"Aware."
"Yes."
The office was very quiet.
Likely.
I sat with that word. Turned it over with the precision I applied to everything, examined it for its actual content.Likelywas notdecided.Likelywas a position with room in it.Likelywas, depending on what was applied to it, potentially moveable.
I was a man who dealt in data. Who made cases from numbers and patterns and the precise accumulation of evidence. Who had, for three seasons, built a professional argument for the line that anyone with access to the relevant statistics could follow to the same conclusion.
I thought about the folder on Callahan's desk.
I thought about the folder and the picks and the young defenseman they'd had their eye on and the ownership group and the wordperceptionand then I thought about what I was actually thinking about, which was Shay, which was where everything led now, which was where it had always led, which I was done pretending was a surprise.
"Thank you for telling me," I said.
Callahan nodded once. "This conversation,"
"Stays here." I stood. "I understand."
I walked to the door.
"Felix," Callahan said.
I turned.
He looked at me for a moment. The expression of a man who had done this job for six years and had developed the ability to read situations he wasn't supposed to read. "For what it's worth," he said, carefully, "the hockey case is strong. If someone wanted to make it."
I looked at him.
"I'll keep that in mind," I said.
I walked out.
The corridor outside the GM's office was empty , the administrative wing, separate from the locker room, the particular quiet of a building's official portion. I walked to the end of the corridor. I found the stairwell. I went down one flight and stood in the stairwell with my hand on the railing and I breathed.
Likely.
Shay's name. Trade. Management. Optics.
The thing I had been afraid of , the thing I had been using as a reason, as a weight in the calculation, as evidence that the risk was real and the fear was legitimate , had arrived. Not as a consequence of what was between us. As a consequence of what ownershipperceivedto be between us, which was, in the logic of organizations that monitored image, the same thing.
I stood in the stairwell.
I thought about going to the locker room. I thought about the specific, simple act of walking through the door and finding Shay at his stall and saying:there's something you need to know.I thought about what his face would do. I thought about the three days of careful professionalism and the quiet door and the floor of his apartment and the wordlikelyand what it would do to him to hear it.
I thought about what he'd said.
I did everything I could.
He had. He had done everything. He had been patient and careful and generous and he had handed me every exit and absorbed every cost and then he had come to my apartment in the morning and said the true thing without performance or protection and I had stood there with the word right there andgiven him a hockey argument and watched him close the door quietly.
He had done everything.
I had done almost nothing.
I didn't want it to be the reason, I thought, which wasn't a decision yet, just the beginning of the shape of one , the first line of a thing I was going to have to finish. I didn't want the trade rumor to be what moved me. I didn't want him to think that I had said the thing only because something external had forced my hand, that it was urgency rather than truth, that it was loss,prevention rather than , the other thing, the real thing, the word I had been living beside for two years without saying.
