Chapter 3 Unknown

MIA

"Did you tell anyone about the contract," I said, and Chloe went quiet for exactly 2 seconds before she answered, which was long enough to tell me everything.

"I told Becca that you were doing a thing with Kessler," she said. "Just a thing. I didn't say contract or fake or any of it. Just that there was something between you two."

Becca Hartley. Chloe's roommate. The girlfriend of a sports blogger with 600,000 followers who had built his entire platform on posting things he had no business knowing about junior hockey players in this region. I stood in the hallway outside the media room and did the math on how fast that could move and the math was bad. "The boring ones always talk," I said. "They just don't have better options." I hung up.

If Becca had passed it to her boyfriend and he decided this was worth a post, the contract went public in 48 hours. Dana pulled the agreement. The money was gone. My mother's next treatment deposit was due in 3 weeks and there was nothing in the account that covered it, which was the entire reason I had been sitting at a kitchen table at midnight signing 12 pages of legal language while my mother slept in the next room. I stood in the hallway and let the math finish arriving and then I went back to work because that was the only thing available.

I finished the equipment check, fixed the buckle on seventeen's left skate, sorted the jersey delivery that had been sitting unopened in the back room since Tuesday. The locker room filled and emptied around me and I moved through it the way I always did, which was invisibly and without stopping, because the work did not pause for personal problems and I had long since stopped expecting it to.

Caleb found me at 4:15. He filled the equipment room doorway with that particular stillness of his, the kind that takes up space without announcing itself, and I kept my back to him and finished the log entry before I turned around. "Dana wants a photo tonight," he said. "Candid. Something that reads real."

"Post something with a location tag near the rink and I'll comment on it," I said. "Keep it low-key. Under 20 words from me."

"Who sent the text," he said.

"I think it's Shaw," I said. "But Shaw doesn't have the contract. The only people with full access are you, me, and Dana. Which means someone handed him enough to work with." I held his gaze. "Your father's management firm handles Dana's company, doesn't it."

Something moved in his expression, fast and controlled. "Yes."

"Then Dana has access to more than her own files," I said. "And so does whoever she reports to." I showed him my phone. "I want to test whether Shaw is bluffing or whether he actually has the document. I'm going to text him something that only lands if he has read the specific language. If he responds correctly, he's seen it. If he doesn't know what I'm referring to, he's guessing."

"The payment structure," Caleb said immediately. "15 to your account, 15 in trust through Dana's firm. That's in the document and nowhere else. Nobody guesses split-trust arrangements."

I typed: If you actually have it, you know it wasn't a flat fee. I showed him. He nodded. I sent it.

We went back to the morning. The team came in for the afternoon session and I ran the pre-skate checks and Reid handed me the line adjustments he wanted logged and the rink filled with the sounds it always fills with, sticks and skates and the particular volume of 16 players who have been around each other long enough to communicate mostly in insults. I moved through all of it and kept my phone in my pocket and did not check it until 9:17, when a buzz came through during the line combination review at the bench.

Split payment. Smart. Does Kessler know his father is the one who suggested it?

I read it twice. My clipboard came down against the boards harder than I meant it to. 2 players looked over. I waved them off and stood very still with the phone in my hand and the shape of it rearranging in my head, because the message was not from Shaw operating alone. Shaw did not have access to Dana's files on his own. But Richard Kessler did, because Dana's firm operated under the same management group that handled Richard's own contracts. Richard had seen the document. And Richard had passed Shaw just enough to use while keeping his own name out of it entirely.

If Shaw published, it read as a rivalry move. Richard's hands looked clean from every direction.

I found Caleb at the far boards during the mid-session break and handed him the phone without explaining it first, because the message said what it said and he needed to read it rather than hear me describe it. He read it once, then again, and his jaw shifted in the small controlled way it does when something arrives that he was not fully prepared for despite being partly prepared for it.

"He wants the contract gone," I said. "If your image recovers without him running it, you stop needing his network for the draft. He loses the mechanism he's been using to keep you in line." I kept my voice level because the bench area was visible from 3 camera positions tonight. "Dana comes off the account today. If Richard has visibility through her firm, every move we make from here is already seen."

Caleb pulled out his phone and made the call right there, short and level and giving nothing away to anyone watching, and when he hung up he said, "Suspended pending review. New administrator by end of week." He looked at me. "Shaw?"

"Without the document as independent backup he can't publish without legal exposure," I said. "We don't react. We let it go cold." I took my phone back. "The part about your father is yours. I can manage the rest of it."

He looked at me for a moment with the expression I had started to notice but not yet named, and then he nodded and skated back out.

My phone rang at 4:52. St. Joseph's Hospital. Local number. 3-second pause before the voice came through. "Is this Mia Chen? We're calling about your mother. She's stable, but we need you here."