Page 100 of Cross Ice

Me too.

It wasn’t entirely a lie. Part of me did wish I’d been there. The rest of me was relieved I hadn’t been, and I didn’t know which part to trust.

Monday morning, I woke up early and made coffee. Sat with my laptop open to two browser tabs: the Lasers’ official Instagram account and Nico’s profile.

The statement was scheduled for nine o’clock. At 9:02, it appeared. A clean graphic in team colors, Nico’s number seventeen in the corner. I’m proud to be a gay man and a professional hockey player. My personal life is my own, and I ask that the media and public respect that boundary.

Nico’s account posted it eleven seconds later.

I sat there and watched the shares, likes, and comments accumulate in real time. Hundreds in the first minute. Thousands by the time I’d finished reading the first wave of responses.

His name was in the statement. Mine wasn’t.

That was Nico’s call. It made sense strategically—it protected my privacy, or what was left of it. Kept the focus on him. But it also meant I was still the man in the photographs. Present but unconfirmed. And the speculation hadn’t stopped. It had just shifted shape. Instead of, “Who is he?” the question had become “Why won’t they say who he is?”

I closed the browser tabs.

Opened them again thirty seconds later.

The responses were mostly good. Teammates sharing André’s simple message—Proud of you, 17—and Griffin’s longer post. Morelli and Savard had posted a photo of the three of them, arms around each other at some all-star event, with nothing written underneath. They didn’t need words. Fan response was mostly positive too. Some of it was genuinely moving. Young people, longtime fans, paragraphs about what it meant to them.

Some of it was the other kind. Slurs and accusations, the predictable ugliness. And underneath it, quieter and more pointed, “Why isn’t the boyfriend named? What is he hiding?”

I closed the laptop.

Made more coffee I didn’t need.

Opened the laptop again.

I’d counted my tab checks yesterday. Forty-seven. I’d told myself I was doing it for the same reason I did anything information related: because knowing was better than not knowing. Because if I tracked the story, I could anticipate where it was going. Because Ryan had taught me what happened when you stopped paying attention, when you trusted things were fine and didn’t check, and then looked up one day to find people who felt entitled to you had discussed and dissected and rewritten your life.

That was the story I was telling myself. The more honest version was that I couldn’t stop, and I’d started organizing my day around the compulsion rather than around work.

I knew the difference. I just didn’t know what to do with it.

I closed the tabs and opened my client files instead.

By nine thirty, I had twenty-four new emails in my professional inbox. Three media requests, two from people I’d never heard of, and a politely worded termination from a client I’d been onboarding last month. A LinkedIn message from someone I didn’t recognize asking if I was open to “brand partnership opportunities related to my current visibility.”

I stared at that one for a long time.

Current visibility. As if the photographs and the speculation were a strategy I’d executed rather than a situation that had happened to me.

I marked everything from unknown senders as spam. Then I pulled out my notebook and started a list.

The search result problem was the one I could actually do something about. My headshot was already down, but cached versions were circulating and would be for weeks. What I could control was what came up alongside my name, and right now that was the photos, Ryan’s name, and three-year-old headlines I’d spent years burying.

I wrote it out like a client brief, because that was how my brain worked when it was working properly.

Problem: Search results for “Evan Beckett” currently return paparazzi photos, speculation, Ryan Pierce association.

Goal: Displace with professional content within 60-90 days.

Actions: Update three case studies on firm website with measurable outcomes; pitch one bylined piece to a marketing trade publication, brand resilience under public pressure, keep it abstract; increase LinkedIn activity, one substantive post per week, professional topics only; submit to two industry directories I’ve been putting off.

I read it back. It was a good plan. Specific, achievable, mine.

It would also require me to be deliberately visible in a controlled way at exactly the moment I wanted to disappear entirely. That was the cost. I wrote it down too, because pretending the cost wasn’t there was how plans failed.