The Rival Between Us

Chapter Six

Back in Toronto, the team had two days off before the second round began, and Elena used the time the way she used every uncomfortable feeling she didn't want to examine too closely: she worked.

She spent the first day at her desk at Sportsline Weekly, transcribing interviews, drafting the team chemistry piece, and successfully avoiding her editor's pointed questions about whether the "tension" everyone online was talking about would make it into her copy. She spent the second day doing something she had promised herself, multiple times, that she would not do.

It had started as an idle thought, the kind she usually managed to smother before it took root - a memory of the night everything ended, resurfacing uninvited while she stood in line for coffee. She remembered, with sudden and startling clarity, a photographer at the restaurant that night, some local paper doing a puff piece on up-and-coming athletes and their partners. She remembered being annoyed at the flash. She remembered Roman laughing at something and pulling her closer for the shot, unaware that in three hours their entire relationship would be reduced to rubble.

She had never seen the photograph. She had left before it could have been published, had spent the following weeks so deep in her own unraveling that a local puff piece about young athletes was the furthest thing from her mind. But some instinct, some journalist's habit of pulling every thread, made her sit down at her laptop that afternoon and search the archives of every small Toronto outlet that might have covered a rising hockey prospect five years ago.

It took her three hours to find it. A short piece from a now-defunct sports blog, buried in an internet archive, titled "Toronto's Next Big Thing and the Girl Who Believes in Him." The photograph accompanying it showed Roman and Elena at a restaurant table, both of them younger, both of them laughing, unaware that they were being photographed at all except for the small blur of a camera flash caught at the edge of the frame.

Elena almost closed the tab immediately. It was a painful image, the kind of relic she'd spent years training herself not to look at. But something in the background of the shot caught her eye, and she leaned closer to her screen, zooming in on the blurred edges of the photograph with the methodical care of a woman who had built an entire career on noticing things other people missed.

There, at a table near the back of the restaurant, half-obscured by a waiter carrying a tray, sat a man she recognized instantly despite the poor image quality and the passage of five years.

Marcus Hale.

At the time, Marcus had been a mid-level executive with the team's front office, not yet the powerful general manager he'd since become. Elena remembered meeting him exactly once, briefly, at a team function Roman had brought her to. She had no memory of him being at that restaurant that night. She was fairly certain - though five years and considerable emotional trauma made her less than fully confident in the memory - that neither she nor Roman had known he was there.

Her stomach turned over slowly, the way it did when a story she thought she understood suddenly revealed a structural c***k she hadn't noticed before. She told herself it was probably nothing. Restaurants were public places. Marcus Hale could have been there for any number of reasons that had nothing to do with her or Roman.

But the timing nagged at her. That dinner had taken place the same week the anonymous messages started. The same week the photographs arrived, the ones that convinced her Roman had betrayed her, the ones she had never questioned closely enough because they had confirmed exactly the fear she'd been carrying since the day they'd started dating - that a man that talented, that watched, that wanted by so many people, would eventually find someone better than a journalism student with more ambition than money.

She saved the article. She saved the photograph. She told herself she was simply being thorough, the same instinct that made her double-check every quote and triple-source every claim in her actual reporting. She did not let herself think too hard about what it might mean if the instinct was right.

She sat back from her laptop for a long moment after finding the photograph, chewing on the end of her pen, an old habit from journalism school she'd never quite broken. Marcus Hale. The name meant almost nothing to her at the time - a face from a single team function, a handshake she barely remembered. But the itch in the back of her mind, the one that had built her entire career on refusing to let small inconsistencies go unexamined, would not let the detail rest.

She opened a new document and began, almost against her own better judgment, a private file. Not for the team feature. Not for anything she planned to show her editor. Just a place to keep the loose thread until she decided what, if anything, to do with it.

She titled the document, after some hesitation, simply "Questions." Beneath the title she typed the date, then a short list: Why was Marcus at Verdana that night? Did Roman know he'd be there? Did I ever mention where we were going, to anyone besides Roman himself? The questions looked almost absurd on the screen, the paranoid scribblings of someone constructing a conspiracy out of a single blurry photograph and five years of unresolved grief. She almost deleted the file twice. Both times, something stopped her - the same stubborn, methodical instinct that had built her entire career, the refusal to look away from a detail just because acknowledging it might be inconvenient.

She thought about calling Maya immediately, laying the whole strange theory out loud to hear how it sounded outside her own head. But it was past midnight, and some private, cautious part of her wanted to sit with the possibility a little longer before giving it shape in front of anyone else, even her closest friend. If she was wrong - if this was simply grief manufacturing patterns where none existed - she wanted to be the only one who knew she'd briefly, foolishly hoped for something more than a coincidence.

She closed her laptop eventually, but sleep didn't come easily. She lay awake running the timeline again and again: the dinner, the anonymous messages that had started that same week, the photographs that arrived days later, the message that had finally broken her resolve entirely. Every detail she'd once accepted as simply the shape of her own devastating luck now seemed, in the small hours of the morning, to carry the faint, unsettling symmetry of design rather than accident.

By the time gray dawn light began creeping through her curtains, Elena had made a quiet decision. She wasn't ready to say anything to Roman yet, or to anyone else. But she wasn't going to let the thread go, either. Whatever she found - even if it turned out to be nothing, even if the photograph really was just an unfortunate coincidence - she owed it to the twenty-one-year-old version of herself, the one who had disappeared into a lonely apartment in Vancouver believing she'd made an unforgivable choice, to actually look.