Chapter seventeen
Pratt
Iwoke at five thirty-three, before the alarm.
The ceiling came into focus first. My bedroom was the right temperature, and nothing in the room was out of place.
My phone was face down on the nightstand, where I'd left it. I turned it over and read the message.
Sully:At Nora’s.
I'd sentAre you at workfirst. In the ten minutes before the reply came, I built five explanations that would have made his absence understandable, including short staff at the bar, a schedule change, and Sully having left his phone there. When the answer arrived, it didn't fit any of them.
Sully had never mentioned going to Nora's. He told shift stories with enough detail that it would have come up if he'd ever gone to her place, and he would have set a story inside it.
I checked the thread a second time and then set the phone back down.
My shower ran for four minutes. The heat brought my shoulders back to baseline and loosened the stiffness in my hands.
I made coffee and set the mug at its usual spot on the counter. I ate standing, a simple breakfast of eggs and yogurt.
After that, the morning continued in its usual order. I gathered my keys, wallet, and phone, set my bag by the door, and ran ten seconds of “More Than a Feeling.”
Sully’s door was quiet when I passed it. It was not quite seven, which meant he would still be asleep on his day off, if he were home. I thought about him lying diagonally across the mattress with one hand thrown above his head. I'd seen that enough times now for it to lodge in my head as standard Sully.
In the elevator, I shifted to my hockey brain and ran the coverage rotations for the morning skate.
Our session ran short.
I was on the ice twenty minutes early, before Rook came through the gate. I'd already made two passes along the boards and settled into the paint by the time the forwards started gathering at the blue line.
Kieran came in from the right on the first rep and moved the puck low along the boards to Cross. The shot came from the dot, low, blocker side, tight enough to beat a guess. I wasn't guessing. The puck hit my pad and deflected into the corner.
"Again," Coach called.
It was the same setup, one beat faster. I was ready before the shot left Kieran's stick.
On the fourth rep, Kieran changed his release point, getting the puck away a quarter-second earlier. He'd leaned into his front skate on the shift, a tell, and I got my glove up in time,barely. The puck hit the webbing hard enough to ring through my wrist.
"Good read," Heath said behind me on the reset.
I moved back to the top of the paint.
They sped it up.
Kieran went low to Cross. He snapped the puck back across the grain, and Heath cut through the crease as the shot came. I tracked it through the screen and caught it clean at chest height.
There was a pause after that one.
Coach Markel didn’t call the next rep immediately. He stood at the boards with his arms folded, watching us reset.
"That’s it," he said after a second. "That’s the read."
Kieran circled out of the zone, tapping his stick once against the ice.
"You’re early on everything today," he said as he passed.
Coach looked down the line once more, then back at me.
