Page 7 of Cross Check
"My bad."
He dialed it back. Slightly.
I tracked him between my own work, blocker saves, glove-side challenges, the lateral movement patterns my goalie coach had me running to strengthen the hip that kept grinding. From sixty feet away, I could study Varis without being obvious about it. His edges were everything the film had promised. His spatial awareness was exceptional; he saw the ice the way defensemen were supposed to, with a breadth of vision that most skill players never developed.
Special teams work put him on the second power-play unit. Not a vote of confidence, not a death sentence. He fed passes to wingers who hesitated a beat too long before accepting them, the half-second delay of men who weren't sure they wanted to be part of whatever Varis was involved in. He tried to set up in front of the net and Bishop shoulder-checked him off the spot with more force than the drill required.
"That's my spot, Minnesota."
Varis bit back whatever he wanted to say and skated to a different position.
By the time Coach Reeves called the end of practice, Varis's legs were shaking and his jaw looked like it ached from clenching. The locker room after was the same silence in his direction, the same noise everywhere else. Teammates showered and changed around him like he was furniture.
He sat in his stall, staring at his skates. The leather was scuffed from years of use, familiar in a way nothing else here was. He'd worn these blades in Minnesota. He had scored goals, made plays, built a career in them. The only constant he had left.
I finished my cool-down and shouldered my bag. I should have walked past. I should have let him figure it out on his own. This wasn't my responsibility, his integration, his loneliness, the way his shoulders were drawing in like he was trying to fold himself into something small enough to ignore.
I stopped anyway.
"You don't have to do this alone," I said.
His head came up. His eyes were dark and flat, the expression he'd worn all day, the one that dared you to see anything underneath. But for a second, I saw a crack. The smallest fracture in a wall that had been holding back a year of pressure.
"Don't I?" he said.
I was quiet for a long moment. I thought about what it would feel like to walk into a room where no one wanted you, every single day, and still lace up your skates and do your job.
"No," I said. "You don't."
He held my gaze for another beat. Something moved behind the wall, something raw and tired that he wasn't fast enough to hide. Then he looked away, back at his skates, back at the only safe place in the room.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay."
I walked to the parking lot and sat in my car for a long time before starting the engine. I replayed the conversation, all three sentences of it, and tried to figure out why those two small words had settled behind my ribs like something I needed to handle carefully.
That night, I passed the guest room on my way to bed. The door was cracked an inch. The bed was pristine, corners tucked tight, the sheets pulled drum-flat across the mattress. Militaryprecision, or the precision of a man who wanted the room to look like no one lived in it.
The blanket and pillow were on the floor, arranged against the wall. The same configuration as the night before. TheKalevalasat on the nightstand, its cracked spine catching the hallway light.
What bothered me wasn't the arrangement itself. It was the neatness, the care taken with borrowed things by a man who expected to lose them. That kind of care wasn't a habit. It was a scar.
4
NICO
Walsh's kitchen mugs were in the wrong order.
I noticed it on my third morning. I'd been awake since four, which wasn't unusual. My brain had stopped cooperating with conventional sleep schedules around the time a reporter from theStar Tribunepublished my personal phone records on the front page. Now I ran on fragments. Two hours here, ninety minutes there. Never enough to dream but always enough to function, if your definition of function included standing barefoot in someone else's kitchen at four in the morning, staring at a shelf of mugs with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb.
The mugs sat in a row on the second shelf. Eight of them, of varying sizes, arranged with no discernible logic. A large blue one next to a small white one next to a medium grey one with a chip in the handle. A Storm promotional mug shoulder-to-shoulder with a delicate ceramic cup that looked like it belonged in a different kitchen entirely. Total disorder.
My hands were on them before I'd made a conscious decision.
I pulled the first one down and set it on the counter. Then the second. The third. Each one placed carefully, no clinking, no noise that might carry down the hall. I lined them up by height, tallest to shortest, left to right.
Stepped back and looked.
Wrong. The gradient was too steep. The tall blue one dwarfed the small espresso cup at the end, creating a visual cliff that made something behind my sternum clench.
