Page 59 of Blind Spot
I took my keys off the hook.
“I’ll go in first,” I said.
He said nothing.
I sat in my car waiting for the garage door to grind up, and when I pulled out, I started it back down before I was all the way clear. It was a trained move, automatic.
I had the Rook and Varga Show running before I hit the room.
”—and the thing nobody tells you about ten days on the road, Trier, the crucial thing, is that the laundry doesn’t end when the trip ends. The trip ends. The laundry is eternal. I did four loads last night. I’m a middle-six forward running an industrial laundry operation—“
“Uh-huh,” Trier said. He looked at me. “Are you sick?”
“Am I—no. Why?”
“You look off.”
“I look spectacular. I have a skincare routine and a smooth face that I’ve kept all season. You’re falling in love with my—“
“Sure,” Trier said, and went back to his laces. I stood at my stall with my bag still on my shoulder.
He saw it. Trier, who couldn’t find his own second glove without a search party, looked at me for three seconds and saw it. I dropped my bag and started dressing.
Rafe hovered. He walked toward my stall with his helmet in his hands, stopping a half-step short of where he usually stopped. He opened his mouth and then closed it. Pratt, taping his stick across the room, looked up at me once and went back to the tape.
I’d spent half a decade with Rook telling me to assume someone was watching. This was the first morning the watching was real. I couldn’t stand the weight of it.
Rook came in at his usual time and dressed at his stall two down. We didn’t look at each other. It was the normal system.
Markel ran breakouts. On the third rotation, I drew Rook’s side, and the puck came back to him on the half-wall under pressure. He did what he always does when it’s me out there; hemoved it to the spot where I was going to be. Except I wasn’t there. I’d read the pressure a half-beat late, and the pass slid through the place where I should have been standing, dying against the far boards.
Coach blew the whistle. Everybody glided to a stop.
Markel stood at the blue line and looked at the spot where the puck had died, not at Rook or me. He focused on the empty ice between us.
“Again,” he said.
We ran it again, and I was where I was supposed to be. The puck arrived, and the drill moved on.
At the far end, during a water break, I caught Heath watching me.
It wasn’t a glance or a nod. He was watching. He stood by the bench with his helmet pushed up and his eyes on me. When I caught him, he didn’t look away fast like a man caught. He slowly turned toward Kieran.
There was a brief exchange. Kieran said something short, and Heath answered shorter. Then Kieran nodded, and they both skated back into the drill as if nothing had happened.
They could see the fight in my face. I’d spent my whole life being unmissable in front so nobody looked in the back, and now the back was showing.
Heath drifted past my stall after practice with a towel wrapped around his neck.
“Rough flight home?” he asked. He was cracking the door open.
“Slept like a baby,” I said. “Woke up every two hours crying.” I watched the joke fail in his eyes.
I was one of the last to leave the room. I listened to my footsteps echo off the concrete in the parking garage. As I passed Heath’s SUV three spots from the elevator, I saw him inside withKieran. They were talking. Heath’s hand movements illustrated his words.
They didn’t see me. I kept walking.
***
