Which meant the only axis left was the one I had been avoiding.
The reason.
I had told him in my head, in the stairwell, two days ago. I had said: I don’t want it to be the reason. It hadn’t been a decision then. It had been a rationalization, a postponement, a way to make not acting feel like an ethical choice.
The file was upstairs now.
The reason was all that was left.
I went down the stairs.
I didn’t go to the locker room.
I went to my car.
Shay’s building was three miles from the rink, ten minutes in light traffic, eleven in moderate, more if you hit the lights wrong. I’d done the drive enough times to know all three possibilities. Today it took ten. Every light cooperated. The city, indifferent and ongoing, cleared a path I hadn’t asked for.
I parked.
I went inside.
I knew his buzzer code. I had known it for four years. I had never used that knowledge without texting first. Today I used my key. He had given it to me last year, in the off,season, with an offhandfor when the contractor comes and I’m on the road,and I hadmade a note of it and pretended, to both of us, that it was purely logistical.
I knocked anyway.
The sound of his footsteps, crossing the apartment. Lighter than mine. Familiar enough that, for one clean, painful second, I was back at the door to Reeves’ party stairwell, listening to him cross the parking lot.
The door opened.
He looked at me.
He didn’t look surprised.
“Hey,” I said.
It was not an adequate word. It was the one I had.
He stepped back.
I came in.
The apartment looked like it had two days ago and like it didn’t.
The throw blanket was on the couch. The dead plant was still dead. The sock that had been mine was gone; either he’d thrown it away or put it somewhere I wasn’t going to look for it. The television was off. The room had the quiet, flat quality it got when Shay wasn’t performing in it , no music, no background noise, just the sound of a building and a city and two people who had run out of pretenses.
He didn’t sit. Neither did I.
I stood in the middle of his living room. He stood by the arm of the couch, one hand on it, fingers resting on the fabric like he’d been sitting there and stood up when he heard the knock.
“I went to the GM,” I said.
His expression didn’t change. Not much. Something moved at the edges , a small, very precise adjustment, like someone filing a new data point into an existing structure.
“You didn’t tell me about the rumors,” he said.
Even. Level. Nothing extra in it. The same voice he’d used in the parking lot when he’d saidthat was nothingandwhyandthat is not an answer.
“I know,” I said.
