CHAPTER 1: ONE

# Chapter 1 — Cade

The rental car was a beige Hyundai. He had asked for it that way at the counter at Logan — small, beige, forgettable — and the woman behind the desk had looked at his license and his Crown PR-issued credit card and said I have a charcoal Camry I can give you instead in a tone that had the small reflexive deference Cade had been hearing for eight years from people who had figured out who he was, and Cade had said no thank you ma'am, beige is fine, and she had handed him the keys to the Hyundai and not looked at him again, which was the better of the two transactions she could have given him.

He drove the two and a half hours up Route 1 with the windows down and the radio off and his phone face-down on the passenger seat under a paper bag from the gas station outside Kennebunk. The bag had a coffee in it that had gone cold halfway through New Hampshire and a banana he had not eaten. The phone had not buzzed since he'd crossed into Maine. He was not checking. He had stopped checking somewhere south of Portland, which was a personal record.

Sebago Cove came up on the GPS at 4:08 p.m., a Tuesday, the thirteenth of July. He took the exit. The road narrowed to two lanes and then to one and a half — a working New England road, repaved unevenly, the seams dark where the tar was newer. Stone walls. A field with a dozen brown cows and one white one. A hand-painted sign for blueberries, three miles ahead. Then the harbor, all at once, where the road came around a curve and dropped — masts and white hulls and the green water beyond, gulls in the air over the working dock, the smell of diesel and salt and something he could not have named at twenty-two but knew now, in the particular Atlantic way it wrapped around the open window of a beige Hyundai going twenty-two miles an hour past a clapboard church.

He counted the masts at the working dock. There were eleven. He counted them twice because counting them twice was the kind of thing his brother Ethan had taught him to do at seven, on a Burlington porch in the August light of 1998, and counting things had been Cade's way of being in a room without thinking ever since. Eleven masts. One ferry, currently in. Three pickup trucks at the lobster co-op. He turned left at the harbor onto a residential street with hydrangeas in the front yards — pink, blue, a kind of half-violet he had never seen on a hydrangea before — and the GPS told him in its unbothered voice that he had arrived.

He had arrived at a small white house with green shutters and a wraparound porch and a detached garage at the back of the property, gray-painted, with an outside wooden stair running up its left flank. There was a man on the lawn between the house and the garage, in a faded blue work shirt and brown canvas pants, with a hose in his hand and a spray nozzle he was pointing at the base of a bank of hydrangeas that had the look of plants that had been watered at the same time of day by the same man for forty years. The man heard the Hyundai pull up. The man turned. The man did not wave. He turned the hose off at the nozzle, hung the nozzle on a hook screwed into the side of the garage, and walked across the lawn in a way that did not hurry and did not dawdle.

Cade got out. He left the bag on the passenger seat. The phone went into his back pocket, face-down against the denim.

"Bellinger," the man said. He said it with the long flat a of mid-coast Maine — Bell-in-jah — and it was not a question. It was the way a man read a name off a reservation sheet. "I'm Hal."

"Yes sir," Cade said. The yes sir was the press-trained polite register and was out of his mouth before he could think about it. He put a hand out. Hal shook it. Hal's hand was the hand of a man who had hauled lobster pots for forty years and then, when his back went, had hauled smaller things. Dry. Rough. Brief.

"Forty-one degrees north," Hal said, by way of nothing. "Hot today. Sit-still hot. You drove up?"

"From Boston."

"Long enough." Hal pulled a keyring out of his canvas pants and held it up to the afternoon light. There were nine keys on it. He worked one of them off the ring with his thumbnail in a way that took ten seconds and that he did not narrate, and he put the key in Cade's palm and closed Cade's fingers around it with one of his own. "Lockbox is on the railing at the top of the stair. Key opens the door. Wifi password is rusty1968. Lowercase. Rusty's the dog. Sixty-eight's me. The router's in the main house and the signal up there is fine for normal use, lousy for streaming. Ferry runs at six and ten and two and four — that's the only schedule you'll need to keep track of in this town and you don't have to keep track of it for me. Trash goes out Wednesday morning. Dumpster's behind the garage. Recycling's a different bin, blue one, by the dumpster. The water pressure in the shower up there is fine if you don't run the dishwasher in the main house at the same time, which you can't, because there isn't one." Hal stopped. Hal looked at him.

"Okay," Cade said.

"You're staying five weeks."

"Five weeks."

"Through August twentieth."

"Through August twentieth."

Hal nodded once, the small economical nod of a man confirming a calendar with the calendar already in his head, and looked at Cade for what was maybe two seconds longer than the transaction strictly required. There was nothing in the look. Cade had spent eight years getting good at reading the small flicker that came into a stranger's eye in the half second the stranger placed him — the oh, you're — and the smoothing-over and the second-look. Hal's look had none of that. Hal's look had the ordinary appraisal of a man who had rented a room above his garage every summer for eleven years to whoever the platform sent him and had developed an opinion about each of them at the foot of his stair. The opinion he was forming now was inscrutable. Then it was over, and Hal had turned and was already walking back toward the hose.

