“What room are you in?” I asked.
He told me the number.
Next to mine. I processed it without letting it show on my face.
We walked down the corridor.
My room was second-to-last on the left.
I stopped outside the door and found my key card. He remained with me, waiting while I scanned the card on thepanel, watching me with the same focus he gave footage when he was trying to understand something.
“I felt it,” he said.
The words landed between us.
He didn’t need to say what he meant.
I swung my door open and glanced his way. We had a choice here, and we both knew it.
“I’m glad,” I said.
“Me too.”
I went inside and closed the door behind me.
It wasn’t until I’d turned the deadbolt that I heard his footsteps moving away. His door opening. Then movement in the room next to mine.
I didn’t unpack my overnight stuff right away. Instead, I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall we shared.
There was no questioning what this was anymore.
The question was what I did about a father who didn’t know, a team that probably did, and a job that was the only thing I’d built that was completely mine. I’d been invisible in this world for years. That invisibility was the only thing that had felt safe.
It didn’t feel safe any longer.
I showered and brushed my teeth, climbing into bed without turning on the light.
The window looked out over a parking garage and a chain restaurant with its sign still lit. The usual view of a road trip hotel.
I lay in the dark and listened, hearing him drop his bag down on the other side of the wall. Water running. A long silence that meant he was standing somewhere, thinking in that still way of his. The low creak of a bed frame taking on weight.
Then quiet.
I lay in the dark and listened to him exist on the other side of three inches of hotel wall.
CHAPTER TEN
TOLREK
Iboarded the bus early because sitting still at the hotel had become impossible. Game prep worked better in motion. Mental sequences. Positioning reads. The patterns I’d need to track once we hit the ice again. Keeping my head occupied meant I didn’t think about other things.
Like the woman who’d be sitting in the row ahead of mine.
I took my seat and ran through the Crimson Crushers’ forecheck structure. They were aggressive and fast. They targeted new acquisitions in the first ten minutes, testing to see what kind of pressure you could handle. This was the standard strategy. I’d done the same thing myself in the past.
Haley boarded and eased down the aisle, her laptop bag hanging off one shoulder, her overnight bag in her other hand. She wore the same jacket as yesterday, dark blue with a hood she never pulled up.
She stuffed her overnight bag in the bin over her seat and took her usual place in the middle of the bus, directly in front of me.
