Page 276 of Across His Line

“You’ve been saying I know since March.”

He’s right. I have. Since the night of the fight, since you need to make that decision, Rafferty, I’ve had three names on a piece of paper in my desk drawer and I haven’t called any of them. My father has called all three. My dad has opinions about all three. He sent me a two-page email about all three with bullet points on a Sunday at six in the morning.

I read every word of it. I called two of them myself from the parking lot behind Corvin, and I asked them what they’d do, and how, and how much, and what happens if I don’t want to sign right away. I listened to how they talked to me. Not to my father. Not to Berwyn. To me.

One of them talked for twenty-five minutes about my brand.

The other one is a woman named Dana Sato, who played college hockey herself at a school I’ve never heard of. She asked me about four minutes in what I wanted. Not what I was projected. Not where I was ranked. What I wanted.

I didn’t know. She said that was fine, it was May.

“Sato,” I tell Berwyn.

He looks at me over the coffee mug for a long time.

“Your father wanted Ames,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“He called me about it. Twice.” Berwyn puts the mug down. He doesn’t smile. He never smiles. But something in his face moves. “Okay. Good.”

I call my dad from the car afterward with the engine running and the windows down because it’s warm now, the first real warm, and the air smells like cut grass and the dumpster behind the dining hall.

I tell him. He’s quiet for a long time.

“Ames has represented two first-rounders,” he says finally. “Sato has represented none.”

“I know.”

“Then why—”

“Because she asked me what I wanted, and he didn’t.”

Nothing. I can hear his office. The window. Traffic, faint, three floors down.

“And what do you want, Rafferty?” he says.

“To play,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything for so long I look at the screen to see if he hung up. He didn’t.

“I’ll be in Buffalo,” he says. “The Wednesday. I’ve booked a room.”

Of course he has.

Tessa moves out of Corvin on the fourteenth.

It takes her two hours. Everything she owns fits in my trunk and my back seat with room to spare, which bothers me. Eleven boxes. The duffel. A lamp. A ceramic frog wrapped in a T-shirt, riding on her lap.

She found a sublet off a flyer on the board in the student center. Two blocks off campus on the second floor of a yellow house in a room a grad student is leaving empty until August while she does fieldwork somewhere in Peru. Paige has the room across the hall for the summer. Kylie’s going home to her parents’ until July and then coming back, she says, to help Tessa become a famous influencer.

The room is small. It has a slanted ceiling, a window that looks out at the top of a maple, and a desk somebody painted blue. She stands in the middle of it with her duffel on her shoulder and turns around to look at everything.

“It has a lock,” she says.

The door. An old brass deadbolt, the kind with a little knob you turn.

I look at it. Then at her.