My pen stays still.
The coffee steams between us.
“A kid where?” I ask.
His jaw tightens.
“No.”
“I’m not asking for a name.”
“You are asking close enough.”
“Then tell me where to look.”
He studies me for a long second, then lowers his voice.
“Ask why the rookie keeps disappearing after practice.”
The sentence lands clean.
Too clean.
“What rookie?”
He stands.
“Do not make me regret that,” he says.
Then he leaves cash on the table for coffee he has not touched and walks out of the diner.
I sit there until his truck pulls away.
Only then do I write the sentence down.
Ask why the rookie keeps disappearing after practice.
I underline rookie once.
Then again.
Then I close the notebook.
Outside, the sky has gone flat and colorless, the kind of gray that makes every parking lot look like evidence. I sit in my car with both hands on the wheel and let the pieces stay separate for as long as they can.
A rookie.
Disappearing after practice.
A system where telling the truth costs him his sweater.
Finn has been quieter.
Not quiet enough that anyone outside the room would notice. Finn still jokes when cameras are near. Still leans into Colt’s noise. Still makes himself big in every doorway like a twenty-three-year-old trying to convince the world size and certainty are the same thing.
But after practice, he has vanished twice.
Maren near the hall.