Chapter 2 A Name I Didn't Give Him

Thea POV

The lights snapped back on so fast I flinched, and the hand let go of my wrist at the same second, like whoever it belonged to had been waiting for the building to permit him.

I spun around with my back hitting the exit door, both hands out in front of me even though I had nothing to swing and no idea what I'd swing it at.

A man stood two feet away. Not old. Not someone I recognized from the league, or the shop, or church, or any of the dozen places a person gets to know everybody in a town this size. He had a flashlight clipped to his belt, dark and useless now that the overheads were back, and a look on his face like he'd been caught doing something he hadn't quite decided how to explain yet.

"Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to grab you like that."

"Who are you?" My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, which was fine, because sharp was better than shaking.

"Compressor's been cutting out for weeks." He nodded toward the equipment room like that answered everything. "I was checking the line when the power dropped. Figured you for one of the ice techs, not," He stopped himself.

"Not what?"

"Not alone at midnight."

I bent down and grabbed my phone off the mat before he could see my face doing anything I hadn't approved of. Odalys's voice was still going, tinny and frantic, and I put it to my ear without taking my eyes off him.

"I'm fine," I told her. "Power's back. Some guy says he's fixing the compressor."

"Some guy," Odalys repeated, in the tone she used for things she didn't believe. "Does some guy have a name?"

I looked at him. He was watching me with an attention that didn't match a stranger checking a compressor at midnight, the kind of look you give something you're trying to place rather than something you're seeing for the first time.

"Does he have a name?" I asked him, out loud, mostly to make Odalys stop worrying and partly because I wanted to hear him say it.

"Cormac," he said. Then, before I could relay it, before I'd said a single word past his name into the phone: "I've got it from here, Thea. Go home. Lock up behind you."

I went still in a way I didn't decide to go still.

I hadn't told him my name. Odalys had said it into the phone, sure, twice, loud enough that maybe sound had carried across a quiet rink in a way I hadn't accounted for. That was possible. That was the explanation my brain reached for first, because the other one didn't fit anywhere I wanted it to fit.

But he hadn't said it like a guess. He hadn't said it like a man repeating a word he'd only just overheard. He said it the way you say a name you've already used a hundred times in your head before you ever got the chance to say it out loud to the person it belonged to.

"How do you know my name?" I said.

"You just told me," he said. Easy. Fast. Too fast, maybe, though I couldn't have said why it felt that way instead of just sounding true.

"I didn't. My friend did. On the phone." I held the phone up between us like it was proof of something. "You said it before I repeated it."

For one second, one full second, long enough that I counted it without meaning to, he didn't answer. He looked at the phone in my hand, then at me, and something moved behind his face that he put away almost as fast as it showed up.

"You're right," he said. "I heard her say it while you were on the ice. Before the lights went out." He nodded at himself, like he was agreeing with his own excuse. "Sound carries weird in here at night. Guess I filed it away without noticing."

It was a good answer. It was the kind of answer that would've worked on anyone who hadn't spent three years learning to read a room full of people who wanted something from her and didn't want to say what.

I didn't believe it. Not all the way. But I also didn't have anything solid enough to argue with, and I was standing in an empty rink at midnight with a stranger who apparently already knew things about me before I'd handed them over, and every instinct I had said the smart move was to leave, not interrogate.

My eyes dropped instead- I couldn't stop them- to the bench, where my stopwatch sat next to two cones I hadn't put away, next to a clipboard with three weeks of times written down in my own handwriting.

He followed my look before I could block it.

"Training?" he asked.

"Just messing around," I said, too fast, and grabbed the clipboard off the bench like covering it would undo him having seen it. "Killing time."

"At midnight. Alone. With a stopwatch and split times going back three weeks."

"I like the quiet," I said, which was true and also nothing, a fact wearing the shape of an answer.

He didn't push it, and somehow that was worse than if he had. He just looked at me a second longer, like he was deciding whether to let me keep the version of myself I'd just handed him, and then he looked away first, toward the equipment room, like he'd chosen it.

"You should still go home," he said. "Lock the door behind you. There was someone outside earlier, before the power cut. I don't think it's anything."

"Someone outside doing what?"

"Trying the side door. Twice." His voice had gone flat and careful, the tone people use when they've decided not to sound as worried as they are. "Might be kids. Might not be. Either way, I'd rather you weren't walking to your car by yourself right now."

Odalys's voice cracked through the phone again, forgotten in my hand. "Thea. Thea, who is trying a door."

I didn't answer her. I was looking at him, at the calm he was wearing as if it fit, and thinking that a man who'd just grabbed my wrist in the dark and said my name like he'd known it for years was now offering to walk me to my car like that made any of this normal.

"I don't need you to walk me anywhere," I said.

"I know," he said. "I'm still going to."

And that was when the side door, the one he'd just told me someone had tried twice, rattled hard against its frame from the outside, as if someone had just put their whole weight into it.