The silence on the other end was a held breath. “Shane. Don’t you dare. If you’re—”
“It’s not me, Mom. There’s a fund. For families. I applied months ago.” The lie came out smooth, which scared him, how smooth it came. “They covered it. All of it. Up front.”
“You’re lying to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You always click your tongue before you lie, you’ve done it since you were six—”
“I’m not lying,” Shane said, and clicked his tongue, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Mom. It’s covered. You start next month. The neurologist already has the paperwork. Please, please let me have this. Let me give you this one thing.”
His mother cried, then, the careful muffled crying of a woman who’d taught herself not to scare her kid, and Shane sat on the floor and listened to it and the yes finished closing over his head, and he thought, okay. Okay. Whatever it costs me. Okay.
* * *
He found Theo in the parking lot the next morning and said, “Yes, but I have terms.”
Theo nodded once and said, “Good. I have terms also. We will write them down.”
That was how Shane Novak ended up at a Denny’s at nine in the morning across a sticky booth from the human iceberg he was about to marry, watching Theo Lindgren uncap a pen and smooth a sheet of lined paper flat on the table like they were negotiating a trade.
“This is insane,” Shane said. “You know this is insane.”
“Order food,” Theo said. “You look like a ghost.”
“Don’t tell me to eat. I’m in a strict—”
“Performance diet. I know. Everyone knows.” Theo wrote a number 1 on the paper. “Money. I pay the clinic directly. Not toyou. To them. It is not income, not a gift to you, nothing that looks wrong. The treatment, the monitoring, all of it, paid by me to the program. You never touch it. Agreed?”
The money never touching his hands made it harder to feel bought that way. He hated that the iceberg had thought of that. “Agreed,” he said.
“Two.” Theo wrote it. “We marry at the courthouse. Soon. Before any interview, so that on paper we have been married long enough to be established. We tell the team we are roommates. The story is: cheaper rent, closer to the rink, two guys saving money. This is normal. Half the league has roommates.”
“And when someone finds out we’re actually married? Because someone will. I’m the guy who has to do team media, Theo, I’m on the socials, I’m—”
“Then we are married,” Theo said, “and it is not their business, and we let them think whatever they think. The marriage is real. That is the protection. We are not hiding a marriage. We are declining to discuss our private life, which is allowed.”
Shane chewed the inside of his cheek. “Three?”
“Three.” Theo’s pen hesitated, the first hesitation Shane had seen from him in this surreal affair. “We live together. My apartment. It is a one-bedroom. I take the couch—”
“You’re like seven feet tall.”
“Six-three.”
“You won’t fit on a couch.”
“I have slept in worse places than a couch,” Theo said, in a tone that closed the topic, and wrote: T = couch. S = bed. “You take the bed. We share the bathroom and the kitchen. We split groceries. We are civil. We do not have to be friends. We have to be convincing, which is different.”
“And four,” Shane said, because he had one, he’d lain awake all night building it. He took the pen out of Theo’s hand, which made Theo go very still, and he wrote it himself, in his own bad handwriting, pressing too hard. Nothing else. “There’s a line. Whatever this is, it’s paper. It’s a license and an apartment and a story. We don’t — it doesn’t become a thing. You don’t get to be nice to me to make yourself feel better about buying my mom’s treatment, and I don’t have to pretend to like you. We keep it clean. We keep it cold. We get you your status, we get her treatment, and then we get a divorce and never speak again. That’s the deal.”
Theo looked at the words for a long moment. Something moved behind his face, fast, gone before Shane could read it.
“Agreed,” Theo said, and took the pen back, and signed his name at the bottom of a Denny’s napkin, deliberate, and Shane signed under it. Their names, together for the first time: two enemies and a smear of syrup. Shane would think about it later, much later, as the realest thing in the whole document, because it was the only part neither of them had any idea how to fake.
* * *
Illinois has a mandatory 24-hour waiting period. Theo had picked up the license the day before; of course he had. The courthouse was beige.
