Page 14 of Cross Check
I didn't know why I was telling him this. The hour, maybe. The dark room, the empty mugs, the strange safety of a space occupied by someone who hadn't decided I was guilty yet. Walsh sat very still, the kind of stillness that goalies learn, the patience that lets the play come to you instead of chasing it.
"What would she say?" he asked. "If you called."
"Rakas." I swallowed. "Darling.She'd sayrakasand then she'd ask if I was eating and then she'd tell me a story about Väinämöinen, he's the hero of theKalevala, and I'd feel like I was eight years old on her kitchen floor, listening to her voice while the snow came down outside."
I stopped talking. I'd gone further than I'd meant to, into a place I usually kept locked. Walsh was looking at me with an expression I couldn't place—not pity, not curiosity, something quieter. Recognition, maybe. The look of a man who understood what it was like to carry something alone and not realize how heavy it had gotten until someone asked you to describe it.
"You should call her," he said.
"Yeah."
"I mean it."
"I know."
Outside, the sky was starting to lighten. Not dawn yet, but the deep black was fading to charcoal at the edges. We'd been talking for close to two hours. In the morning, this would feel different, the daylight would reassert the boundaries, and we'd go back to being the goalie and the liability, the monitor and the monitored. But right now, at the tail end of the darkest part of the night, we were just two men who couldn't sleep, run out of reasons to pretend we didn't need the company.
"I should try to get a couple hours," I said, standing.
Walsh nodded. He didn't move from the armchair, and I understood, he needed time to power down too. The goalie's wind-down. You couldn't just turn off the vigilance. You had to let it unspool.
"Walsh," I said from the hallway.
He looked up.
"Thanks."
"For what?"
I thought about it. For the silence. For not pushing. For asking about superstitions instead of scandals. For sitting with me in the dark and treating me like a person instead of a problem to be managed.
"The tea," I said.
His mouth twitched. "Anytime."
I went to the guest room and closed the door. I arranged the blanket on the floor and lay down in the dark with theKalevalaon the nightstand above me and the sound of the kettle boiling again from down the hall. Walsh was making himself one more cup before he attempted sleep.
The ceiling looked the same as every other ceiling I'd stared at for the past year.
But the quiet felt different.
7
KIERAN
The article went live at 6:47 AM.
I knew because Nico's phone buzzed three times in rapid succession while he was standing at the counter making tea. I was in the hallway, still pulling on a shirt, and I heard the buzzing and then the silence that followed, the specific quality of quiet that happens when someone stops breathing.
By the time I reached the kitchen, he'd already read it. He was standing with his phone in one hand and his mug in the other, his face perfectly still. Not blank the way he'd been when Bishop hit him—this was something deeper. This was the expression of a man watching his own execution and deciding not to flinch.
I didn't ask. I walked to the counter and picked up his phone.
The Snake Sheds His Skin. Did Chicago Make a Mistake?
By Jerry Brue
The article loaded in sections, photos first. Nico in his Minnesota jersey, stick raised after a goal, his face twistedinto something that could be read as celebration or aggression depending on what you wanted to see. Nico shoving a Boston defenseman into the boards, the action frozen at the moment of maximum violence. Nico's face mid-shout at a referee, mouth open, veins visible in his neck. Every image selected to build a specific narrative.
