Page 44 of Caught Offside

The facility was nearly empty at that hour, June thinning it down to a couple of young guys rehabbing, a goalie doing edge work on the far sheet, and the strength coach nursing a coffee and pretending not to watch him fail to move the bar. Most of the roster was scattered for the summer, home to Sweden and Ontario and wherever else home was, skating on their own clocks. Patrick had Montreal he could have gone back to. But he’d stayed, and he came in every morning where the staff could see him because front offices kept a quiet tally of who showed up in June and who didn’t. If it ever came down to the GM weighing whether he was worth keeping, he wanted that part easy: the guy who never left, who put in the work when no one was making him. It was the same instinct as the deal, in the end. Control the one thing he could and hope it counted. Pruitt had texted twice about getting a group together for a round of golf. Patrick had left both unanswered. Being around people meant holding his face still enough that nobody asked questions, and he didn’t have it in him.

Between sets, he checked his phone. He’d started the morning Marc called and hadn’t been able to stop. The rumor mill was loud—beat writers, expansion-draft columns, every account with an opinion on who each team would protect. His own name kept turning up on the wrong side of it, slotted in with the likely-exposed. None of it was official. None of it could be, with the Cup Finals still going. But he kept refreshing anyway, checking for the one update that would make it real, as if seeing it coming would make it easier to take. The official word never came. That changed nothing. The not-knowing stayed with him out to the car and through the rest of the day.

Back at the apartment, Marc’s email was waiting with the terms he wanted to take to the front office. Not a contract, not yet. Just the shape of one. Patrick read it through twice at the kitchen counter. A long-term deal, more years than he had left, at a lower number than he was worth, with a no-move clause built in. The no-move was the point. A team couldn’t leave a no-move player exposed, so the clause did what no amount of clean play had ever managed to guarantee—it took the decision out of their hands. On paper it was simple. Marc walks it into the GM’s office, Chicago gets cap room and a top-four defenseman locked up long-term, and there was no version of the expansion draft that ended with Patrick in a Suns sweater. It would cost him close to two million over the life of the deal, money he’d have earned on the open market and now never would.

He hadn’t told Marc to send it.

The money had never been what stopped him. He’d told Marc as much, or part of it. What stopped him was that he couldn’t look at the document without hearing the question underneath it. If he carved two million dollars off his own contract to stay, he needed to know he was buying Chicago—the city that had finally felt like his, the first address that hadn’t belonged to a team that could ship him out of it—and not buying his way back into a bed in Wisconsin. Because relationships ended. He’d organized his entire life around that single fact, and giving up two million dollars on the bet that this one would last was not a thing he knew how to do.

He closed the laptop.

He cooked with precision. The kitchen was already clean, and he cleaned it again. He read four pages of a book and couldn’t have said what happened on any of them.

His mother called in the evening, and he watched her name sit on the screen through two rings before he answered. He’d never let it ring more than once before.

“Allô, Maman.”

“He’s alive.” Sylvie’s voice came warm and fast, all of it in the French they always fell into. “I sent you a message about your Tante Hélène’s hip, and I hear nothing for two days. I told your father, ‘He’s busy, or he’s sulking,’ and your father said, ‘It’s June, what is there to be busy with.’ So.” A breath. “Which is it?”

“Neither. It’s the offseason. There’s nothing to report.”

“There’s the voice.”

“I’m not doing a voice.”

“You’ve used it since you were six. The one that means everything is wonderful, Maman, please stop asking.” She said it without heat, which was worse than with it. “You forget I knew you before you could talk. I learned you first.”

He stood at the window. The lake had gone flat and dark below the buildings.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m training. I’m reading.”

“He’s reading, Claude.” Away from the phone, to his father, and then back. “Alone, in June, in that apartment with no one in it but him.”

“I like the quiet.”

“You’ve told me that since you were small. I never once believed it.” She let that land, and then, gentler, “Patrick. Whatever it is, you don’t have to tell me tonight. But tell someone before you’ve turned it over alone so many times that it stops being a thing that happened to you and starts being who you are. You do that. You’ve always done that.”

He could have told her then. All of it—the list, the number, the desert team, the man in Wisconsin he had not mentioned to either of his parents because saying his name aloud would make it real, and what was real could be taken from him. The words were right there. He didn’t say them.

“I’ll call Papa this weekend,” he said. “I should go, Maman. It’s late there.”

In the silence, he heard her decide not to push. He was grateful and sorry at the same time and couldn’t have said which was bigger.

“Okay, mon cœur. Eat a vegetable. Je t’aime.”

“Je t’aime.”

He set the phone face-down on the counter. He’d shut the door on Asher for days, and tonight, on his mother too, and he could keep every door shut as long as he wanted. The list couldn’t be shut out. It had a date, and when it came, it would make his choice for him.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In Cedar Rapids, Asher started a double play in the seventh, and the throw that started it was the best he’d made all year.

The batter squared late and dropped a bunt to push the runner to third, and Asher was on it before it stopped rolling. Out from behind the plate, bare hand, no setup, he fired up the line to third on pure instinct and beat the runner by a step. The third baseman swiped the tag and turned it loose across the diamond to first, doubling up the batter by half a stride. It was two outs on one bunt, the kind of play a scout wrote down, that used to live in his chest for a week, and Asher jogged back behind the plate, reset his fingers for the next sign, and felt almost nothing.

Feeling almost nothing after a play like that hadn’t stopped being strange. He was playing the best ball of his life and watching it happen from a distance, like footage of somebody who’d figured it out. His arm was alive. His framing had gone quiet and exact. He was calling games his pitchers didn’t shake off, and the org had noticed. A month ago, that would have been the only thing in his head. Now it sat off to the side, important and weightless, while the rest of him tracked a different scoreboard: how many hours since Patrick had answered, what the answer had said, how much of Patrick had actually been inside it.

He caught a clean game on top of the throw, called a near no-hitter into the seventh before the kid on the mound walked the bases loaded and lost it, stole a fistful of borderline pitches back over the corner for strikes, smothered a slider in the dirt with a man on third that would have scored in April and didn’t tonight. Delgado said something low and approving about his receiving on the way into the dugout, the kind of remark that used to light Asher up for a week. He nodded, said thanks, meant it, and felt it run straight off him. The org was watching. He could feel it in how the staff talked to him lately, a half-degree warmer, a man being measured for a different uniform. Four years he’d wanted exactly this. It was finally arriving, and it was arriving into a version of him that had both hands full.