Page 89 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
“Beckett.” Rick’s voice comes through so far from calm, it’s on another continent. “Tell me what I’m seeing isn’t what I think it is.”
“I don’t know. What are you seeing?”
“I’m seeing WCCO running footage of you walking out of a burning building with Coach Hart’s daughter. I’m seeing your name—the name I have spent six months rehabilitating—in the same sentence as ‘gambling ring’ and ‘overnight’ and ‘Coach’s daughter.’ So please, tell me I’ve gotta go get my vision checked.”
“Get your vision checked, Rick. Whatever headline you’re reading, it’s not telling the whole story.”
“I don’t care about the whole story, Beckett. I care about the optics.” Rick’s voice takes on an oily quality. “The contract renewal is in less than three weeks. And what the board is seeing right now is their problem player walking out of a burning building with Coach’s daughter, soaking wet, at seven thirty a.m, after an overnight situation involving criminals and the kind of chaos that makes sponsors very nervous.”
Across the parking lot, Everly still sits in her foil blanket on the open end of an ambulance. A few cameras have headed her direction, clearly having figured out her identity. Eyes wide, cheeks flushed, she looks terrified. Not of the thugs—they’re done. Of the camera. Of the anonymity she’s spent years building to protect herself being stripped away on live television—Everly Hart. E.J. Hartley, sans the wig.
I want to go to her, my question Can we talk? still in my head.
But I’m surrounded by a pack of journalists myself. I take another few steps back, putting distance between me and the mics as Rick shouts in my ear. “Beckett. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Just…don’t say anything stupid. Don’t talk to the press until we’ve got this sorted out. I don’t know what happened between you and Coach Hart’s daughter, but whatever it is, when the question comes out—and it will—your answer is, repeat after me: nothing. There is nothing going on between you. There is no more to it than that. Got it?”
Everything about it is a lie. Even at its base level, it’s a lie. There has never, at any point in my life, been nothing going on between me and Everly Hart.
“Rick, I don’t?—”
“I’m trying to help you here, Beckett.” His voice softens just slightly, taking me back to our first few months together my rookie year. He’d meet me at the local diner and buy me dinner, stay a while. He knew me back when I didn’t have two pennies to rub together. “That career your mother worked so hard to build for you. All the long hours. All the night shifts and treatment center weekends. All the heating bills she didn’t pay so you could have time on the ice. The car she couldn’t fix. Your father’s legacy. It’s all in jeopardy. Wasted if your renewal falls through.”
The words hit a place that has no armor. No wall. No blue line. The place where I’m a living debt—an obligation that compounds daily, the interest calculated in ice time and performance.
Dad died for hockey. Mom gave everything for hockey. If I choose Everly, I’m saying their sacrifice didn’t matter.
“Nothing’s going to scare the board more than the potential of a scandal between a player and the coach’s daughter,” Rick says. “Keep it professional, Beckett.”
I look at Everly. Thirty feet away. The woman who ran into a fire for my name.
I look at the cameras.
I put the phone down. Walk toward the media cluster.
“Mr. Benson, Mr. Benson, police just arrested four unnamed men and your teammate Cole Thompson. What can you tell us about that?” Karen Lindstrom, WCCO.
“Cole made a mistake, got in over his head, and needed help. That’s what I’ll keep doing—showing up for people when they’re in over their heads. You’ll have to wait for the police reports for further questions on that.”
“Is it true you got trapped in the mall overnight?”
“That’s correct.”
“Were you and Everly Hart there together when you got trapped?”
“No.” Not a lie. I was there. She was there. But we came separately. You were there—you saw it.
“But you two were found together when emergency personnel arrived on the scene. Can you clarify your relationship with Miss Hart?”
I open my mouth. And the words that come out don’t belong to the same man who spent a night with Everly Hart. Because no man who’s spent even a decent amount of time with her could walk away and act like it never happened.
But…well, there’s Rick in my head, and in this very moment, I’ve sort of convinced myself that if Everly can lie, I can too. And maybe this is for the best—to protect her.
Besides, we’ll talk about it later. I’ll fix it.
“Everly Hart and I are not now, nor have we ever been together.”
