Page 85 of Payback On The Ice

The clip is everywhere by Wednesday.

Not just Marrack. The old one. The broadcast angle. Somebody cut them together—Marrack at the desk saying acted alone, and then ninety-one seconds of my brother going into the boards. It's on every hockey account. Somebody tagged Graymoor. Somebody tagged Theo. The comments are what they always are.

I don't read them.

Theo does. I know because I come into his room Wednesday night and he's sitting on the bed with his phone, scrolling, his face lit up blue and completely blank.

I take it out of his hand.

"Hey—"

"Stop."

He looks up at me. His eyes are red.

"The scout stopped emailing," he says.

I don't say anything.

"Duvall. He was emailing Halvorsen every couple days. Asking about my grades, my summer schedule. Monday he sent one about meeting my mom in June." His voice is very flat. "Nothing since Tuesday. Halvorsen emailed him twice. Nothing."

I sit down on the bed next to him.

"Theo."

"Don't."

"Let me tell them."

"No."

"Let me tell them what he said. In the room. At your stall. Take him out of the series. I'll tell Halvorsen, I'll tell the room, I'll call the paper⁠—"

"You're not calling anybody." He stands up. He's shaking. "It's not yours."

"It's my brother⁠—"

"It's my mouth!" His voice cracks. He lowers it, fast, glancing at the wall. "It's mine. It's my thing. I'm the one who did it. I'm the one who said nothing for a year. If anybody says it, it's me. Not you. Not Nico. Not Halvorsen."

"Then say it."

"I can't." He sits back down hard on the bed and puts his face in his hands. "Cole and Mikey are up for review. There's eleven guys on that team on some kind of money. Marrack will pull every single one of them if he thinks they backed me up, and he'll make it look like a budget thing, and nobody will ever be able to prove it. You don't know him. You don't know what he does."

"I saw him in the handshake line."

"Then you know a tiny piece."

I look at him. At the back of his neck, bent over. At his hands, pressed against his eyes.

"So you're just going to let him say it," I say. "On TV. That you acted alone."

He lifts his head.

"I did act alone," he says. "That's the part he's not lying about. Nobody made me do it the way I did it. He just made sure I'd do something." He laughs, short and awful. "That's the genius of it. He told the truth. Just not all of it."

I have no answer to that.

He takes his phone back out of my hand. He doesn't look at it. He just holds it.