"One more thing," Hal said, over his shoulder. "Rusty's old. He's blind in one eye and he isn't going to bite you, but he's going to come up on the porch around eight tonight and bark at the screen door for about forty seconds. Don't worry about it. He's letting me know you're here."

"Okay," Cade said again.

"Welcome to Sebago Cove, Mr. Bellinger."

"Cade."

"All right." Hal picked up the hose nozzle. "Cade, then."

Cade went back to the Hyundai and pulled the two duffel bags out of the back seat and a third smaller bag out of the trunk — running shoes, a pair of Converse, the L.L. Bean half-zip he had bought at the outlet outside Freeport an hour earlier on a small private impulse he did not yet want to look at directly. The hardback was in the bigger duffel, on top, where he had put it in Beaumont because he had thought, accurately, that he would otherwise pretend it wasn't there. The Body Keeps the Score. Bessel van der Kolk. The cover was matte and dark and unfussy. The yellow sticky note on the cover, in Hanna's loop-and-cross handwriting, said call me when you're done. She had sent the book in May, two days after the season ended, with no note in the package and a sticky note on the cover. He had read forty pages on a flight and put it down. The sticky was still there.

He carried the bags around the side of the garage to the foot of the stair. Twelve risers, gray-painted, the paint peeling at one or two of the edges in a way that was about salt air and not about Hal not painting. He went up. The lockbox was where Hal had said. He opened it with the key Hal had given him, which was a slight redundancy he did not think about. The lockbox had one key in it. He took the key, replaced the original on the ring he did not yet have, and opened the door.

The room was small enough to count.

He counted as he stood in the doorway with his bags by his feet. One queen bed against the back wall, white duvet, two pillows. One desk under the small harbor-side window. One wooden stool. One armchair in the corner of the room nearest the window, with a knit afghan folded over the back of it — pale blue, cream, a stripe of dusty pink — that had the specific worn-soft look of a thing made by a person and washed every summer for thirty-some years. One small bookshelf on the wall opposite the bed, empty. One kitchenette: countertop, a single-burner electric range, a small fridge under the counter, a coffee maker, a kettle, a metal sink. Two mugs and four glasses in the cabinet. He could see the cabinet from where he stood because the door was a quarter open. One bathroom, off the kitchenette, behind a door he was not going to open yet. One window — small, maybe two feet across — facing east, facing the harbor.

Eleven things in the room. Twelve if you counted the afghan separately from the chair. He counted the afghan separately. Twelve.

He carried the duffels to the queen bed and put them down. The bed shifted a quarter of an inch under the weight. He stood beside it. He did not unpack. He turned and walked to the window and stood at the desk with his hands at his sides and looked out.

The harbor was three-quarters of the way down the slope of the residential street. He could see five lobster boats moored at the working dock, their hulls white in the afternoon light, their wheelhouses faded blue-green, their stern names — he could not read the names from here, and he was glad — painted in old hand-lettering. The ferry was moving, slow, away from the public landing toward the open water. Not the four o'clock; that would have been the four o'clock, which had left ten minutes ago without him, going nowhere. Maybe it was a private boat. Two gulls were arguing over something in the air above the working dock, one of them holding what looked like a fish-skin, the other one making the specific high keening sound of a gull who had decided she wanted what the first gull had. Underneath all of it the harbor sound came through the window — halyards on the masts pinging in the small breeze, water against pilings, a screen door slamming somewhere two houses down with the particular flat clap of a wooden screen door that has lost its tension spring at some point in the late nineties, a man's voice calling a woman's name across the lawn of one of the houses, and beneath all of that the long flat Atlantic-summer quiet that he had read about in two books on the way north and had not been sure was real.

It was real.

He stood at the window for two minutes. He knew it was two minutes because he had a habit, learned at sixteen and never broken, of counting his own breath when he wanted to know how long he had been somewhere — six breaths a minute when he was settled, twelve when he was not. He counted twelve and twelve. Twenty-four breaths. The afternoon light reflected off the harbor water and painted slow ovals on the slope of the ceiling above him, the kind of moving light he had not stood under since he was a kid in his uncle's cabin on Lake Champlain and had been allowed to lie on the floor and watch the ceiling. He had forgotten that light existed. He had forgotten he had forgotten.

He thought about taking out his phone. He did not take out his phone. The phone was in his back pocket against his denim, face-down by orientation only — there was no face-up or face-down once it was in a pocket; that had been a B2-room habit, a specific thing he did at his Crown locker stall when he was paying attention to a teammate, a small declaration that he was not going to be pulled away by a buzz — but the muscle memory of declaring his attention was still in him even now, in this room, with no teammate in front of him and no buzz coming. He was paying attention. To what, he did not yet know. The window. The light. The eleven things. The twelve.

