Page 22 of Cross Check
His sleeves were pushed up. His forearms worked as he julienned ginger into translucent slivers. The light from the stove hood caught the fine hair on his arms.
"I have to testify," I said from the doorway.
He set the knife down and turned to face me. Full attention, no rush, no alarm. The goalie's stillness, the patience that lets the play come to you.
I told him everything. The texts they'd recovered. Petrov's handler. The pattern of embedded cover. The timeline that would prove I'd been making legal, permitted bets while Petrov used those transactions as camouflage for his operation. I told him more than Sarah would have liked, probably more than was wise.
But the 3 AM version of Kieran Walsh had earned a trust that the daylight version hadn't even asked for. And I was tired of carrying this alone.
He listened without interruption. His hands rested on the counter, still. When I finished, the kitchen was quiet except for the oven ticking through its preheat cycle.
Then he asked, "Did you do it?"
The question landed differently than it had before. In the guest room, after the wall punch, he'd saidI believe youas a response to my confession. This was different. This was direct. A yes-or-no question asked by a man who wanted to hear me say the answer one more time, not because he doubted it but because he wanted me to hear myself say it in daylight, standing up, in the kitchen that had become ours.
"No," I said.
"Okay."
I stared at him. "That's it?"
"I asked. You answered. I believe you." He picked up the knife and went back to the ginger. "Sit down. Dinner's in twenty minutes."
I sat down. The kitchen smelled like lemon and brown sugar, and Kieran was standing three feet away cutting vegetables with the concentration of a man performing art, and for the first time in eleven months, someone had asked me directly if I was guilty and when I said no, they'd believed me.
Not reluctantly. Not with caveats. Not with the careful hedge ofwell, the evidence suggests.Just:I asked. You answered. I believe you.
I pressed my palms flat against the counter and breathed.
Brue's next article dropped the following morning.
STORM'S GAMBLE: Inside the Decision to Trade for Nico Varis
This one was different. Not a hit piece, but measured and thorough, the kind of long-form journalism that built credibility by appearing balanced. Brue laid out the facts of the trade, the organizational risk, and the league's ongoing investigation. He quoted unnamed front-office sources who described the acquisition as "a calculated risk with significant upside." He referenced the team's playoff trajectory and the salary cap implications, plus the precedent of other teams trading for players under investigation.
Then, buried in the seventh paragraph like a land mine, my "reported living arrangement with a teammate whose identity has not been confirmed but who multiple sources describe as a veteran player with longstanding ties to the organization." He didn't name Kieran. He didn't need to. The implication of special treatment, of monitoring dressed up as housing, was embedded in the phrasing the way Petrov had embedded my bettingrecords into his operation. Invisible unless you knew where to look. Devastating once you did.
I read it on my phone at the kitchen counter. Kieran read it on his iPad across from me. We were close enough that our elbows nearly touched. The morning light was sharp between us, casting shadows from the mugs, still arranged by size, tallest in the center.
"He's thorough," Kieran said, scrolling.
"He's dangerous."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
He locked his iPad and looked at me. The morning light caught the angle of his jaw, and the line of his neck, the grey-blue of his eyes that shifted depending on the hour and the mood and—I was starting to suspect—whatever he was feeling about me at any given moment. Right now they were the grey of lake ice, clear and focused.
"You need to be careful in New York," he said. "The testimony is good. The article is noise. Don't let the noise make you reckless."
"I'm never reckless."
"You punched a wall two weeks ago."
"That was controlled demolition."
His mouth twitched. The tectonic shift. "Nico."
"I'll be careful."
