Page 97 of Her Rival

Because I had something the beat writers didn't, which was nineteen days of watching him from four feet away. And what I'd learned watching him was that the slump wasn't the story. The slump was a symptom. A man at the top of this sport does not forget how to score in November because his legs went. He forgets because something has gotten inside the room he keeps locked, and the locked room was the story, and the locked room was the thing I'd been circling for three weeks while I told myself I was writing about hockey. The hockey was just the door I'd walked in through.

I was looking for the team. Boring stuff. Ownership structure. Caldwell Sports and Entertainment LLC. The roster of subsidiary entities that ran the arena, the concessions, the foundation, the international development pipeline. Brynn had walked me through some of it months ago when she first took the community relations job, and I'd filed it then the way I filed everything, which was somewhere I could find it again. I was pulling it back up now because the piece I was building had a structural thread about the cost of building a championship organization, and the costs were going to be the spine, and the spine needed the bones in it before I could put any flesh on.

I pulled the secretary of state filings from Nevada. Standard stuff. Anyone could pull them.

The Caldwell holdings were exactly the size I expected.

The names attached to those holdings were exactly the names I expected. Victoria. Brynn. A short list of board members. Three attorneys. Hollis Briar's name, which I hadn't expected but which made sense in retrospect, listed as a corporate officer of two of the security subsidiaries. Marielle Cho on the legal entity I'd figured she'd be on.

Then I followed a footnote.

The footnote referenced a separate filing. A different LLC, registered in Delaware, that had purchased a six percent silent stake in one of the Caldwell concessions subsidiaries in 2022. The LLC was called J.S. Holdings, which was the kind of name a company gives itself when it doesn't want to be looked up too quickly, and I wouldn't have looked it up if I hadn't had a Wednesday afternoon and a fresh coffee and the kind of writer brain that doesn't stop looking just because it hasn't been told to keep looking.

I looked it up.

J.S. Holdings was a Delaware corporation. The registered agent was an attorney in Wilmington named Brett Hanover. The single member, listed in the public filings because Delaware required it, was Jettson J. Sturgill.

I sat with that for a second.

Then I pulled Brett Hanover's other corporate filings.

There were forty-seven of them.

J.S. Holdings was one of forty-seven entities Brett Hanover had registered for Jettson J. Sturgill of Las Vegas, Nevada, between 2016 and 2024. Real estate holdings in three states. A vintage automobile restoration LLC registered to a garage in Henderson with one employee, a man named Earl Wagner. A music publishing entity. Three foundations registered in Tennessee, one of them named after his sister Mary Beth Sturgill. A venture capital fund domiciled in the Cayman Islands. Two equity stakes in companies whose names I recognized from the Wall Street Journal's tech coverage in the last eighteen months. A holding entity that owned, through three layers of LLC, a six percent stake in the Caldwell sports and entertainment concessions subsidiary.

He had a six percent silent stake in the team.

The team he played on.

I stared at that one a while.

I sat at the kitchen island in his t-shirt at four-eighteen on a Wednesday afternoon and stared at the legal entity through which the man I was in love with quietly owned a small piece of his employer, which was also the family business of my best friend, and I tried to decide whether what I was feeling was anger.

It was not anger.

I checked it. I looked at it. I held it up in the light of the kitchen and turned it around and tried it from three different angles, the way you try a sentence you've written when you're not sure whether it's the right sentence, and the thing I was feeling was not anger.

It was something else.

It was the same feeling I'd had at twenty-two on a train back to Brooklyn from a dinner with my thesis advisor, with the MFA offer in my pocket, with the certainty arriving that I was going to be a person who hid for the rest of her life. The feeling of looking at a thing about yourself you hadn't known was there, and recognizing in the same instant that it had been there all along and that the recognition was on you, not on the thing.

It was the feeling of being the slow one in the room.

I had been the slow one in the room.

I'd spent three weeks in this man's life. I'd been in his car. Eaten his food. Slept in his bed. I'd taken his protection from a man who'd been after me for twenty-six years and I'd let him pay for a private investigator to track my father across the city of Las Vegas without asking what that PI cost. I'd let him pay for a lawyer who, I now realized, had been hired with money that did not come from a hockey salary. I'd let him put a security car at my best friend's building without ever asking who is paying for that, exactly, and where does the bill go.

I had not asked.

The man whose t-shirt I was wearing had given me, from the beginning, the very specific impression that he was a regular hockey player with a nice house in the hills and a restored car he'd built with his own two hands, and that the house and the car were the upper limit of his life. He'd given me that impression on purpose. He'd been giving the world that impression for eight years before he ever met me, because he'd built an entire architecture of camouflage around himself in order to walk through the world being seen as the loud chirping winger from the team and not as a man who controlled the kind of money that controlled the kind of things he controlled.

He had been hiding.

It had been the entire point of his life since he was eighteen. Since he'd walked out of the Tennessee church town with nothing on his back. Since he'd built himself into a man whose face the cameras couldn't get enough of and whose actual life nobody could find. He'd been hiding from his parents. From his hometown. From any version of himself they'd ever been able to see. And the hiding had been working, and I'd been a person standing inside the hiding with him, eating his food, sleeping in his bed, building a life around him, and I had not seen any of it.

The reason I hadn't seen it was that I'd loved being the person nobody asked questions of. I'd spent twenty-six years training myself not to ask other people questions about the things they didn't volunteer, because the courtesy of not asking had been the only thing I'd ever wanted from anyone in my life, and I'd given it to him reflexively, the way you give a cup of coffee to a friend who comes over before they ask.

That had been my part.