume low. They traded comments back and forth like two forwards passing a puck.

"Here's what we've got, and here's what we're guessing, and I want you to hear which is which," Mac said. "What we've got: the Carolina contract, the suppression language in their own white papers, and men walking through those clinics with joints a decade too old for them. Halloran and Tierney. Two deaths that look like nothing. That's one thing they're good at." Typing sounds on the other end of the call. "What we're guessing is everything about who's driving it."