Page 86 of Triplets for the Pucking Playboys
My phone is the only thing moving in my apartment, the screen lighting up every few seconds with a notification that might as well be a dog whistle. There’s nothing to do but stare at it, thumb hovering over Sage’s contact, sometimes opening it just to see her name, then closing again before my hand can betray the rest of me.
The apartment’s silent except for the hum of the fridge and the echo of the TV, which I turned off hours ago but still believe I can hear. I pace, socked feet wearing a track from the busted futon to the window and back. The first hour, I called it cardio. By hour three, it’s ritual. By hour five, it’s the only thing holding my bones in the right order.
I keep waiting for the anger to come back. Instead, it’s just this ache, like the world’s largest hangnail, impossible to ignore and not even close to fatal. The most Swedish of emotional responses: walk it off, bottle it up, find a logical explanation, and set it on the shelf next to the others. But the shelf is full, and nothing about this is logical.
I grab the puck from my coffee table and start working wrist shots against the old foam roller. The roller is dented from lastseason, when I thought I could fix my own form by repetition. Now it just serves as a backstop for all the stuff I can’t say out loud. I throw the puck, retrieve, repeat. Every slap, a curse.Helvete.Djävla helvete. Fucking hell.
The first dent in the drywall doesn’t register. The second leaves a crescent of paint dust. The third, I leave, just to see if it’ll bother me more than everything else.
The phone vibrates. I let it ring out. Someone from theFront, probably, or one of the guys, or maybe my mother, who watches every press conference and wants to know if I’m okay. I text backYesorAll goodor nothing, depending on the hour. It doesn’t matter. Nobody believes the answer anyway.
I make a protein shake with enough powder to choke a mule, pour it into a Storm-branded shaker, and drink it straight from the bottle. The taste is sour, chemical. I slam the empty against the counter for punctuation, then check the phone again.
The headlines cycle faster now. There’s the latest from the beat writer—Storm Star Linked to Staff Scandal—and the follow-up,Sources: Pregnancy Fallout Could Sideline Key Players. There’s the sports podcast, the local news, the idiot blog with the banner photo of my face, cropped and up-lit like I’m about to stand trial at The Hague. I scroll through the comments until my vision goes blurry. Then I close the phone and do another lap of the apartment.
The thing that keeps looping in my head: they all talk about the pregnancy like it’s a foregone conclusion, but none of them know shit. They don’t know who, or why, or what it means. They want it to be me because it makes a better story, and because I have a face that fits the slot they’ve made for me. But it isn’t, and I know it isn’t, and the idea that everyone can just decide it’s true makes me want to start over as a hermit in a shipping container.
I open my texts again, read the last message from Sage. It’s not even a sentence, justThanks for listeningwith no punctuation. I think about writing back. I don’t.
Outside, the city is a melted snowdrift, everything gray and shining under the sodium streetlights. I watch the headlights, try to find a rhythm. I can’t. I put on my old team jacket, the one that still smells like locker room, and stare at the keys in my hand for a good thirty seconds before I decide to move.
I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just know that everyone’s got a theory, and nobody’s got the facts.
So I’m going to find them myself, and I’m about to start at the coffee shop, and with the one person who had Sage’s back besides the three of us.
The shop is two blocks from the arena, but a world away in terms of expectation. The barista’s got a man bun and an underwhelming mustache, and he makes a point of ignoring me every time I look up from my phone. There are three customers: a pair of students in the corner, heads bowed over their laptops like monks at a relic, and a woman by the window who could be either asleep or dead. I choose a seat halfway between the register and the emergency exit, just in case.
Mia walks in twelve minutes late, wearing the same battered Storm backpack from last season and a scarf that eats most of her face. She clocks me, does a quick scan of the shop, and sits across from me without taking the scarf off.
“Sorry,” she says, not sounding sorry at all. “Had to ditch my shift early. It’s been very busy since I’ve taken over Sage’s—” she mumbles something indistinct and then apologizes once more.
“It’s fine,” I say, even though it’s not, and wave at the barista for two more coffees. He ignores me, which is probably the only reliable service in this place.
Mia keeps her bag in her lap and her hands wrapped around the straps. Her hair’s pinned up in a hasty bun, and her nails arechewed to the quick. She looks at the window, then the students, then finally at me. “It’s terrible, what happened,” she says, voice low.
I shrug. “I just need to know what happened. You were working with her the whole time, right?”
She shifts in her seat. “Yeah. Until last week. Now it’s just me and the nutrition intern.”
The barista delivers our coffees with a look of studied contempt, like we’re lowering the property value just by sitting here. Mia adds three sugars, stirring fast, the spoon clinking against the cup with a Morse-code urgency.
“I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble,” I say. “I just need the facts.”
Mia laughs, short and dry. “Facts? About what?”
“About Sage. About what they were doing to her. About why none of this makes sense.”
Mia stirs her coffee with a wooden stick she’s already broken in half, eyes flicking toward the lounge door as if someone might come through it any second. When she finally does speak, her voice is as if she’s been holding the words in for longer than she should have. “You know about the cameras, right?”
I shake my head. “Just the documentary crew. The usual GoPros and bench cams.”
Mia lets out a short breath, something between disbelief and exhaustion. “That’s what Sage thought too.”
She looks at her coffee, then away again, like the memory leaves a bad taste behind.
“She hated them, but only in the way you hate bad lighting. She thought they were obnoxious and messy, always getting in the way, filming stuff that didn’t need filming. But she didn’t think it went further than that. She didn’t know the placements were changing. She didn’t know they were tracking her.”
I straighten a little, caught off guard. “Tracking?”
