It hadn’t always been a short list. That was the part Theo didn’t let himself touch most nights, the part filed deepest. At twenty, he’d had a whole country’s worth of people who wantedto be near him, the kid from Gothenburg who’d put up forty points in the SHL, who scored in overtime, who got mobbed at center ice, who got asked for his number by people who’d never asked anyone for anything. He’d been wanted then. And he’d looked at all that wanting and understood, even at twenty, with the cold clarity that had always been his curse and his only real talent, that it wasn’t him they wanted. It was the points. It was what he could do. And so he’d done the most reckless thing of his careful life and gotten on a plane to a country where no one knew the points, where he’d have to find out whether there was anyone underneath them worth wanting.
There was an answer to that question. Seven years later, Theo had it. The answer was no.
He’d lost the points somewhere over the Atlantic. The scoring touch had stayed in seat 14C, apparently. And he’d rebuilt himself into the other thing, the necessary thing, loved by coaches and trusted by partners and valued, genuinely valued, for exactly as long as it kept blocking shots. He was good at being necessary. He’d made a religion of it. And the religion had a hole at the center of it that he’d spent seven years not looking into, and tonight, in a Volvo in a parking lot in Rockford, Illinois, with a voicemail from an immigration lawyer cooling in his ear, the hole looked back.
He started the Volvo. The heater took a while. Across the lot, Shane Novak was leaning against his own car, with his phone pressed to his ear and his back curled in on itself. Even from forty feet away in bad light, Theo could tell the man was getting bad news, because Shane went still when he got bad news, the only time on earth Shane Novak ever went still. Theo watched him go still and thought, with the small cold clarity he brought to everything, we are both standing in this parking lot losing something. Then he put the car in drive and went home to the one-bedroom apartment he could not afford to lose either, anddid not think about Shane Novak again until it was much, much too late to stop.
Chapter 2
Theo heard it before he understood he was hearing it.
He was in the trainer’s room the next morning, empty at seven because no one in their right mind came in at seven, lying on a table with a heating pad strapped to his shoulder and his eyes closed, talking his shoulder into another day. The room had a back office, a glassed-in cubby where Pete the trainer kept the good tape and the bad coffee, and the door to it was open a crack, and through the crack came a voice, low and fast and wrong.
It was Shane. Shane never came in at seven. Shane came in at the last legal minute and made it his personality.
“No, I understand that, I do, I’m not, okay, I’m asking if there’s a payment plan. Like, like installments. Because the number you said, I can’t, that’s not, that’s more than I make in a, okay. Okay. What if I put down half now and—” A silence. Theo lay very still. “No, she’s not, my mom’s not a candidate for the standard program, that’s the whole, the neurologist said the experimental one is the only one that might actually, yes. MS. Mid-stage. It’s not slowing down, it’s—” The voice cracked, right down the middle, a clean break, and then came back patched over with iron. “Right. No, I get it. I’ll figure it out. Thank you for, yeah. Bye.”
Theo heard the phone go down on the desk, not slammed, just set down, carefully. Somehow that was worse. Then heheard Shane breathe, one long shaking pull of air, the sound of a man making himself be fine in an empty room.
Theo did not move. He was good at not moving; it was half his job. He lay on the table with the heat sinking into the ruin of his shoulder and he thought about what he had heard as a problem with parts.
The parts were these. Shane Novak needed a great deal of money. His mother was sick in a way that money might fix, or might at least slow, and the money was not the kind of money an AHL salary made. Shane was twenty-six and loud and a fan favorite and almost certainly broke, the theatrical broke of a man who financed a nice car to look like he wasn’t, and he was carrying this alone, at seven in the morning, in a glass cubby, where he thought no one could hear.
And Theo had money. Not the kind a hockey contract makes. The kind that made his hockey contracts look like loose change, that had been in the Lindgren name longer than Theo had been alive to spend it. Whatever the signing bonus had been, whatever the SHL had paid him, it vanished into accounts he didn’t manage and rarely opened, a rounding error against what his name was worth. He still drove the paid-off Volvo, not because he had to, but because he’d never cared to trade up. By any standard, Theo was rich. Generationally, immovably rich.
The math was not complicated. Shane needed money. Theo had it. Theo needed a citizen. Shane was one.
* * *
He waited until they were the last two in the room.
This took effort. Shane was a social creature; he closed the room down most nights, holding court, doing impressions, being the thing the room wanted him to be. But it was a morning skate and there was a team lunch and the guys peeled off in twos andthrees until it was just Shane, half-dressed, scrolling his phone with the grim focus of a man checking a bank balance and hoping it had changed, and Theo, fully dressed, sitting on the bench across the room with his bag at his feet, watching him.
Shane’s hair was still damp from the shower. There was a bruise along his left jaw, souvenir of a board check two games back, going yellow at the edges. He stood squared, set, shoulders just slightly too high. The posture of a man trying very hard not to look exhausted. He was twenty-six and he was carrying a number in his head that Theo had heard him say out loud and he didn’t know anyone could see it on him.
Theo saw it. He saw most things, when he was looking.
“What,” Shane said, without looking up.
“I have a question.”
“The answer’s no. Whatever it is.” Shane pocketed the phone and reached for his shirt. “I’m not flipping you for the better stall, I’m not switching sides on the power play, and I’m not telling Mercer the third goal was my fault, because it wasn’t.”
“It was.”
“Was there a question, or—”
“How much does the treatment cost,” Theo said. “Your mother.”
Everything about Shane stopped. The shirt dropped back against his chest. Up close the stillness was nothing like stillness. His jaw worked once, his throat moved, his knuckles went white around a fist of fabric. And Theo looked at all of it with the detached clarity he brought to defensive reads and thought: he didn’t know anyone was here. He has never been this exposed in his life and now someone is looking straight at it. “What did you just say.”
“This morning,” Theo said. “In Pete’s office. I was on the table. The door was open. I was not listening on purpose. But I heard.” He had thought about lying about this and had decidedagainst it, because the whole thing only worked if it was honest, and the only thing Theo had ever had to offer anyone was that he was honest to the point of being unpleasant about it. “The experimental program. Your mother. MS. You asked for a payment plan and they said no.”
“You—” Shane crossed the room so fast Theo half-expected to be hit, and braced for it, the old brace, the one that would pop the shoulder if he got it wrong, and made himself unbrace. Shane stopped a foot away, vibrating. “You heard a private phone call about my mother and you’re bringing it up, what, to needle me? To have leverage on me? You absolute—”
“No.”
“Then why.”
