Chapter 60 MARCUS AGAIN

Chapter 60 MARCUS AGAIN

POV: Reese Calloway

I had my hand flat on the kitchen table.

"Tell me," I said.

Cole told me. Measured and specific, the way he delivered information when he'd already sorted through it and knew what the relevant pieces were. A league media deal, negotiated and approved before the ethics board ruling came through, while the formal review was still pending. Press credentials for the full season. Press box access for every home game. Player interview availability on a standard rotation.

Marcus Deane, credentialed to cover the Chicago Vanguards' season.

Which meant Marcus Deane would be in the same building as Tommy Banks for every home game from now until the end of the season.

I sat at the kitchen table and listened to Cole go through the details and kept my hand flat on the surface and didn't say anything until he finished.

"Can the credential be challenged," I said. "Given the ethics board ruling."

"The league's legal team is reviewing it. The ruling changes the picture but the credential was approved under different circumstances and the review process has its own timeline." He paused. "It's not fast."

"Is Tommy okay."

"Tommy found out before I did," Cole said. "Someone in the locker room saw the credentialed press list and mentioned it. Tommy was already on the ice when he heard. He finished the session, came off the ice, handled the conversation in the locker room without help, and went back to the weight room."

I looked at the wall across the kitchen.

"He's okay," Cole said. "Not performing okay. Actually okay. He dealt with it and moved on and I watched him do it and it was different from how he would have handled it six months ago."

I sat with that for a moment.

Tommy finishing a skate session and handling a locker room conversation about Marcus Deane without help and going back to the weight room. Six months ago Tommy had called me at eleven at night asking how much of the documentary was going to be about him. The distance between those two moments was real and Cole had watched it happen from the same room.

"And you," I said.

Cole was quiet for a second.

"I'm angry," he said. "Marcus in that building, in the press box, with access to Tommy for a full season, I'm angry about it." He said it plainly, not performing the anger and not managing it away. "But I'm not doing anything about it. You and Tommy and June did the work. The right way. The documentation, the ethics board, the legal process, all of it built properly so it holds." A pause. "It's not mine to absorb. I'm letting it go."

I looked at the wall.

The magazine work on the right side, the documentary prints on the left, the trumpet player from the L platform in the corner where the light hit the frame in the afternoon.

I thought about Cole three months ago, twelve incidents on a suspension record and a trade request and a reputation built from absorbing everything that came toward the people he was protecting. The machinery of making himself the loudest thing in the room so everything else went quiet.

"Good," I said.

The line was quiet for a moment.

"That took me three years to get to," I said. "The part where you stop absorbing it and let the process do what it's supposed to do." I looked at the trumpet player photograph. "It's harder than it looks from the outside."

"I know," Cole said. "I watched you get there."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Reese." His voice had shifted slightly, less informational and more direct. "I need you to hear me say this."

I waited.

"I'm not making myself the target anymore. Whatever Marcus does this season, whatever he writes, however he tries to use the press box access, it's not mine to absorb." He stopped. "I'm saying it out loud because I need it said out loud. Not just decided. Said."

"I hear you," I said.

"Good."

I looked at the wall across the kitchen. At the work on it, new and old, mine in the full sense of the word.

"That took me three years to get to," I said again. "Saying it out loud instead of just deciding it."

A pause on Cole's end.

"I had a good teacher," he said.

The kitchen was quiet around me and the city was outside the window doing its evening thing and the photographs were on the wall and Cole's voice was on the phone from two hours away and the line stayed open for a moment longer without either of us filling it.