Page 5 of Omega’s Forward

“Yeah.”

Then he leaves me alone with it.

The office hasn’t changed since before I left. It’s all wood paneling with team photographs on every wall: thirty years of men in the same sweater. My father is in the middle of every one of them, grinning.

There are no family photographs in this office. There weren’t any the last time that I was in here and there are none here now.

His reading glasses are still on the blotter. I hang my coat on the hook by the door.

Thirty years of a franchise, run by hand, by one man, out of one room. There is no chief operating officer. There is no real front office. There is a caretaker general manager two years from retirement whose signature appears wherever my father’s told it to. The org chart is a portrait.

I don’t want any of it.

My father’s will was simple. The franchise passes to me. If I sell inside the restricted period, every dollar of the proceeds goes to a charitable trust.

There was a handwritten letter with it. Learn the game before you judge it, Ev. That’s it. One damn line. Even in death, the damned game was more important to him than I was.

The man was obsessed with hockey. Obsessed. It broke up my parents’ marriage. He was never home or never interested in anything that my mother did, unless it was about hockey.

Same thing with me. When I was still little and he assumed I was going to be an alpha like him, then he cared. Then I was the light of his life: the next big star as soon as I was old enough and big enough. All he wanted was the name Rourke on a jersey and an alpha son big enough to shove and punch like the rest of the thuggish herd.

Of course, that didn’t happen. I don’t think he said ten words to me after I presented as an omega.

My first instinct when I heard the will and read that damned letter was to sell it anyway: get rid of the team and never look back.

But that would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. The Barons have done very well over the last decade. They’re worth real money. I’d be a fool to get rid of a valuable asset for no reason other than to spite a dead man who is no longer capable of knowing or caring.

So: hold the team until the clock runs out, then sell to whoever writes the largest check.

I need to hold it for two years and it’s mine to sell. Break early and a charity I’ve never heard of becomes the luckiest organization in this city’s history.

I don’t do hockey. I had the whole horror of a game pushed on me enough when I was a child, but now I need to catch up.

I have zero interest in actually managing this club, but I don’t want to screw up either. I’m here to clean out the office because apparently that’s my job despite not seeing or speaking to my father in more than five years, and to catch up enough on the team to be sure that handing over control to Sacco for the next two years isn’t going to come back to bite me in the ass.

I come around the desk and open the drawers, feeling like I’m intruding. I was never allowed to touch his desk, but it’s my desk now.

There’s nothing exciting in it: rubber bands, a tin of mints. A whole drawer given over to pucks, each one taped and dated in silver marker. Goals, I assume. I roll my eyes. Dad was bothered to remember the dates of the goals. He wasn’t bothered enough to remember the date of my birthday.

No. I’m not doing this. The little kid in me is all riled up by the smell of the place and being back here after so long. I got over my dad not giving a shit about his omega son years ago.

I leave pretty much all of it where it is. The next owner can decide what to do with the taped-up hockey pucks.

I pull out the things that are of interest and put them into a pile: a sponsorship renewal, half annotated, a contract summary for L. Berg. A qualifying offer for a defenseman whose name I don’t recognize.

Someone is going to have to make a decision on this stuff. I check the closet next, not expecting anything of interest.

There’s not. Just a bunch of smelly old gear and a practice schedule taped on the door.

My phone buzzes. I cross back over to the desk and pick it up.

It’s Priya, my assistant. She’s texted from London to let me know that my re-entry documentation has all cleared.

Coming back to the U.S. took a surprising amount of paperwork: residency declarations, tax forms. I’d signed them all without looking, the same way I’d signed off on the funeral arrangements without looking.

I didn’t make it back in time for the funeral. The excuse is that I wasn’t able to get the flights, but the real reason is that I just didn’t want to.

Priya asked if I wanted her to arrange for anyone to travel with me. There wasn’t anyone. I’ve spent ten years building a career instead of a life, and the truth is the career hasn’t arrived where I want it either. It’s just eaten everything else. If I ever do get there, wherever there is, I’m not sure who I’d tell.