Chapter 6 THE BROKEN GLASS
The practice arena smells of wet rubber and Zamboni exhaust, and I have never once walked into it without feeling like I'm about to be told off.
Tonight I'm standing behind the penalty box with a coffee that went cold in the second period and a leather folder I keep pressing to my chest as if it could stop a puck. It's a preseason game. Nothing counts.
The scoreboard says 2-2 with eleven minutes left, and the crowd, mostly wives, agents and one man selling pretzels, doesn't seem very bothered.
Liam is bothered. He's been skating like it's personal for two periods.
It's been two days since the press conference, and I had braced for the worst: no-shows, a sulk, a leak to the press. Instead he's worked through the planner like a sentence he's decided to serve politely. Media training, on time.
Tuesday at the hospital, where for twenty minutes he read a picture book about a bear like a man defusing a bomb, until a six-year-old in a Spider-Man gown told him he was doing the bear's voice wrong. He did it again. He did it three more times. A nurse took a video. I watched it twice in the elevator.
So I know what all that politeness costs him. I just hadn't expected the bill to come due tonight.
It happens along the boards on my side of the ice. Leo Marsh, our teenage rookie, chases a puck into the corner and keeps his head down half a second too long. Marcus Vance, a defenseman for the visitors who has spent eleven years in the league on a single skill, comes in late.
The puck is already gone. The hit comes anyway, shoulder to chin, and the kid goes backward into the glass with a crack I feel in my back teeth.
He doesn't put his hands out. That's what I'll remember. He just goes down and stays there. For a second there's no sound in the building at all, which in a hockey arena is the worst sound there is.
The whistle is already blowing when Liam gets there. He's across the ice one second and on top of Vance the next, and his gloves land on the floor of the penalty box beside me, one of them still rolling. What follows isn't clever.
There's no technique in it, just two men hitting each other hard, six feet from my face, through an inch of plexiglass. Three punches, maybe four. I don't count. Then the linesmen pile in, and it takes four of them to pull him off.
He comes up with his collar torn and blood on his hand, and I can't tell whose it is. He doesn't look at Vance. He doesn't look at the referee. He looks at the kid.
Leo is sitting up. A trainer has a hand on the back of his neck, and the boy nods at something, wobbly, swearing a little, and the whole arena lets its breath out together. Someone behind me starts clapping and then, embarrassed, stops.
They walk Liam toward the box. As he passes the glass he lifts his head and finds me, and I expect rage. It isn't that. He looks like a man waiting to hear how bad it is.
It's the footage I showed Apex, I think. Last Friday, in a glass room above the river, I stood up and told a roomful of strangers that he gets angry when someone smaller is being hurt. I could have put tonight on a slide. And I know exactly what the clause says, because I'm the one who agreed to it. No incidents.
I don't wave. I wouldn't know what I was waving at.
By ten, the agency looks like a building after a fire drill that turned out to be real. I'm at my desk, rereading the clause on my phone for the fourth time, when my father walks in without knocking. He has never knocked. He sets a tablet on my desk, face up, and I read the headline before I can arrange my face.
UNHINGED AND UNFIT: KNOX'S ICE RAGE PUTS DUBOIS AGENCY UNDER FIRE
"The league office called me before the ice was dry," Christian says. He isn't angry. He's pleasant, which is how I know. "Multi-game suspension, a fine, and a look at the conduct language in his contract. Apex's CEO rang at nine-forty. Very cordial."
"He was protecting a rookie. Leo was out cold."
"The media is reporting a fight, Scarlett, not a rescue." He straightens a cuff. "I'm not interested in the why. Nobody who matters is."
"The league hasn't even ruled. The clause says suspensions, and there hasn't been a—"
"Apex doesn't wait for rulings. Apex reads headlines."
I say nothing. I've learned that silence is the one thing he can't redirect.
"Here is what happens next. You have lunch with Apex's CEO tomorrow at noon. Before then, you'll sit Knox down and make clear that he should hand back the A on his jersey. I've spoken to the club's general manager, and it will go better for everyone if he offers it before they take it. PR will draft an apology. He'll read it on camera, without improvising." He lets that sit. "If he balks, even slightly, we drop him, and his file goes to Pierce's people."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then you'll spend the winter choosing centerpieces after all."
He gets as far as the door and pauses, one hand on the brass.
"Things that fail in this family get replaced, Scarlett. Ask your mother."
The door closes softly, because he never slams one.
I sit there for a while. I drag the clip back on the tablet and watch it three times. Vance's hit lands more than a second after the puck is gone. Liam covers the ice in four strides. The league will see a fight, but I see a clock, and the clock says one of them started it.
Under the video, the comments scroll, thousands of them, strangers who want Liam gone and want to say so with feeling. One says lifetime ban. Another says the Arctic.
My father wants him gone too. The difference is that he'll do it in a very good suit.
If I do what Christian says, I know what I'll be making: the hollow, well-lit, grateful man Liam accused me of wanting. A bear voice with all the edges sanded off.
I pick up my blazer. I leave the folder on the desk. I take the stairs down to the players' tunnel, because the elevator would give me time to change my mind.
