Chapter 164 Kai Signs

Chapter 164 Kai Signs

POV: Kai

The office was smaller than I expected. A desk, three chairs, a window that looked onto a car park, a plant in the corner that had seen better days. Patrick Reeves sat behind the desk with the contract open in front of him, already signed on his side, waiting on mine. My coach sat to my left in one of the visitor chairs, present and quiet in the way he was quiet when something mattered. 
My phone was on the corner of the desk with Richard on speakerphone, his voice having come through clearly when we set it up ten minutes ago to say he was there, that he was ready, that he was proud, and then nothing else because Richard had learned when words were enough and when presence was enough and today presence was enough. Riley was in the waiting area outside the door.
She had driven with me. She had sat in the passenger seat the whole way without filling the silence with anything it did not need, which was one of the things about her that I had never stopped noticing even after months of it. When I pulled into the car park and turned off the engine she looked at me and said: “Go do it. I’ll be right here when you come out.” Nothing more. Nothing that performed support. Just the clean, certain fact of it. I had wanted her inside the room.
But I had also known, in the way you knew things that required honesty with yourself to acknowledge, that the final act of this needed to be completed alone. Not because she was not part of it. Because she was too much a part of it for me to know whether the weight in the room was mine or ours, and I needed it to be entirely mine when I signed my name.
Reeves pushed the contract across the desk toward me, I picked up the pen. I looked at the signature line. My name printed beneath it in clean type, waiting for the version of itself that was handwritten and permanent and could not be taken back once it existed on the page.
I thought about my mother.
Not deliberately. She arrived the way she always arrived at significant moments, without announcement, simply there, the specific warmth of her presence that existed somewhere in my body rather than in the room. I thought about her standing at the boards of every rink I had ever played in, arms folded, eyes on the ice, the kind of watching that was not casual observation but something more concentrated and more committed than that. She had driven me to practices in the dark before school and picked me up in the rain and never once made it seem like a cost rather than a choice.
I thought about the number seventeen.
About being eight years old and explaining to her why I had chosen it and watching her face do the thing it did when I said something that landed in her correctly, that particular brightness that belonged only to her. She had sewn it onto a training jersey the following week. I had worn it every season since.
She had believed in something she would never live to see completed. I was completing it now, in a small office with a dying plant in the corner and a car park outside the window and my father’s silence on speakerphone and my coach sitting two feet to my left and the girl I loved in the waiting area on the other side of a closed door.
I did not cry.. I was past the place where that grief required tears. I had cried for her already, properly, in the way she would have told me to, and what remained of that grief was not sharp anymore but present, the comfortable settled weight of someone who had been deeply loved and knew it.
I sat with it for thirty seconds, Then I signed my name.
The pen came off the page and I held it for a moment and looked at what I had written and understood that the world was different than it had been thirty seconds ago. Not dramatically different. Not different in any way the car park outside the window could register. Different in the way that mattered, which was internally, in the part of a person where the things they have been building toward for their entire life either arrived or didn’t.
This one had arrived. Reeves extended his hand across the desk and I shook it. My coach stood and put his hand briefly on my shoulder, which was more than he usually offered and which meant more because of that. I picked up the signed copy of the contract. I picked up my phone from the desk, Richard’s speakerphone still active, and said: “Thank you for being here.”
“Wouldn’t have been anywhere else,” he said. His voice was thick in a way that Richard’s voice rarely was.
I put the phone in my pocket and walked to the door. Riley was on her feet before I had finished closing it behind me.
She looked at my face first, reading it the way she always read me, before her eyes moved to the signed contract in my hand. Something in her expression opened, the particular opening of someone who has been braced for a moment and finds that the moment arriving is better than the bracing.
I held up the signed copy.
She crossed the waiting room and I did not have time to say anything before she was there, her arms around me, her face against my shoulder, and I held on with the signed contract still in my hand and my face against her hair and the small waiting room quiet around us.
Behind the closed door of the office, Richard’s voice came through the speakerphone that nobody had switched off.
“She would have come to every game,” he said quietly.
The door was closed. Neither of us heard it.
But Marcus was there, having arrived in the car park just as we came out, and the office door was not quite as thick as it appeared, and Marcus heard it clearly.
He told Kai three days later, simply and without ceremony, the way Marcus delivered the things that mattered.
Kai did not say anything when Marcus told him. He just nodded once and looked at the middle distance for a moment.
And carried it the right way for the rest of his life.