JAMIE
Mars Santos finds me in the hallway on a Wednesday afternoon, which is how important conversations happen in this building: in corridors, between rooms, in the spaces that are not officially for anything and that therefore become spaces for everything.
I'm coming from the weight room. Mars is coming from the film room. We meet at the junction where the player corridor crosses the coaching corridor, the same junction where Declan and I had our first real conversation about proprioception and ice acoustics, which feels like years ago and was six weeks ago.
Mars stops. He doesn't pretend the stopping is accidental. Mars Santos does not do accidental. Mars Santos does intentional. Everything about him, from his skating to his parking spot to his conversations with his goalposts, is executed with the deliberate precision of a man who has audited every behavior in his life and determined that randomness is a waste of resources.
"Kowalski," he says.
"Santos."
"The thing you're carrying isn't as heavy as you think it is."
The sentence arrives without preamble. No small talk. No weather. No "how's the season going." Straight to the sentence, delivered in the flat, analytical tone that Mars uses for everything from postgame analysis to conversation with his left post, and the flatness makes the sentence more powerful, not less, because the flatness is the evidence that Mars considers this observation factual rather than emotional. He is not offering advice. He is reporting data.
"I can see you trying to hold it alone," he continues. "The holding is changing your posture. Not on the ice. Off the ice. You carry yourself differently when you think nobody's watching than when you know they are, and the difference is the weight. You don't have to carry it alone."
I stare at him. Mars Santos, who reads shooters by the angle of their blades, who tracks pucks by sound, who calculates probabilities in real time, has been reading me. Not my hockey. Me. The off-ice version. The version that walks through hallways with his eyes on the floor. The version that sits in booths with Sprites and watches couples. The version that is learning, slowly, to stop hiding.
"How did you know?" I ask. The question has become a refrain in my life, a repeating motif, each iteration aimed at a different person and producing a different answer. I asked Declan (about career, about vantage points). I asked Cole (about identity, about the pretending and the knowing). Now I'm asking Mars, and the asking is reflexive, because "how did you know" is the question I've been living inside for months and each answer peels back another layer.
"I read people," Mars says. "It's a goalie trait. We track everything. Pucks, bodies, angles, the micro-adjustments that reveal intention before the body's owner has decided to act. I read you the same way. Not on purpose. Automatically. The way I read a shooter's weight shift."
"What did you read?"
"A man who is getting lighter. Week by week. Whatever you were carrying is coming off, and the coming-off is visible in the way you hold your shoulders and the way you skate and the way you look at people when you think they're not looking back."
He pauses. The pause is a Mars pause, which is shorter than Mik's pause and more analytical. Mars processes before he speaks, but the processing is fast because Mars's brain operates on prediction and prediction requires speed.
"I also noticed the journalist is gone," he says. "And the journalist's departure correlates with a specific change in your behavioral pattern. The correlation may be coincidental. My training suggests it is not."
I don't confirm or deny. My face, like Declan's face in Sharon's office, apparently does both.
"The team knows," Mars says. "Not because anyone told them. Because the team reads each other the way I read the ice. Cole noticed three weeks ago. Mik noticed before Cole. Luca has been leaving extra biscotti in your stall, which is Luca's diagnostic indicator for 'I know something and I'm expressing my support through baked goods.' Wes brought you bread, which is Wes's version of the same thing. Jonah has been watching you with the specific expression of a man who wants to say something supportive and is restraining himself through an act of will so heroic it should be commemorated."
I almost laugh. The description of the team's awareness, catalogued by Mars with the precision of a scouting report, is so accurate and so unsentimental that it loops back around to being profoundly sentimental. They see me. All of them. They've been seeing me. And they've been responding not with questions or confrontations or well-meaning but unwanted conversations, but with biscotti and bread and the patient, permission-giving silence that says: we're here when you're ready.
"The team doesn't care," Mars says. "I am stating this as a fact, not a reassurance. The team's response to Cole and Mik was seventy-two hours of adjustment followed by complete normalization. The team's response to Wes and Luca was forty-eight hours. The team's response to Jonah and Ren was approximately eleven minutes, because Jonah is universally loved and Ren is Cole's brother and the combination reduced the adjustment period to almost nothing. My projection for your situation is similar."
"You've projected my coming out?"
"I project everything. It is compulsive. It is not something I can turn off."
The echo of his own words (the same words he said to Theo about watching, about the compulsion, about the inability to stop) is audible to me because I've read his book, literally (Breakaway and Icing are on my shelf, read in a single weekend, the series that made me believe the Reapers were a safe place to be), and the echo is deliberate. Mars Santos does not speak accidentally.
"Thank you," I say.
"For what?"
"For seeing me."
"I see everything. It is the job. But seeing you is not the job. Seeing you is a choice. I choose to see you the way I choose to see Theo, which is: completely, without judgment, and with the full awareness that being seen is sometimes the only thing a person needs to feel safe."
He walks away. Mars Santos walks away the way he skates: efficiently, without wasted movement, having said exactly what needed to be said and not one word more. The hallway is empty. The fluorescent lights hum.
I stand in the junction. The corridor extends in both directions. The coaching corridor, where Callahan's office is. Theplayer corridor, where the locker room is. I am standing at the intersection of two paths, which is a metaphor so obvious that even Jonah would roll his eyes at it.
I walk toward the coaching corridor. Not because I planned to. Because my legs carry me there.