Iget there first, which is a joke, because in the years I’ve been meeting Darius at this bench, I have never, not once, beaten him to it.
The air is briny and cold enough that my breath comes out in little plumes, dissolving as soon as I try to see them.
The bench is wet, but I sit anyway, legs splayed, hands tucked under my thighs, feet vibrating out last night’s leftover nerves.
I can feel my phone in my pocket, burning a hole through the denim, a radioactive lump of missed calls and texts and the message I’ve been staring at for half an hour, not because it’s poetic, but because “Meet me at the spot” means there’s a truth about to drop, and nothing is ever the same after.
The wind whips off Elliott Bay, sharper than I remember, stinging the cut on my chin and the other one just above my left eyebrow, the one the team doc said “probably could use a stitch” before taping it shut and sending me back out for third period.
It feels good, actually. I like the ache, the way the cold makes everything feel urgent.
He walks up from the path, not in his usual gait, but slow, measured, like he’s pacing off the final steps before a firing squad.
He’s in sweatpants, an old Steelhawks jacket that’s too small for him now, hood up, hands jammed in the pockets.
His face is unreadable, jaw set, eyes flat and bright as river rocks.
He doesn’t sit. Not right away.
He just stands there, looking at me, then out at the water, then back at me again, like he’s triple-checking I’m real. The silence is brutal, but I hold it. I always do.
He sits, finally, the bench creaking under his weight. “Hey,” he says, and the word is too soft, so he clears his throat and says it again, harder this time. “Hey.”
“You wanna start?” I ask, because I don’t trust myself to do anything but joke.
He nods, but he doesn’t speak. He pulls his phone out, unlocks it, swipes, then holds it out to me. “Read,” he says.
I take it.
The screen is already open, glowing white in the dim gray light. It’s an email draft, from Vincent, the subject line, “Hero or Hate? Steelhawks' Rising Star and His Ties to the Holt Shooting.”
There’s a photo at the top, me with my helmet off, blood smeared like war paint down my jaw.
I look like a guy who just won a fight, but the article underneath is a slow-motion autopsy.
I read. The first line, “After a lifetime of near-misses and anonymous seasons, Asher Rosen finally got what he always wanted: attention.”
I feel my face go cold. My ears ring.
He’s pulled everything I ever said, every offhand line I dropped in those late-night, whiskey-soaked conversations, and fed them into a wood chipper.
There’s a paragraph about Cap’s funeral, about the “awkward” hug I gave Caleb, about how I was the only one who spoke at the wake, and then there’s the smoking gun:
“But the relationship between Rosen and the Holt family wasn’t as simple as survivor and casualty. Sources confirm that Rosen and Caleb Holt were seen together multiple times in the weeks leading up to the shooting, including at a diner off I-5, where witnesses recall a ‘heated conversation’ and a ‘possible exchange of items.’
The question no one wants to ask: did Rosen know?”
My hands are shaking so hard I almost drop the phone.
I keep reading, even though the words crawl across my skin like ants.
There’s a section about Darius, about the “complicated dynamic” in the locker room, about the “emergence” of a romance with a “local sports journalist.”
There are quotes, actual quotes, about how I “felt invisible,” about how I “just wanted to matter.”
He has me talking about the shooting, about how “sometimes I wish I’d just stayed down,” about how “being a survivor is its own kind of prison.”
It gets worse. There’s a screenshot, a chat log, two lines that look like I sent them, but they’re twisted, out of order, made to sound like I was confiding in Vincent about Caleb, about the “plan” and the “aftermath.” The best part?
