Page 48 of The Reckless Rookie

We win, and the wins mean deeper playoffs, and deeper playoffs mean bigger crowds and national windows and a camera on me every shift, which means the one bad night I can’t afford has a bigger and bigger stage to happen on. Success is its own kind of trap for a guy like me. The better it goes the more there is to lose in a single ejection, and everybody in that building would love to be the guy who finally makes O’Sullivan drop them, because dropping the reformed enforcer in a playoff game is a highlight that follows you for a career.

And Roman’s still not sold.

He’s civil now. We’re fine on the ice, we’re a machine on the ice. But I catch him watching me the way you watch a space heater you left on, and after game three, in the tunnel, all he says is, “Three more rounds of you not swinging,” flat, like a countdown, and keeps walking. Not cruel. Just true. He’s not wrong that it’s a long way to go and I’m one bad shift from proving him right. I don’t get to argue it. I get to keep giving him the number, game after game, and hope the number talks him into it eventually, because words won’t.

I earned the room in the fall. I’m learning you don’t earn it once. You re-earn it every single night, with every guy who’s got a reason to doubt, and Roman’s got a good one.

I go to the barn before I sleep, because it’s become my routine, and Bonita comes to the rail for me now the way she didn’t use to, which Catalina noticed before I did and mentioned once, dry, like it meant something to her that the mare decided about me.

She’s heavier than she was. The vet came today and I was there for it, watched him run a hand down her side with a face I didn’t like, heard him say the word breech and the word watch her and tell Catalina to call the second anything changed. Catalina went still the way she goes still when something matters and she doesn’t want you to see it matter.

“She’ll be alright,” I said after, because I wanted it to be true.

“Maybe.” Catalina looked at the mare a long time and didn’t say the rest of it, whatever the rest of it was. Just maybe, and let it sit.

I didn’t have an answer for the way she said it. I stand at the rail now and Bonita brings her head level with mine and looks at me, both eyes, close, and I see myself in them, small and bent in the dark of them, the whole wild animal of me looking back out. Then she sets that heavy head against my chest, a thousand pounds that could put me through the boards without a reason, choosing not to. That’s the only kind of safe there is with her. The chosen kind. She could change her mind in a breath and we both know it, and standing here counting on her not to is the closest thing to trust I’ve got.

There’s a lot I could lose right now. I keep finding new items on the list. That’s what having things does. It writes you a list.

She walks me back toward the bunkhouse near three, which she shouldn’t. I’m a placement. I sleep in the bunk with the other men the county sent her, and every minute she spends out here in the dark walking me halfway home is a minute that could sink us both if the wrong headlights came up the drive and wondered why. We both know it. We do it anyway, stopping in the black yard halfway between her porch and my bunk, standing too long, because neither of us wants to be the one who says goodnight first.

I want to tell her about the empty place down the road and next season and the plan I’m not allowed to have. I want to hand her the whole reckless future I’ve been building in my head all night.

I don’t. Handing her a future is a bet, and I don’t know yet if she’s holding the same cards, and there’s a splinter of a night a few weeks back, a phone on a counter, a wall that came up, that I’ve never quite pulled out. We papered it. We’re good. I leave it there, where it’s safe, and I don’t go looking under it.

I lie down in a bunk with the best season of my life going and a hundred yards of dark between me and the best thing that ever happened to me, and I count everything I’ve got now instead of everything it costs.

The list keeps getting longer. Her coffee on a cold step. The place down the road. A mare who leans on me. A room I have to win back one skeptic at a time. A future I’m not allowed to plan and can’t stop planning.

I used to keep everything movable. Nothing nailed down, nothing I couldn’t walk away from inside an hour, because a thing you can’t lose is a thing nobody can use against you. That’s how I survived, the whole way up. Own nothing. Need no one. Stay light enough to leave.

And I tore it all down without noticing, one nailed-down good thing at a time, a mare and a woman and a place and a season, until I’m lying here in a bunk I can’t walk away from, counting everything I’ve got like a man who forgot the whole reason he used to travel light.

I fall asleep before I finish the total. It’s the last easy night I get for a while, and the only mercy in it is that I don’t know that yet.

Chapter twenty-five

Catalina

Three weeks after the first letter, the county stops being polite about it.

The second one doesn’t say routine. It says formal notice of comprehensive review, Delgado Ranch placement program, full records requested inside fourteen days, a hearing date, and the phrase they bury in the third paragraph where they put the ones that matter: pursuant to concerns regarding suitability and supervision. Concerns. Somebody raised concerns. Off-cycle, out of nowhere, with a deadline and a demand for every file I keep.

I don’t go through this one twice at the counter the way I did the first. Once is enough, and I set the coffee down carefully, because my hand isn’t steady and I don’t want to hear it rattle in the empty kitchen, and I let it be true.

This is what I’ve been managing since the phone rang in this kitchen weeks ago. It stopped being a shadow on the wall. It’s on my counter now, in triplicate, with a deadline.

I know it’s Sebastian before I’ve finished the notice. I don’t need proof. I’ve spent three years learning the shape of his hand, the way you learn a man’s handwriting, and this has his fingerprints on every line of it.

He didn’t threaten me. He never threatens. He arranges. Somewhere in a paneled office he mentioned to the right person over the right lunch that the county might want to take a closer look at Judge Delgado’s daughter and her high-profile placement, the hockey player, the one with the assault charge, all that liability sitting out on a ranch with at-risk placements. He didn’t lie. He didn’t have to. He aimed the machinery and stepped back and let process do what process does, and now there’s a review with a date on it and his name nowhere on the paper.

Three weeks after Finn arrived, I filed a conflict-of-interest notice and removed myself from his formal supervision. Sebastian’s firm works county contracts. The filing is available to anyone who knows where to ask, and he knows exactly where to ask.

He doesn’t have to know Finn has been in my bed. He only has to suggest that my recusal hid a personal interest, then wait for the county to investigate the question.

I call him. I don’t decide to; my hand does it, the old reflex, take the danger somewhere I can see it.

“Catalina.” Warm. Delighted, almost. “I was hoping you’d call.”