Page 2 of Caught Offside

“Okay? That’s it?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Try ‘thanks, Marc, that’s great news. Now I can stop refreshing mock draft boards at midnight when I should be sleeping.’”

“I don’t refresh mock draft boards.” He’d only looked at the social media speculation a couple times.

“Liar.” Marc’s chair creaked through the phone. “The Suns are going to be aggressive. They want to build fast, and they need a blue line. Your name’s on every list out there. But the Syndicate knows what they have. They’re not leaving you exposed.”

“Good.”

“You don’t sound relieved.”

Patrick put the car in reverse. “I wasn’t worried.”

They talked another two minutes about the road trip and a bonus clause Marc wanted to revisit in the summer, a structure written for a forward’s production that a defenseman would never trigger. Patrick answered where required and pulled out into the gray wash of a Chicago winter. The sky sat low and colorless. Wind cut across the overpass, rocking the car.

He’d meant it. The Syndicate had no reason to leave him unprotected with two years left on his deal at a number reasonable for a top-four guy. He blocked shots, killed penalties, and logged heavy minutes without complaint. The analytics backed him up and so did the eye test. He wasn’t flashy, but he was exactly what a team needed in the spring.

What stuck wasn’t the reassurance. It was that the call had been made at all. Teams didn’t reach out to agents to confirm good news unless a version of the conversation had gone the other way. Reassurance was preemptive. Preemptive meant someone in the front office had run the numbers and found a scenario in which his name landed on the wrong side of the list.

The drive home took fourteen minutes. His apartment was the same as the day he’d signed the lease, give or take his own furniture and the print of the Montreal skyline his mother had shipped him, wrapped in tissue paper with a note asking him to please remember Montreal still existed. He’d picked the building because it was unassuming and quiet, out of the way.

He’d dropped his bag by the door and was drinking a glass of water at the counter when the phone rang against the granite.

He answered in French. They always spoke French. She said it was because the rest of the world expected English and her job as his mother was to make sure he never forgot his roots.

“You didn’t answer my text,” she said, skipping hello the way she always did. “I sent you the dog. Did you see the dog?”

“I saw the dog. He’s a disgrace.”

“He found the only snowbank on the street. Your father is very proud.” A pause he felt coming from a thousand kilometers away. “Have you eaten?”

“I’m about to.”

“That’s not a yes.”

“It’s an about-to-be yes.”

“Patrick.” Just his name, in the voice she’d used since he was small and caught at something he shouldn’t be doing. “You skate all morning, and you eat at three in the afternoon. I raised you better than this.”

“You raised me to win faceoffs. The eating I figured out myself.”

“And clearly you figured wrong.” He heard her moving around her kitchen, something set down on the counter. “Eat. Call me after the Nashville game. And don’t read the internet about the desert team. Whatever they’re saying, it isn’t decided.”

“It isn’t decided,” he agreed, which wasn’t the same as believing it. The fact he’d now received two calls telling him New Mexico wasn’t an issue had him concerned that it very much was something to worry about.

“I love you. Go eat.”

She was gone before he could answer. He set the phone face-down and opened the fridge. Meal-prepped containers sat in rows, labeled by day. He’d felt guilty when he first hired someone to come in and cook for him, but Titus was now a valuable member of his team. Every week, he looked at Patrick’s schedule and prepped accordingly. He’d left chicken and rice for today and salmon and vegetables for tomorrow. He pulled out today’s container, placed it in the microwave, and leaned against the counter while he waited.

Chicago was the first place to feel like home since he left home. The city had never felt warm—he doubted it would, in any sense—but it was solid, and the Syndicate played a system that suited him. The staff gave him minutes and clear expectations and didn’t ask him to be anything other than what he was. He’d come here after two years in a hockey outpost where the arena held four thousand people and the nearest airport was ninety minutes over roads that froze in November. Chicago had felt like the first full breath he’d taken in years.

If the Suns drafted him, he’d be starting over in a desert city with no history, no infrastructure, no reason to exist as a hockey market except someone’s ambition and a pile of expansion fees. Santa Fe in July hit one hundred and five. He’d grown up scraping ice off his father’s truck in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue before school. A life in the desert read like a mistranslation, his whole self rendered in a language that didn’t carry the right words.

The microwave beeped. He ate standing up, fork in one hand, scrolling the schedule with the other. The road trip started the day after tomorrow, Nashville, then St. Louis, and then home. He’d pack tonight, not because it took long but because he liked having it done.

He rinsed the container, dried it, placed it back in the stack. Marc’s reassurances were already fading, and underneath them rumbled the quieter voices he kept behind the same wall as everything else. Protection lists forced choices. The cap meant teams couldn’t keep everyone, and the players who survived were the ones whose value was undeniable. His value was real but quiet, and a front office loved that right up until it needed room for someone louder.