Chapter 57 THE OFFER

Chapter 57 THE OFFER

POV: Reese Calloway

We went upstairs.

Cole sat at the kitchen table where he'd been sitting that morning and I put the folder from the magazine meeting on the counter and made coffee because it was something to do with my hands while I listened.

The suspension lifted officially at noon. The league's formal communication had gone to his agent first and then to Cole, the trade request expunged from his record under the specific language the league used when they acknowledged that a filing had been made under conditions that compromised the player's ability to act freely. Pressured circumstances. Two words that meant the league had read the documentation and drawn the conclusion the documentation was built to produce.

The interim coach had called at two. The locker room wanted him back. Tommy had texted Cole before the coach finished the call, which Cole mentioned without elaborating and which told me everything about the timeline of how that information had moved through the team.

I listened to all of it and watched his face while he talked.

He didn't look the way I expected someone to look when everything they'd lost over two years came back in a single afternoon. He looked like someone running calculations on something they hadn't finished calculating yet.

"What aren't you saying," I said.

He looked at his coffee cup. "The season starts in three weeks. Training camp starts in ten days." He looked up at me. "I've been here every day for six weeks. That changes."

I looked at him across the table.

"I know that," I said.

He put both hands around the coffee cup. "I'm not saying I don't want to go back. I do." He looked at the table. "Hockey is what I'm built for. Everything about how I'm put together points toward it. I've known that since I was eight years old on a Detroit pond and I've never once wanted anything different."

He stopped.

I waited.

"But I'm not the same person who filed that trade request," he said. "That person was operating alone by design. That was the whole structure of how he moved through everything." He was looking at the table when he said it.

"What's different," I said.

He looked at me.

"I have something I don't want to blow up," he said. "For the first time in a long time."

The kitchen was quiet around us. The coffee was warm in front of both of us and the folder from the magazine was on the counter and outside the window the city was doing its late afternoon thing, the light going orange at the edges of the buildings.

He was looking at me when he said it and he kept looking at me after he said it, not moving away from it or adding anything to soften what he'd said or redirect where it was pointing.

I looked at him across the kitchen table.

I thought about six weeks. The rehabilitation center lobby and the flash going off and the signed release from his PR team. The footage review in the van and the bench in the empty rink and the gala parking lot and the audio file and the all-night edit and the note on the laptop in Cole's handwriting. Ten days until training camp and three weeks until a season that would put him back in the world he was built for, which was not a world that included a photographer in a South Side apartment with a converted darkroom and a magazine meeting scheduled for Thursday.

"Cole," I said.

He looked at me.

"Go back," I said.

He was quiet for a moment. "Just like that."

"I'm not asking you to choose." I kept my eyes on his. "You shouldn't have to choose. Go back to hockey. Go back to the thing you're built for and that was taken from you for two years because you were protecting someone who needed protecting." I looked at him steadily. "We figure out the rest as we go."

He looked at me for a long moment. His hands were still around the coffee cup and his eyes were on mine and the kitchen was quiet between us.

"As we go," he said.

He said it slowly, the way you said something you were testing the weight of before you committed to carrying it.

Then he nodded once.

"Okay," he said.