Page 4 of Take Two

Three days ago, my agent, Marcus Hill, called me after midnight and told me the deal was close. His voice had that particular quality it gets when he is trying to deliver news carefully, each word placed with deliberate precision. I’d sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and listened to him talk about opportunity and positioning and what the Vipers could offer me that the Guardians couldn’t anymore.

Two days ago, I sat in an office with management and shook hands with men I had spent years playing for while everybody spoke in calm, measured voices about business decisions and long-term strategy. The handshakes were firm. The smiles were professionally warm. Everyone in that room said everything they were supposed to say, and I said everything I was supposed to say back, and when I walked out of the building, the sunlight felt wrong.

This morning, I packed the last of my apartment into boxes and signed paperwork I didn’t particularly want to read. I found a coffee mug behind the microwave that I’d forgotten I owned. I stood in the middle of my kitchen for a long moment before I taped the final box shut.

Tomorrow, I board a flight to Seattle and become someone else’s player.

Everything about it is simple on paper, which is probably why people love saying hockey is a business. They say it like that should make it easier. They say it like calling something a business strips away the years, the friendships, the routines, the quiet attachments that form when you’ve built your entire adult life around one city and one team.

The business side of hockey has always been straightforward. The emotional side gets stuck under your ribs and makes it hard to breathe.

The bartender tops off the drink in front of me before moving on to the next customer without a word, and I wrap my hand around the glass without lifting it. The ice has mostly melted. I haven’t been drinking so much as maintaining.

The funny thing is, Seattle is not a punishment.

Most players would celebrate this trade. The Vipers are one of the best organizations in the league. They are perennial playoff contenders, they sell out arenas night after night, and lately they have been pulling enough national attention to make headlines far beyond the sports world. Between their captain, their co-captain, and the relationships that keep half the roster plastered across sports segments and entertainment sites every other week, people know the Seattle Vipers even if they have never watched a full hockey game in their lives. It is one of those franchises that has managed to transcend the sport itself, which is either impressive or a sign of the times depending on how much patience you have for celebrity adjacency.

Every analyst talking about the trade seems convinced I have won some kind of lottery.

Maybe they are right. I should be, no, I am grateful. It still doesn’t change the fact that my entire life is boxed up and waiting to be reconstructed somewhere new, three thousand miles away.

My family is in New York. My parents are here. My brother and sister are here. Every birthday, every holiday, and every last-minute Sunday dinner where my mother insists she only cooked enough for a few people and somehow ends up feeding half the neighborhood is here. My entire adult life has been built around the quiet, reliable comfort of knowing that if I needed to see the people I loved, all I had to do was get in my car and drive. Thirty minutes and I could be sitting at my mother’s kitchen table with something warm in front of me and the sound of my father’s voice coming from the other room.

Now I am supposed to live on the other side of the country and pretend it doesn’t feel like someone reached inside my chest and shifted something out of place.

I grew up close enough to the city that New York always felt like mine, even before hockey made it official. The Guardians drafted me young, developed me through their system, and eventually called me up from the AHL before I’d had time to properly unpack half the boxes in my first apartment. I spent years building a life inside that organization, learning how to survive the league, proving game by game and shift by shift that I belonged there, carving out a version of myself that could exist under that kind of pressure without falling apart. New York was where I became a professional hockey player. It’s where I became an adult. It’s the city that has seen nearly every version of me since I was twenty-three years old.

Somebody else will probably be sleeping in that apartment next month. Parking in my spot, getting used to the floorboard creaks near the kitchen and which window sticks during the winter. They will make it theirs the same way I made it mine, and I know that’s how it works. I know that. It still sucks.

Life moves whether you are ready for it or not.

My soul still aches from having to relay my news to my family. My mother cried when I told her, and she tried so hard to pretend she wasn’t crying that it made me feel worse. She kept clearing her throat and telling me Seattle was a wonderful opportunity, her voice getting thinner and more brittle every time she said the word opportunity, like she was testing how many times she could repeat it before it started to sound believable. I couldn’t help but envision her pressing the backs of her fingers under her eyes between sentences. I know exactly what she looks like when she does it.

My father took the news better, at least on the surface. He shifted into practical mode almost immediately, the way he always does when he doesn’t want to talk about how he is actually feeling. He asked about housing, travel, taxes, discussing the time difference and how it will affect our regular calls, and whether I needed him to fly out with me to help me get settled. That was his version of saying he was worried without making it my responsibility to sit with his worry. My father has always loved me by trying to solve things.

My siblings were less subtle.

My sister, Tazja, told me I was selfish for letting a hockey team kidnap me, her voice full of the particular outrage she reserves for things that genuinely upset her, then immediately pivoted to ask whether Seattle was a good place to open a business. My younger brother, Jacques, announced that he would miss me for exactly one week before converting my old room into a home gym, which was such a transparent lie that I almost called him out on it directly. He has had years to claim that room. He hasn’t lived with our parents in years, away at NYU. He just wanted something to threaten me with. Spoiled brat.

I laughed when they said all of it, because I needed to laugh to keep myself from crying like a baby. I mean, I’m a grown ass man.

Now, sitting alone at this bar with my drink barely touched and my phone buzzing at steady intervals against the wood, I can already see the shape of my life changing in ways I’m not entirely ready to look at directly. I can see phone calls squeezed between road trips and time zone math I’ll have to do in my head before I dial. Video chats that freeze at the worst possible moments, right in the middle of someone’s face when they are trying to tell me something that matters. Holiday flights that route through at least one connection and leave me too exhausted to be present by the time I make it through my parents’ front door. I will do all of it because they are worth it and because staying connected matters more to me than convenience ever will.

It doesn’t mean I am looking forward to learning how to love people from a greater distance.

Eventually, I will convince them to spend more time in Seattle. I will make the case slowly, carefully, the way I approach most things. Maybe I will even convince them to move there, eventually. It’s not entirely impossible.

The idea earns the first real smile I have managed all day, because I know exactly how my mother will respond the first time I float it. She will call me ridiculous before I finish the sentence. She will say she has a life in New York, a whole life, and she’s not going to pack up everything she has built here because her grown son misses her company. She will remind me that she’s definitely not dismantling her kitchen because I can’t figure out how to make my own macaroni and cheese.

Then she will probably spend three weeks quietly looking at houses and trying to act like she isn’t.

There is absolutely no chance I am surviving years without my mother’s cooking. We both know it. She knows it better than I do.

The smile fades as quickly as it came.

The bar around me hums with low conversation and the kind of soft background music that is designed to fill space without demanding attention. The crowd is steady but not loud, the lighting warm and amber-tinted in a way that makes everything feel slightly removed from the rest of the world. Nobody bothers me, which is exactly how I like it tonight. Most people don’t recognize hockey players outside of a rink, and even fewer recognize Black hockey players when we are sitting in hotel bars wearing suits instead of jerseys, looking like anyone else who has had a difficult week and come somewhere quiet to sit with it.

Tonight, I am grateful for that particular invisibility.