Page 134 of Cross Ice

At nine fifty, I retrieved a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge, opened the app on my laptop, and waited.

At exactly ten, Wesley’s face appeared on the screen.

He was older than I expected—maybe late thirties—dark hair, a friendly smile, sitting in what looked like his office at headquarters with the Stormhawks’ team logo visible on the wall behind him.

“Evan. Good to meet you.” His voice was warm but professional. “How are you doing?”

“Honestly? Not great.”

“Fair enough. You’ve been having a rough few weeks.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

He looked at me for a moment without rushing to fill the silence. “You weren’t sure about calling me.”

It wasn’t a question. “No. I wasn’t.”

“That’s okay.” He leaned back slightly. “Can I ask why you changed your mind?”

“I ran out of strategies that were working.”

“Okay. Walk me through what’s been happening.” He picked up a pen.

I took a breath. “The feeling that I can’t go anywhere without someone recognizing me or taking a photo. The articles. Having my routine documented by a gossip site—where I live, what time I leave, what I order at the coffee shop…” I paused. “I’m a pretty private person, and I don’t have any privacy left.”

“Right. So, the exposure is unmanaged. That’s actually something we can work with.”

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me.”

“First… cameras.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “You can’t stop people from taking photos. But you can make yourself boring. Don’t react, don’t run, don’t engage. Just go about your day. If you react, that’s the shot they want—the flinch, the hand over the face, the person clearly rattled. If you’re just a guy buying groceries, that’s not interesting after the first week.”

“What if they follow me? Or wait outside my building?”

“You establish a pattern that doesn’t give them anything useful. And if someone gets aggressive—physically blocking you, making you feel unsafe—you document it, you call the police, and you tell me. But most of the time? They want the reaction. Don’t give it to them and they’ll move on to something else.”

I wrote that down. It was concrete in a way I could actually use.

“Social media,” I said. “The comments. The monitoring.”

He looked at me directly. “Stop.”

“I can’t just⁠—”

“Yes, you can.” No hedge in his voice. “I know it feels like information. Like if you know what they’re saying, you can prepare for it. But you’re not preparing, you’re just absorbing it. And it’s making everything worse.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Here’s what actually helps,” he said. “You designate one person to monitor for anything you genuinely need to know about.”

“My friend Danny.”

He nodded. “A specific threat, a piece of misinformation that’s spreading and needs correcting. He flags it if it matters. Everything else, you don’t see.”

“What about Google Alerts? I set one up for my name.”

“Turn it off today.”

“That feels like not knowing what’s coming.”