Page 56 of Take Two

There is a brief pause before Marcus speaks again, his voice shifting slightly, moving from professional to something closer to personal.

“How are you handling it? All of it.”

I rest my shoulder against the brick and watch a cyclist cut smoothly through the intersection before answering.

“I’ve been thinking,” I admit. I hadn’t planned on going here today, not with Marcus, but the thought has been sitting in me long enough that it comes out anyway.

Marcus lets out a soft, knowing laugh. “That’s usually how these conversations start.”

“It isn’t about the media.” I wave the words away, almost physically, a brief absent swipe of one hand.

“What is it about?” he asks carefully. There’s a tentative quality to it, like he’s not sure what direction this is about to go. Poor Marcus, asks like he’s bracing himself for something catastrophic.

I take a slow breath and try to find the words for something I haven’t fully articulated even to myself.

“I’ve got three years left on my contract.”

“You do.”

“I’ve always assumed I’d play until my body made the decision for me. That’s been the plan since I was a kid,” I say quietly, almost like I’m saying it into the open air rather than directly into the phone. Like saying it too loudly might somehow disturb the arrangement I’ve had with myself for the last two decades.

Marcus doesn’t interrupt. He just holds the line and lets me keep going.

“I never really think about what comes after hockey,” I admit. “Every decision I’ve made since I was twelve years old has been about getting to the next level, staying in the league, finding a way to keep playing. I’ve always figured I’d know when the time came. That something would signal it.”

“And now?” he asks, the surprise quietly threaded through the question.

I glance back through the window. Tazja is smiling at something the estate agent is saying, clapping her hands together once, her whole face alight with a kind of excitement that she doesn’t try to contain. She looks like she belongs in that room. It is the first time since she moved to Seattle that I can picture her exactly where she is supposed to be.

“Now I’m not so sure anymore.”

Marcus lets the silence sit between us without rushing to fill it. By the quality of his quiet, I can tell he’s bracing himself. He is expecting this to be worse than it is.

“I don’t mean I want to retire tomorrow,” I add quickly. “I still love the game. I still want to play. I still think I have years of good hockey ahead of me.”

He exhales audibly, and the relief in it is genuine. “I know you do.”

I nod to myself. “I just don’t know if I want hockey to be the thing that decides when the rest of my life gets to start.”

The words come out steady, but they surprise me on the way out. I feel them differently in the open air than they’ve been sitting inside my chest. Marcus goes quiet for a beat too long, which tells me they landed the same way for him.

I’ve never said them out loud before. I’m not sure I’ve truly admitted them to myself until right now.

“When we negotiated this contract, you told me to think about where I wanted to be in five years,” I say. “Back then the answer came immediately. I wanted to be playing hockey.”

Marcus is quiet for a long moment. Knowing him, he’s definitely turning my words over in his mind before he finally speaks.

“I’ve represented enough players to know the question almost always shows up before the answer does.” I let that sit for a moment, watching another car move through the intersection below me. “It doesn’t mean the answer is urgent. It just means you’re starting to look in a different direction than you used to.”

Marcus waits, comfortable in the quiet the way he always has been. He’s been doing this long enough, managing enough different personalities and egos and career crises, that he has developed what I can only describe as nerves of reinforced steel.

He has been my agent since the day I signed my first professional contract. Somewhere across the years that followed, somewhere between every negotiation and every difficult season and every conversation that didn’t have anything to do with contract terms, he became something more than that. He has celebrated every milestone. He’s talked me down from every setback. He has never let me lose sight of who I am when I’m not wearing a jersey. If there is one person I trust with my career in the same way I trust him with my actual confidence, it is Marcus.

“I never expected to be asking it this soon,” I reply.

Marcus chuckles quietly. “Jamie. You’re thirty-two, not forty-two.”

“I know.” I laugh despite myself, then release a long breath.