“Goodnight. Drive safe.”
Finn looked at him for one more second. The expression was there, the one Evan couldn’t read, and then Finn got in the driver’s seat, started the engine, and pulled out of the lot. Evan watched the taillights shrink down the access road until they turned onto the main street and disappeared.
Evan got in his own vehicle and drove home the same route he always drove, the streetlights cycling through the same intersections, the board on the passenger seat. He had been driving this route for over a decade. He could do it without thinking. He did it without thinking.
The house was silent. Evan hung his coat on the hook. Set the clipboard on the counter next to the mail he hadn’t opened.Poured a glass of water from the tap that dripped from the washer he kept meaning to replace and drank it standing at the sink.
Evan checked his phone. Typed:You okay?
The response came ninety seconds later. One word.
Sure.
Evan set the phone on the nightstand and got ready for bed. The scout reports would get done. The hotel logistics would take most of the morning but they were manageable. He brushed his teeth, set his alarm, and turned off the light.
Sure.
Evan closed his eyes.
9
FINN
Finn had gone back for his keys, which was the kind of stupid, forgettable errand that wasn’t supposed to change anything.
The side entrance was unlocked, the corridor dim on the after-hours setting, and Finn was halfway down it when he heard his name through a door that was open a crack. Coach Tremblay’s office. Finn stopped mid-stride.
“Peterson’s groin holding up?”
Evan’s voice. “Day-to-day. I’ll check with training staff in the morning.”
“Marchetti cleared from that upper-body thing?”
“Cleared for contact practice. Should be full go by the end of the week.”
“Good. How’s Holloway’s head this season? Kid seems distracted.”
“Holloway’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”
Finn stood in the corridor. The fluorescent above him hummed. His keys were in his fist, the teeth pressing into his palm where he was gripping too hard.
Peterson’s groin. Marchetti’s shoulder. His name, third in the sequence, in the same voice. The same cadence. The same flat professional tone Evan used for every piece of program business that crossed his desk. Holloway. Not even Finn.Holloway,filed between an injury update and a scouting logistics note, delivered with less inflection than Evan gave the weather.
Finn’s throat closed. Not all at once. A tightening from the inside, his sinuses burning, his ribs aching, his breath going too fast and too shallow for the air to fill. He pressed his spine to the cinder block wall, the cold of it went through his shirt, and he stood there and listened to the man who’d had his grip on Finn’s waist an hour ago file him between a groin injury and a scouting report.
No hesitation. No catch. Not the smallest shift that might have meantthis one is different.
All that patience. All that waiting, all that believing that the real Evan was the one in the truck and the film room and the apartment, and the guarded Evan was the performance. Standing in this hallway with his spine to the wall and his throat burning, Finn heard it for what it was. The guarded wasn’t the performance. The guarded was the reflex. It came out of Evan without effort, without thought, the way breathing came, and Finn’s name in that voice was what Evan sounded like when he wasn’t trying. When he was just being himself.
The man who touched Finn like he was the only real thing in the room could stand on the other side of a door and make him invisible without flinching.
“Scouts at every game now,” Coach said. “Last thing we need is personal drama tanking his draft stock.”
“I know.”
“Keep an eye on him.”
“I will.”
