“Okay,” Jude murmurs, after a beat. “We are, before the game, going to need to do a small careful conversation, O’Shea.”
“Yes, Captain.”
My hand, against the small heavy embossed weight of the business card now nesting against the bourbon-and-vanilla interior of his jacket pocket two feet from my elbow, does not, in fact, reach for it.
I lick the cone, instead.
And, in the small private chamber of my chest, I think the only sentence the small private chamber of my chest is, at this exact moment, capable of thinking. The sentence is not the small clean girlhood sentence of the romance novels on my Kindle. It is the small dark precise sentence I have, against every cozy instinct in me, just earned in the past nine minutes.
An Omega who perished, in fact, at the hands of those who did not want her to have a happily ever after…
CHAPTER 28
Domino Effect
~IRIS~
There is, on the small embarrassing inventory of the hotel’s availability page at the moment Coach Declan booked the rooms two weeks ago, one king-size bed in this room.
Only one.
Matteo, on discovering this fact at three this afternoon, made a small soft incoherent noise of triumph somewhere in the back of his throat that the room-service receipt has, since, been able to do nothing to walk back. Rémi accepted the configuration in his usual silence, with the small dry observation that, on the small private cubic-foot ledger he maintains in his own head, the king bed in question was, against the small posted dimensions on the hotel website, in fact a single inch short of the proper specification, and that the inch was going to matter. Jude, in his captain register, observed only that the arrangement was, in fact, structurally fine, on the precise condition that the four of us were going to behave like adults for the duration of the night.
Filing the captain’s caveat. Filing the small downstream implications of the captain’s caveat. The folder is already in distress.
Right now, however, the four of us are crammed shoulder-to-shoulder against the mountain of overpriced hotel pillows, the duvet pulled up to our laps, the small slim silver laptop of Rémi’s open on his thighs across our laps, and the long bright square of its screen lit on a small old archived sports-blog article from seven years ago.
The article’s lead photograph is, in the precise compressed pixel resolution of a piece of online journalism that has been quietly buried for the better part of a decade, of an Omega woman.
Oh.
She is in goalie pads. Full uniform. The home jersey of a small senior-tier squad whose colors I do not, on first read, recognize. She is laughing on the ice in the precise unguarded joy-on-skates posture of a goalie who has, in the small private chamber of her own chest, just won a thing she has earned, and she is looking up at the camera over the curl of her own shoulder with the small bright openness of a woman who is, on the day this photograph was taken, twenty-three years old and about to be famous.
Her hair, where it escapes her helmet, is the precise warm gold of a wheat field in late September.
Her eyes — and this is the small unfair detail of her face that I cannot, on first viewing, look away from — are the precise pale gold-amber of a small expensive whiskey held up against a winter window.
And behind her, half-cut off by the edge of the frame, in a coach’s jacket of the same small senior-tier squad, the precise scaffolding of his shoulders not yet hollowed out by five winters of grief, with the small unguarded fully-present captain-and-coach grin of a man on a Friday afternoon in his late twenties — is Coach Declan O’Rourke.
Oh.
Oh, Coach.
Two tall buff men flank him, also in uniforms of the same colors. They are smiling. The four of them are, in the small frozen joy of the moment captured, in fact a complete unit.
Her name, in the caption, isSaoirse Boyne.
Matteo, beside me, exhales the small honest exhale of a man clocking the photograph for the first time.
“Fuck,” he whispers.
Rémi reads.
“Okay,” Rémi says, evenly, scrolling through the article with the precise unhurried index finger of a defenseman reading a scouting report. “Saoirse Boyne. Twenty-three years old at the time of the photograph. Signed three months prior by Vance Athletic Group. Half-mention in a senior-tier sponsorship release. Two clips of game footage on the page. The rest is, on the publicly indexed internet, very thin. The article from seven years later announcing her death is, professionally, even thinner. Three paragraphs. Listed asequipment failure and skater error.No follow-up coverage. No obituary in the senior-league reports of the year. As if a senior-league administrative tier of approximately fifteen men collectively decided that, on the small public-facing internet, the woman never quite existed.”
“We knew that part,” Jude says, quietly, on my other side. “Vance laid it out in the corridor.”
“I can find more,” Matteo announces. “Trust me. Give it.”
