Chapter 248 248

Chapter 248 248
Alejandro's POV:

The flight home was an hour and fifty minutes and I did not say a word for the first hour of it, which for me was a medical event.

Connor noticed. He was across the aisle with a book he was not reading, and at some point he looked over at me and went back to not reading it. That was Connor asking, and I did not answer it.

Chen slept. He slept on planes the way he did everything, immediately and without any fuss, chin down, hands in his lap, and he did not move the whole way.

I sat there and tried to build a sentence for what his face had done in that hotel room and I could not get one to hold. He had looked at a ceiling with his hands open on a bedspread and I had gotten nothing. Not a wrong reading: nothing. Like putting your hand on a wall you had leaned on your whole life and finding out it was a door.

And then he had called me Ale. Into a pillow, with his back to me, after I had put my hand on it. My mother had called me Ale my whole life and my sister used it like a weapon, and in four years Kevin Chen had never once used it, and then he did, and it did not sound like either of them.

I called my mom from the parking lot because I always called her after a trip, and she made me put the camera on to confirm that I was safe and sound and not lying to her. We talked in Spanish. We always did. I told her about the eleven minutes and Holloway's stick on Chen's shin pad and Marsh turning his chair around, and she was as happy as me.

Then she asked where Kevin was. She always asked. I turned the phone around.

He came over with a bag on each shoulder and put his face in the frame.

"Hi, Mrs. Martinez," he said with a tiny smile.

She went into English for him, she did that for nobody else. She asked him something about the flight and he said it was fine and that I had let him sleep, so I surely had a fever or something serious going on. She laughed, the big one out of her whole body, and he handed me the phone back and went to put the bags in the car.

It was a ninety seconds talk. Maybe less.

The last time he had taken my phone he had kept it for forty minutes. That night he did not ask her one thing.

I did not notice that, but she did.

She waited until he was out of the frame. Then she went back into Spanish, low and quick, the way she went when she did not want a room to hear her.

"He never gives you the phone back," she said. "Kevin never does that."

"He's tired, mamá. We flew today."

"Mm." She was looking at where he had been, not at me. "He didn't ask me anything, Alejandro. Not one thing. That is not normal."

"He's fine," I said.

She stopped for two seconds, maybe less. She had been asking me about Kevin Chen for years and I had never once in my life given her two words.

"Are you sure?"

So I told her again that he was fine, he was tired, that was all.

"Okay," she said, in the voice she used when it was not okay and she had decided to let it be okay for now, and then she told me to eat vegetables that were not on a pizza, and we hung up.

Chen was waiting by the Xterra with the hatch up and both bags already in it, and he was looking at his phone.

My mother had that man on a screen for a minute and a half and came away with something, and I had been standing next to him for hours and got nothing.



Practice on Monday was where it started, or where I started, which were two different things.

Davis broke up the pairs for a gap-control drill, the way he did every couple of weeks, and he put Chen with Reiner.

It was a drill, twelve minutes, everybody rotated, nothing happened. Reiner was professional. Reiner was, if anything, generous. He pointed at the far post twice and Chen adjusted twice and the second rep was clean. From the blue line where I was standing with Connor waiting our turn it looked like a veteran defenseman teaching a rookie something for free.

But I could not stop watching it.

I knew how stupid that sounded, because nothing happened. A man in his thirties pointed at a post. And I stood there with my stick across my thighs and my mouth dry, tracking two guys down at the far end of the sheet.

Reiner played eighteen minutes a night in October and he was down to fourteen by the middle of November, and the four that came off him did not evaporate. They went somewhere. They went to a third pair that had not existed as an idea in September.

And the club had a scout at three of our games that month, because they wanted a defenseman, and every minute we played was the club saying maybe they did not need one. Every minute he lost was a minute closer to being the guy they moved to make room.

Chen came off after the twelve minutes and took his water bottle and squeezed it into his mouth from six inches the way he did, and I said, "What'd he say to you?"

"Nothing."

And that was the second time.

Kevin Chen had said the word "nothing" to me twice in less than a month. Once in the car outside Connor's house and once on a bench beside me. And before those two, going back four years to a dorm hallway in September of freshman year, I could not give you a single one.

Chen did not lie to me. Chen declined to say things, which was a completely different move and one I had always been able to spot, because when Chen was declining he stopped talking and looked at you and let you decide whether to push. Nothing was not declining. Nothing was a door closing with a person still behind it.

I let it go both times.

So I started watching him.

Not on purpose. It was not that I made a plan, I had never made a plan in my life. It was that I had always known where Chen was in a room without checking, the way I knew where my own hand was. Somewhere between a hotel in Detroit and a Monday practice, that stopped working. And the only thing I could think to do about it was look.

And I was going to look at him until I got the answers I needed.