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He made me promise, in his room, on Wednesday. It's mine to tell. And tonight he came in at three in the morning shaking and crying and asked me to make him forget, and when I said truth, he said please don't make me talk.

That's the first time he's broken the rule. In five months.

At five, I get up to stretch.

I do it in the dark, on the floor, the way I always do, quiet so I don't wake him. Hips first, then hamstrings. When I'm done, I go to pick my phone up off the floor where I knocked it last night.

There are two phones on the carpet. They're the same model. The same black case.

I pick one up. The screen lights up.

It's not mine.

It's his. He never locks it. I've told him a hundred times. It's open to a Notes app, because that's where he was when he came in. And there's a note at the top of the list, one line, from 2:07 a.m.

My name is Theo Lindqvist.

I shouldn't. I know I shouldn't.

I close the note and open his messages anyway.

The top thread is from somebody named Cole. I read all of it, standing there in the dark in my boxers, with Theo asleep three feet away.

mikey's mom got laid off in january. he NEEDS his money. if marrack pulls it he's done.

please T

I won't. I promise.

I put the phone down on the nightstand. Screen down. My hands are shaking.

I sit on the edge of the bed in the gray light and look at him.

He's protecting them. Cole Vasko and Mikey Brandt. The same way he protected me from Nico, and Nico from me. He's carrying all of it by himself again. He's going to stand on the ice tonight and play Game 2 against a man who threatened his friends, and say nothing, and when the clip goes around again, he's going to let it.

I know what it looks like when somebody tries to carry everything alone. I've been doing it since April.

I can't let him.

Coach Halvorsen lives in a yellow house on Lake Street with a hockey net in the driveway for his grandkids. It's six-fifteen when I knock. He comes to the door in a bathrobe with a cup of coffee and his reading glasses pushed up on his head.

He looks at me for a long second.

"Kovač," he says. "Game day. You're supposed to be in your crease."

"I need to talk to you."

He looks at me a second longer. Then he steps back from the door.

I tell him everything.

I sit at his kitchen table with my hands flat on the wood, and his wife puts a cup of coffee in front of me and leaves, and I tell him. What Theo told Nico. What Theo told me on center ice. Take him out of the series. The handshake line in October. The meeting in the video room at Harrow. Talks to media or outside parties. Cole Vasko. Mikey Brandt. Mikey's mom.

He listens without saying anything. When I'm done, he takes off his reading glasses and folds them and sets them on the table.

"I've heard stories about Ray Marrack for ten years," he says. "Never anything I could prove. That's why I took the kid. You know that."

"Nico told me."