“Yeah, I know you’re not my enemy,” I agree.“You’re just the guy who gets me sponsors and tells me when my life changes.”
“Listen,” he says, doubling down.“Portland is going to be good.Bigger contract.Endorsements in the Pacific Northwest.A fan base starving for a Cup.You can buy a place.You can settle?—”
“Stop saying settle,” I snap.
I stand in my living room and look around at the furniture I didn’t pick, the art I’d never have chosen, the couch I bought because it fit the space, not because it felt like me.
I’ve built my life like a hotel room—clean, efficient, nothing too personal, nothing I can’t leave behind without ripping something open.
And now I’m supposed to go to Portland and pretend I’m excited about this fresh start.
Believe that I’m not already picturing myself standing in a new empty apartment, keys in my hand, staring at blank walls, and realizing the only thing I’ve ever been allowed to keep is the part of me that performs.
I’ve done that on purpose.
It still hurts.
“Do you know what I think when I hear ‘trade’?”I ask.
He doesn’t answer.He knows better than to interrupt when my voice goes quiet.Quiet is where the truth lives.
“I think of my uncle,” I continue, and the words come out wrong—too personal, too old.“I think of his hands packing my clothes into a suitcase that wasn’t mine because I was too small to do it.I think of him driving me to a new house and telling me it was going to be okay, telling me I’d get used to it.”
My vision blurs for a second, and I blink hard, as if that can erase memory.
“At least I was done with foster families,” I add, because humor is the only thing that keeps grief from swallowing me.
I inhale.The air in my apartment smells like coffee and detergent.It doesn’t smell like me.It never does, and soon I’ll be forgotten.
“I got used to it,” I say.“That’s the problem.I got used to leaving.I got used to not belonging anywhere.”
“I’m sorry,” Conrad says, and it’s the right sentence, delivered in the wrong voice, too practiced to reach me.
It doesn’t help.
Because I did everything right.
I have the stats.I have the numbers.I have the wins.I kept them alive in games they had no business surviving.I gave them everything.I always do.I take pucks to the body and keep standing.I take the blame, the pressure, everyone’s fear, and hold it in my hands like it’s mine to manage.
And they still send me away.
I stare out the window again.Somewhere in this city, people are waking up next to the same person they woke up next to yesterday.Somewhere, someone is making pancakes in a kitchen they’ve owned for ten years.Somewhere, a kid is complaining about school, and his parents are alive to roll their eyes and tell him to eat.
My jaw starts to tremble.I clamp down on it.
My hands start shaking—worse than nerves, worse than anger.It’s my whole nervous system staging a mutiny, like my body is trying to climb out of itself.
I set my phone on speaker and walk to the kitchen sink.I turn on the faucet.
I shove my hands under the water as if the cold can reset me, like it can shock me back into control.
It doesn’t.
My thoughts keep snapping back to the same place, like my mind has one obsession and it refuses to let go.
Portland.
Oregon.
