"I can do that," I said.
"Good."
He turned and went back to whatever he'd been doing before I arrived. I carried my duffel down the hall and pushed open the guest room door.
Queen bed. Grey sheets. Nightstand with a lamp. Empty closet.
He wasn't expecting me to stay.
I set my bag on the floor and stood in the center of the room, letting my eyes adjust. The light from the window was pale and cold. Traffic noise filtered up from the street, muffled by fourteen floors of glass and concrete.
For a year, I'd been in rooms like this. Hotel rooms in cities where I was sent for meetings. Temporary apartments arranged by lawyers and front offices. The spare bedroom at my agent's house in St. Paul, before he'd dropped me as a client. They all looked the same. Functional. Temporary. A place to wait for whatever came next.
I unzipped my duffel and pulled out the things I needed. Phone charger plugged in beside the bed. And a worn paperback copy ofThe Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, that my grandmother had given me when I was twelve. The spine was cracked and the pages were soft from years of handling. The cover was taped along one edge where it had split during a move three teams ago.
I set the book on the nightstand. It looked small and absurd in the empty room.
Then I pulled the blanket off the bed, took the pillow, and arranged them on the floor between the bed and the wall.
The carpet was thin. My back would ache in the morning the way it always did, a dull complaint I'd learned to ignore. With my back against the wall, I had a clear line of sight to the door, the bulk of the bed between me and the window. Low and protected. It was the way I'd slept in every temporary room for the past eleven months.
The bed was fine. The bed was perfectly good.
I just couldn't make myself lie in something that could be taken away tomorrow.
I pulled the blanket to my chin and stared at the ceiling until the patterns in the plaster blurred and my breathing slowed. From somewhere down the hall, I heard the faint sound of a kettle boiling. Then silence.
My phone glowed on the nightstand above me. No messages. No one checking in. My former teammates in Minnesota had stopped texting one by one, like lights going out down a hallway. First the guys I'd only known casually, the newer players, the call-ups. Then the ones I'd eaten dinners with, whose kids I'd held at team barbecues. Last to go was Jennings, who'd been my linemate for two seasons and who sent a single text the day the trade was announced:Good luck out there.Nothing since.
I closed my eyes.
Chicago. New team. New city. New man down the hall who would report everything I did to the people who held my career in their hands.
My fingers found the edge of the blanket and gripped it.
Tomorrow I would walk into a locker room full of men who'd already decided what I was. I would lace up my skates and play the game that was the only language I'd ever been fluent in besides Finnish, and I would do it under the gaze of twenty thousand strangers who wanted me to fail and one stranger down the hall whose job was to watch me try.
Sleep came in fragments. Two hours, maybe less. Enough to function. Never enough to dream.
3
KIERAN
I found the bed untouched in the morning.
I'd gotten up for my usual pre-dawn routine of tea, stretching, and twenty minutes of visualization before the drive to the facility. The apartment was dark and quiet, and Varis's door was closed. I assumed he was asleep.
But when I passed the guest room on my way to the kitchen, the door was cracked open an inch. The bed was made with the tight corners of someone who'd been taught to respect borrowed things. The pillow sat centered on the mattress. The sheets hadn't been disturbed.
The blanket and a pillow from the foot of the bed were on the floor.
I stood in the hallway and stared at the arrangement. The blanket was folded neatly, not thrown. The pillow was positioned against the wall, between the bed and the window. This wasn't someone who'd gotten hot in the middle of the night and kicked off the covers. It was deliberate.
I filed it away and said nothing when Varis emerged ten minutes later, dressed in workout clothes, his face a smooth wall. He moved through the kitchen like he'd already mapped the space, pulled a mug from the cabinet without opening the wrong door first, found the green tea on the shelf without scanning, and poured the hot water I'd left in the kettle.
"There's eggs if you want them," I said.
"I'm good. Thanks."
