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Not because I don’t understand it. Every line is one Marek took off himself and put on a page for a federal judge to sentence him by. Every line is worse for him and better for me.

Five weeks ago, I stood on stairs in the port district and told him there was nothing he could say to me. He said ask me for the third one. I didn’t ask. I went down the stairs, sat in a truck, and counted to sixty twice.

He wrote it down instead. He wrote it for a federal judge and put his name at the bottom. He didn’t send me a line to say he had.

My hands stay level on the desk because that’s what they do. My throat closes and my eyes burn. I blink once and keep looking at the page. The words stay where they are. So does his name at the bottom.

“He didn’t have to write it that way,” I say.

“No.”

“What did it cost him?”

“That’s not my department,” Yeardley says.

“You’ve read it. You’ve read a hundred statements. What did that paragraph cost him?”

She puts her pen down flat and lines it up with the edge of her pad.

“His counsel would have advised him against every word of it,” she says. “Federal sentencing runs on cooperation and where you put the weight. The same facts could put you at the center without ever using the word designed. He was offered that wording more than once. With what he brought in, it was likely he wouldn’t go into custody at all.”

“But because of that paragraph?”

“He goes into custody. How long is the judge’s business, and I’m not going to speculate.” She squares the pen again. “But you asked what it cost. It cost him the difference, and he knew it.”

I sit in a small office on Cormack Street with fourteen pages in a plastic sleeve in front of me. I do what I’ve done my entire life: put a number on it. This one comes out in months. I have no mechanism for that. There’s no account it goes into. Nothing I can sell. “Mr. Doyle.”

I get my head up.

“I want to tell you what this document is,” Yeardley says. “Not what it means to you. What it is. That statement is why you’re sitting on this side of my desk instead of being served in your building lobby. The federal attorney’s office is charging Lindqvist on documents. It doesn’t need you in a witness box. Because of that, it doesn’t need a deal with you. A man they don’t need a deal with is not a defendant.”

“Okay.”

“Your criminal exposure isn’t zero, and I’m not going to pretend it is. But it’s very small, and it got small because of Brandt’s statement.” She takes the sleeve back and puts it in the drawer. “The league is a different building. You signed a loan from a betting operation. You moved a total twice. I’ll tell you what I’ll be recommending. It’s not a promise, and I’ll deny I said it if you repeat it. One season suspension. Full, from the first of July. No pay. No facilities. Eligible to sign again the following summer.”

“A season.”

“I’ve seen five of these in nineteen years. Four were for life,” Yeardley says. “The difference in your file is that nobody put a dollar in your pocket. Somebody put fourteen pages on the table. What you did this afternoon by walking in here without a lawyer helped. Don’t do anything clever between now and the ruling. Don’t talk to press. Don’t post. Don’t be photographed with anybody. Be extremely boring for four months.”

She caps the pen.

“You’ll play again,” she says. “Just not this year.”

Fin comes at eight with a bag of tools, because he’s decided he’s fixing the window frame.

He checks the ceiling and corners first, then gives me a long report on the building’s guttering that I don’t follow. There’s already a summer’s worth of sun on the back of his neck and dust in his hair. He’s louder in my kitchen than eighteen thousand people have ever been in the rink. He works the top-left sash out with a chisel while I hold the chair. There’s rot four inches in. He says there we are with actual joy.

He doesn’t ask me one question about the afternoon.

At half past nine, he starts putting the tools back in the bag. He stops with one hand inside.

“I need to ask you a favor. I want you to know I hate it.”

“Ask.”

“The rent up there. It’s eleven hundred. The jobs don’t clear until August, so I’m about six weeks short.” Faster now. “It’s only until August. Just while this is running. I know what you’re going to say. I’ve got no right to be standing in your kitchen with a chisel asking you for⁠—”

“No.”