Page 4 of Cross Check
"Minnesota didn't give me one either."
"Minnesota buried you. Chicago's going to dig you up." She paused. "The front office has arranged housing with a teammate. I'm told it's the starting goalie. Kieran Walsh."
"I know who he is."
"What do you know?"
"He's been out for three years. Never had a problem with the team or the league. He's steady, he's respected, and management trusts him to spy on me without calling it spying."
Sarah was quiet for a moment. "He's also the person you'll be living with. Try not to antagonize him."
"When have I ever antagonized anyone?"
She didn't dignify that with a response. "Call me if anything comes up. Anything at all."
I ended the call and collected my bag from the carousel. One duffel, black with no team logos. Everything I owned that mattered fit inside it. A year of upheaval had a way of teaching you what you actually needed versus what you thought you did.
O'Hare was O'Hare, massive, loud, and full of people moving with the purposeful chaos that Chicago seemed to breed. A car waited at the curb, arranged by the front office. A black sedanwith tinted windows. Anonymous. I climbed in and gave the driver the address.
I stared out the window as the city blurred past. Chicago in late October was grey and windblown, the trees along the expressway stripped down to their bones. Lake Michigan appeared between buildings in flashes. Flat and grey and enormous.
My grandmother would have hated it. She liked forests and mountains, the kind of landscape where the earth rose up to meet you. Helsinki in winter, the silence of the countryside north of the city where she'd taken me as a kid to watch the northern lights.Revontulet. Fox fires. That's what the Finns called them.
I hadn't seen my grandmother in fourteen months. She was eighty-three and her English was limited to pleasantries and endearments, and I was afraid that if I called her, she'd hear what I couldn't say. That I was tired. That I was scared. That her grandson, who she'd watched skate before he could read, had been reduced to a headline and a hashtag.
Rakas, she'd say.Darling.And I'd break apart.
The driver turned onto a tree-lined street in Lincoln Park. A glass-and-brick high-rise with a clean lobby, and a doorman who checked my ID against a list and pointed me toward the elevator.
Fourteenth floor. Apartment 1407.
I stood outside the door for ten seconds before I knocked. Ten seconds of cataloging exit routes and hallway dimensions and the way sound carried in the corridor. Every new space got assessed before I entered it. Sight lines, noise levels, the distance to the nearest door. My therapist had called it hypervigilance. I called it keeping my eyes open.
The door opened.
Kieran Walsh was taller than I expected from his film. Six-three, maybe six-four, with the broad shoulders and long arms that made goalies look like they were built specifically to filla net. Dark hair and sharp features, with grey-blue eyes that tracked over me once, fast and thorough. The way a goalie reads a shooter. Assessing angles, measuring threat.
"Varis."
"Walsh."
He stepped back. I walked in.
The apartment was what I expected from what little I knew about him. Minimal. Ordered. Clean in a way that suggested not just tidiness but intent. Every object occupied its correct position. The bookshelves were organized. The kitchen counters were bare except for a tea kettle and a small wooden tray holding a row of glass jars, loose-leaf teas—eight or nine varieties.
No photographs on the walls. No mess. A man who controlled his environment the way he controlled his crease.
"Guest room is down the hall," Walsh said. "Second door on the left."
"Okay."
"Kitchen's open. Help yourself to whatever. There's a list on the fridge of team meal times and facility hours."
"Okay."
Walsh paused. He studied me with those assessing eyes, and I watched him decide how much to say. "Look, I'm not going to pretend this is a normal situation. Park asked me to do this, and I said yes. We don't have to be friends. We just have to coexist without making each other's lives harder."
Direct. I appreciated that. People who danced around things usually did it because they had something to hide.
