When I returned home, my apartment was dark, and I left the overhead light off.
I sat at the kitchen table with my phone flat on the surface. Calculator app. The monthly budget I kept updated.
I added the surgery. Forty-two thousand. Round up for contingency. Forty-five and let the calculator spit out the expense totals.
Next, I looked at the numbers from my contract. Remaining paychecks. Performance bonuses I was tracking toward. Subtract rent, insurance, groceries, and the monthly transfers home.
The math worked if I stayed.
Then, a new thought arrived.
A trade.
A different team. One further down in the league hierarchy where I could be more valuable. Potentially more money. Enough to cover the surgery and build a buffer that didn't depend on sixty-game streaks of uninterrupted good fortune.
The math was clean. The logic was sound.
The cost was Chicago.
The cost was Kieran, the Northbound, and Markel placing me on one of the best first lines in the league.
I set the phone face down.
The pipe cleaner figure on the coffee table leaned forward in its permanent stride. Elbows out, committed, hard to knock over. I'd started talking to it on bad nights.
Two futures. A trade that solved the money and broke everything else. A stay that preserved everything and gambled the money.
I went to bed. The sheets were cold.
The numbers ran through my head. They were still running when I fell asleep.
Chapter twelve
Kieran
Ididn't recognize my packed bag.
Structurally it was fine: clothes rolled, toiletries sealed, and chargers coiled. The problem wasn't what it contained. It was what was absent. No team gear or suit. My luggage had nothing to do with hockey.
I zipped it shut and carried it to the front door.
Heath was in my kitchen.
Varga had seen us outside the Northbound and decided we were friends. It gave Heath and me a reason to be seen together, and I invited him home.
The first thing Heath had noticed when he walked in wasn't the view or the square footage or the kitchen that dwarfed his entire apartment. It was the photo on the bookshelf. He'd crossed the room, picked it up without asking, and studied it for a long time.
"Is that a beluga?"
"Yeah. Ansel."
"You're smiling in this."
I hadn't known what to do with that observation. Heath held the photo up, comparing the face in the frame to the face in front of him.
He set it back carefully, adjusting the angle so it sat exactly where it had been.
Now, the morning after, he stood at my counter eating cereal. Barefoot on heated tile, wearing yesterday's t-shirt and a pair of my sweatpants cinched with the drawstring pulled to one side. The hem rode up when he shifted his weight, showing the tendon above his heel, with a faint bruise on his ankle bone from a blocked shot two games ago that had already cycled through green to yellow.
