At me.
For one suspended, gut-twisting second, his eyes find mine through the wire-threaded glass, green, unreadable, and yetsteady,always so maddeningly steady.
Every word I have rehearsed for exactly this moment over five years scatters like a broken play.
I step back from the glass, knowing damn well that those memories deserve to be burried in the past she left in the heart of Knottingley.
She takes a deep breath and let’s it out, turning away so her back is against the door and she has enough time to fix the weight of her duffle bag on her shoulder.
With a determined nod, she takes a deep breath and let’s it out.
No distractions. We’re not here to play.
Welcome to Minnesota, O'Shea.
CHAPTER 2
Locker Room Roulette
~IRIS~
The room they have given me to change in was, until very recently, a place where mops came to die.
The mops have not entirely accepted their eviction.
They lean in the corner like sullen, retired soldiers, four of them, bristled heads crusted stiff, and the whole space still wears their perfume the way a sweater wears the smell of an ex.
Bleach. Wet string.
The sour, mineral cling of standing water. Somebody has wheeled a folding chair in here and propped a hand-printed sign against it,AUXILIARY – GOALTENDER, in marker that smeared before it dried, and I have been standing in front of that sign for a full ninety seconds, holding my gear bag, performing the small private ceremony of not screaming.
North Star Elite has a recovery center with its own logo.
It has a bronze statue of a man being better than me. It has, I would bet the contents of my duffel, a goaltender’s lounge somewhere in the gleaming belly of this building with heated floors and a smoothie fridge.
And it has put me in the cupboard.
“Charming,” I tell the mops. “Real five-star treatment. I’ll be leaving a review.”
They decline to comment.
I drop my bag onto the chair before the chair can lodge an objection of its own, and I unzip it, and the smell that lifts out is so violently, stupidlyminethat something behind my sternum unclenches half a degree. My gear. My particular catastrophe of leather and foam and sweat that no laundry cycle has ever fully defeated, threaded through with the frosted-strawberry ghost of a hundred protein shakes and the cold-metal note of old ice that lives in the padding like a memory.
Underneath it, fainter, the cotton-candy body mist I spritz on out of pure spite at a sport that would prefer I smelled of nothing at all.
Home doesn’t have a postcode.
For me, Home is a bag that zips and moves where you need to be for the sake of growth.
I peel off the Gatorade-stiff hoodie I have been wearing since the airport, and I do not think about the airport, the corridor, the wire-meshed window, the green eyes on the other side of it. Compression shorts. Sports bra, the good black one with enough structural engineering to hold a small bridge. I stand there in the mop-scented dim, breath fogging faintly because nobody has thought to heat the cupboard, and I start the long liturgy of putting myself back together. Knee pads. The cool slither of base layers. My chest protector dragged down over my head so my pink hair static-clings to the collar and crackles.
I am bent double, wrestling the left pad’s strap, hair hanging in a damp pink curtain over my face, when the door opens.
Not a knock.
Not a polite throat-clear from the hallway.
The door simplyopens, swinging wide on its complaining hinge, a wedge of bright corridor light falling across theconcrete, and a voice that has clearly never once considered the concept of a closed door says?—
