I look at him. He looks tired and old.
"Thank you," I say, because I don't know what else to say.
"Don't thank me yet," he says. "Reaper's still in that locker room. He's going to be quieter, but he's not going to be different."
"I know."
"Handle that part."
"I will."
He nods once and walks away.
Practice is the strangest thing I've ever skated through.
I walk into the locker room, and the conversation doesn't stop. It just adjusts. Danny looks up. "Heard about the email. That's bullshit. Sorry, man." Then Liam says, "We got you. Just so you know." Carter—the veteran defenseman who's barely spoken to me in six months—nods at me and goes back to taping his stick. Rodriguez claps my shoulder on his way past.
Reaper is in his stall on the far side. He doesn't look up. He doesn't say anything. The team has rearranged itself around him in a way I can feel but can't see—guys who used to drift toward his stall are sitting elsewhere, pretending to look at their phones.
He's not gone. He's still the captain. He's still going to be a problem. But the room has shifted, and he can feel it too. I can see it in the set of his shoulders.
Coach runs us through drills. Reaper stays away from me on the ice. He passes when he should pass and doesn’t make a run at me. He doesn’t acknowledge me. He plays like a man going through the motions of his job while everyone watches him do it.
Yesterday made something visible that’s been true for months. Coach knew. The board knew. The GM knew. They just didn’t want to say it out loud until they had to.
Yesterday I cracked something. The crack is what I have to work with.
Practice ends at four. Most of the guys peel off to the showers, then home, on a quick turnaround for tomorrow's game. I stay in the locker room longer than usual. Reaper does too, because he always does.
Eventually, it's just the two of us and the equipment manager doing rounds.
I wait until the equipment manager leaves.
"Reaper."
He doesn't look up. "Not interested, West."
“Wasn’t asking if you were.”
I cross the room and sit on the bench across from his stall. Not in his space, but close enough that he can hear me without raising my voice.
He has the choice to walk out.
He doesn’t.
“You and I are going to talk for two minutes,” I say. “Then I’ll let you go home, and I won’t bring this up again. If you want to walk out, walk out. But I’m only doing this once, so decidewhether you want to hear it from me here or from someone else later.”
He sets down the wrap in his hands and crosses his arms.
“I have eight months of video. Not just yesterday. The Boston board. The cross-checks during home opener week. The hits during the scrimmage, you thought nobody was filming.”
I lean back against the wall.
“Practice cameras don’t always catch audio, and they don’t always get the right angles, but they get enough. I have all of it.”
His expression doesn’t change.
“I also have six months of notes,” I continue. “Dates. Times. Which coaches were in the building, every conversation I had with Coach about you, and every conversation he avoided having with me. I have photos of the bruises. Medical records. Texts from teammates saying what you did was fucked up.”