Same Envelope

Zara gets into the car smelling like fryer oil and lime wedges, kicks off her shoes, and puts her feet on your dashboard.

"Never let me work a Wednesday again."

You haven't taken your eyes off the silver Explorer. "Zara. Is my dad in there?"

She follows your gaze. Her face does a thing you've never seen it do: it goes careful.

"He was in the back," she says. "With Cy. I didn't know if I should say anything."

"In the back where they take bets."

"In the back where Cy has an office and a safe and a bottle of very expensive scotch." Zara chews her lip. "Babe, he could've been there for a lot of reasons. Cy knows everybody. Sponsors, city council..."

The back door of the Breakwater opens. You both duck, which is stupid, because it's your car and it's your father, but you duck anyway, and through the gap in the dashboard you watch Clancy Mullane walk out into the fog with his collar up and his shoulders hunched. He gets into the Explorer. He sits there for a long moment without starting it, his forehead resting on the steering wheel.

Then he drives away.

"Ava," Zara says quietly. "You okay?"

You aren't. You drive home anyway.

You don't sleep. At six a.m. you're in the Cave with the lights off and all three monitors on.

You do what you're good at. You count.

Last season the Gales lost thirty-one games. You pull every one. For each, you mark three things: the planned penalty-kill pairs from the coaches' pregame notes, which live in a shared folder you have access to; the pairs who actually went over the boards; and every penalty with its time stamp.

By ten a.m. the spreadsheet has a shape. By noon the shape has teeth.

Nine games. Nine losses. In every one of them, in the first three minutes after the first intermission, the penalty-kill deployment flipped against the written plan, and Zeke Gorski took a penalty within two minutes of the puck drop. And in every one, the opponent scored on that power play and the Gales lost by two or more.

Nine is not bad luck. Nine is a pattern. It's the number you told a stranger in a bar, before you knew what it meant.

You text Zara with shaking hands. The smug guys at the bar. What do they usually bet on?

She answers from bed, half asleep. idk, Cy's guys always bet the Gales to lose by 2+. sometimes "power play goal in the 2nd". why are you awake.

Power play goal in the second.

You put your phone face down on the desk.

Then you open the audio.

The bench feed is a two-channel recording, one channel for the head coach's mic and one for the assistants. Nobody ever listens to it except to tag line changes. You pull the first of the nine games, a February loss in Providence, find the second period, and put on your headphones.

Channel one: your father, hoarse, yelling at the ref about a missed trip.

Channel two: noise. Sticks. A trainer asking for tape. And then, under the noise, low and gravelly, unmistakable:

"Gorski. Go."

Gorski goes over the boards. Eleven seconds later he hooks a man who isn't going anywhere.

You rip the headphones off like they burned you.

You know that voice. You've known it your whole life. It read you Goodnight Moon. It said I'm sorry, kid, she's gone in a hospital hallway when you were twelve. It said I read your thesis twice three nights ago in this room.

You play it again. And again. You pull the second game. The third. It's not on all nine, the feed is too noisy on some, but it's on five. The same two words, in your father's voice, on the second channel.

Gorski. Go.

You need to think. You need to breathe. You need, absurdly, to return your father's tablet, which he left in the Cave last night when he came down in his slippers, because if you don't do something normal with your hands you're going to scream.

The team is at the practice rink in Bedford all afternoon. The coaches' hallway at the Chebucto Centre is empty, lit by the flicker of one bad fluorescent tube. Your father's door is unlocked. It always is.

His office looks like him. Depth charts in drifts. Three coffee mugs in various stages of growing a culture. A framed photo of you at eight in a Gales jersey down to your knees, and next to it a photo of your mother laughing on a beach in Cape Breton, her hair blowing across her face. The yellow sticky note under the keyboard.

You set the tablet on the desk. You turn to leave.

Then you turn back, and you open the top drawer.

You don't know why. Yes, you do.

Pens. A roll of tape. Antacids. A crumpled lineup card. And at the back, under a stack of old parking stubs, a phone. Not his phone. His phone is a giant thing with a cracked screen protector he refuses to replace. This is small and black and cheap, the kind you buy at a gas station with cash.

It isn't locked.

There's one conversation on it. A contact saved only as C.A. The last message is from yesterday.

Thursday. Same envelope. Your girl's good with tape, Clance. Shame if she looks too close.

The room tilts.

Your girl. That's you. Someone is talking about you, to your father, on a secret phone. And your father didn't call the police. He didn't call the league. He kept the phone in a drawer under parking stubs, and he went to the Breakwater at one in the morning, and he sat in his car with his head on the steering wheel.

C.A.

Cy Arsenault.

You scroll up with numb fingers. More messages. Thursday. Thursday. You're late, Clance. Don't make me come to the rink. Your father's replies are all one word. Fine. Fine. Coming.

Your hands are shaking so hard you nearly drop it. You lift your own phone and photograph the screen, every message, because you're your father's daughter and you document things.

The fluorescent tube in the hall buzzes and flickers.

"Hey," says a voice behind you. "Bris said you were down here, I wanted to..."

You spin around.

Mason is standing in the office doorway in his Gales track jacket, hair damp from the practice-rink showers, a bag of salt and vinegar chips in his hand. He looks at your face. He looks at the cheap black phone in your hand. He looks at your father's open drawer.

Everything cocky drains out of him.

"Ava," he says quietly. He steps inside and shuts the door behind him. "Whatever you just found. Show me."