The irrational possibility, the one that my body latched onto before my brain could intervene, is: he's gone. The coffee was the end. The three hours were a goodbye. He realized that the situation was impossible (journalist, source, the line, the career) and he made the professional choice and the professional choice was to walk away and the walking-away means the press credential now belongs to someone else and the third row will never contain his face again.
The irrational possibility is consuming approximately 90% of my mental bandwidth. The remaining 10% is responsible fortying my shoes, finding my car keys, and walking to the parking lot without colliding with walls.
I sit in my car. I take out my phone. I type a text and delete it. I type another and delete it. The cursor blinks. The cursor and I are old friends. The cursor has watched me type and delete for months. But this time the typing and deleting is not about a search bar and a question about identity. This time the typing and deleting is about a man whose chair was empty and whose absence felt like a hole in the room.
I type: "Where were you today?"
I stare at the text. Four words. Direct. Potentially too direct. The directness reveals that I noticed his absence, which reveals that his presence is something I track, which reveals that the coffee was not casual for me and that the three hours mattered and that the person in the third row is not interchangeable.
I send it.
The response comes in forty seconds. Forty seconds that I spend staring at my phone with the same intensity I bring to reading a penalty kill.
"I need to tell you something. In person."
Nine words. The nine words produce a physiological response that is closer to the pre-game anxiety of a playoff elimination game than anything I have experienced in a parking lot. My heart rate elevates. My palms are damp against the phone case. My breathing becomes the shallow, controlled breathing of a body preparing for impact.
I need to tell you something. The sentence construction is ominous. The sentence construction is the structure of bad news. People who have good news say "guess what" or "you'll never believe this." People who have something difficult say "I need to tell you something." The "need" is the weight. The "in person" is the gravity. The combination suggests that whatever Declan has to tell me is heavy enough that it requires proximity,and proximity for heavy things is what you ask for when you want to be able to see the other person's face when the heavy thing lands.
"When?" I type.
"Tonight. My apartment. I'll send the address."
The address arrives. East Atlanta. A neighborhood I've never been to. Between the text and the drive, I spend four hours in a state of controlled panic that I disguise as normalcy. I eat dinner at the facility (chicken and rice from the team nutritionist, consumed without tasting because my taste buds have been conscripted by the anxiety and are no longer available for civilian duties). I talk to Jonah in the parking lot about tomorrow's practice schedule. I text Becca a thumbs-up emoji in response to her question about my day, which is a lie by emoji, a thumbs-up covering a situation that warrants at least seven alarm emojis and possibly the skull.
The distance from the arena to East Atlanta is fourteen minutes, according to my phone's map application, and I drive the fourteen minutes with the focused, over-careful attention of a man whose hands are not entirely steady on the wheel.
The fourteen minutes are the longest fourteen minutes of my life. Longer than the wait for the draft pick. Longer than the walk from the tunnel to the ice on opening night. Longer than the hour in the Philadelphia hotel room. The radio is on and I turn it off because music requires emotional bandwidth and my emotional bandwidth is fully allocated to the project of not driving off the road while imagining every possible outcome of a conversation I haven't had yet.
During the fourteen minutes, I cycle through every possible version of "I need to tell you something." He's moving. He's sick. He's been reassigned. He regrets the coffee. He realized that I'm nineteen and he's twenty-seven and the gap is too wide. He realized that I'm a hockey player who can barely string sentencestogether at a podium and he's a man who writes sentences for a living and the gap is not about age but about language.
The version I don't let myself consider, the version that my body is hoping for and my brain is refusing to examine, is: he left. He left the beat. He left the press box. He left the third row. He left because of me.
I park on his street. I sit in the car. I breathe.
The breathing is not the Philadelphia breathing (the naming) or the equipment room breathing (the breaking) or the parking lot breathing (the calling Becca). This breathing is the breathing of a man who is about to walk into an apartment and hear something that will either end the possibility or begin it, and the not-knowing is the worst part, because the not-knowing is the space between who you were and who you're becoming, and Cole said the space is where most people turn back.
I'm not turning back.
I get out of the car. I walk to his door. I knock.
The door opens. Declan is standing there. No glasses. T-shirt, jeans, bare feet. His apartment behind him is warm and full of books and lit by lamps that cast amber light across the walls and the shelves and his face.
No glasses. He's not wearing the glasses. The glasses that are his wall, his frame, his professional distance. The glasses are not on his face.
"Come in," he says.
I walk in. The door closes. The room smells like food (something spiced and rich, tomato and onion, the residue of a meal cooked with attention) and books (paper and ink, the specific scent of a home that is organized around the written word) and him.
The apartment is small and full and warm and nothing like my furnished one-bedroom. This apartment has been lived in. The books on the shelves are not decorative. They are read,handled, loved, their spines cracked and their pages marked. There's a desk with a laptop and notebooks. There's a couch with a throw blanket. There's a kitchen where the jollof rice was made.
"Sit," he says. "Please."
I sit. The couch. He sits in the chair across from me. The six inches from the parking lot in Decatur are six feet now, the distance of a man who has something to say and who needs the space to say it.
"I left the beat," he says.
Three words. The world rearranges.