He had signed the extension six weeks ago. The contract sat on a hard drive at Felix's office in Boston — the executed pages, the signing-bonus schedule, the no-trade clause that had cost Marcy Volkov three weeks of negotiation and that Cade had refused to settle without. Four years. The years went out to 2030-2031. He had been twenty-two when he had come out, and he had been twenty-three when he had played his first full out season, and he had been counting the years that way since — first out season, second out season, the year of the Tampa scrum, the year of the You Can Play campaign, the GLAAD Vanguard banquet, the All-Star game at twenty-six when the league had asked him to do the open-mic moment and he had said yes — and the four new years on the contract, when he laid them down beside the first seven, made eleven. Eleven would be longer than Brian Burke's son had had. Eleven would be the longest a man had ever been openly out and active in this league, by a margin that was not small.

He sat on the queen bed. The duffel by his right hip shifted. He stayed in his coat — a navy nylon shell he had grabbed in Beaumont in the bright sun of a July morning, because he had not been able to leave town without a coat in his hand, because coat in hand was what people did when they were going north — and he listened to the harbor through the window for a long time without counting anything. Gulls. The halyard. The screen door. A bicycle bell, two streets over. The low hum of an outboard motor starting up at the marina, idling, settling. He let it come.

He was tired. He had not let himself notice this at the season's end, in the second-round handshake line after the loss to Halstead in the spring, when the last six months had been Asher's contract, Henrik's farewell tour, the trade-deadline scrum, three nights in Tampa with a stomach flu the team's doctor had not believed was a stomach flu and that Cade had played through anyway because not playing through it would have been a story. He had not let himself notice it at the development-camp dinner in late June, where he had given a six-minute address to twenty-two prospects in a conference room at the Coliseum and had said the words the room around you is the most important room of your career and had been believed and had believed himself. He had not let himself notice it on the morning he had signed the extension, when Felix had clapped him on the back and Daniel and Linnea had come on FaceTime with a piece of carrot cake on a paper plate and Hanna had texted call me when you're done. He had not let himself notice it. He was noticing it now.

The afghan on the armchair across the room, in the slow afternoon light off the harbor, looked like it had been folded by someone who had folded it many hundreds of times. The pink stripe was faded the way a cotton-blend stripe faded in a sunny window — not even, but in a long faintness from the side that had been turned to the light. Cade did not know that Hal Petrowski's wife had knit that afghan in 1991 in a hospital room in Bangor in the third-to-last week of her life because she had wanted to leave one more thing. He did not know that the room above the garage had been hers — the converted room — that she had wanted as a guest room for her sister and that Hal had finished after she had died, twelve months after, the way Hal had finished a lot of things. He did not know any of that. He looked at the afghan and registered only that someone had loved it. The room has been someone's room. The kettle has been someone's kettle. The mugs in the cabinet had been chosen, two of them, by a woman who had known what kind of mug she liked. There was somebody's hand all over this room and the somebody was no longer in it. He had not noticed any of that in the first count. He noticed it now.

Outside, down on the lawn, he heard Hal's hose come back on with the small metallic snap of a brass nozzle being turned. Hal, watering the hydrangeas at four-twenty-something in the afternoon. He had said morning was when he watered. The hydrangeas had been already watered, dark at the stems where the sun had not yet reached them. So this was the second watering. So Hal Petrowski was a man who watered his hydrangeas twice a day in a heat wave, the way you would do if you had been told by a wife in 1991 that hydrangeas needed it, and had been doing it for thirty-six summers since.

Cade's chest did the thing it had not been doing for a long time. It loosened. He sat on the edge of the bed in his coat with his hands on his knees and let it loosen. He did not perform the loosening — he was alone, and there was no broadcast camera on him, and he had been the man on the broadcast camera for so long that the muscle memory was to perform even alone, but the room was small enough that the muscle memory could not quite get its arms around him. He felt a small private mercy at that. He was going to have to be in this room a lot. He was going to have to be in this room for thirty-five days. He was going to have to find out, in this room, whether the man he had been for eight years could be put down on the desk for a while and picked back up later, and whether the man underneath was a man he had ever been allowed to know.

The harbor light moved on the ceiling.

He thought, with the specific clarity of a man who has just finished signing his name to four more years, this is the room where I get to find out what I sound like with the broadcast off.

He did not say it out loud. He sat on the bed in the coat. He listened to the gulls. Down on the lawn, Hal Petrowski watered the hydrangeas. The screen door slammed somewhere two houses down. The ferry, wherever it was now going, was no longer the ferry he had been watching. It was just a boat, on the water, in the late afternoon, in a town where nobody yet knew his name.