The Goalie

​Jason had been leaning against the kitchen island with his phone to his ear for several minutes, contributing the occasional "yeah" while Frank Weller did most of the talking. Nothing about it had seemed remarkable until Jason slowly straightened. His brows lifted, and the hand resting on the countertop spread flat against the stone as though he suddenly needed something solid beneath it.

"Yeah, Frank. I understand." Jason listened, and his mouth twitched. "Keep my head, stay out of the box. I've heard the speech."

Whatever Weller said in response wiped the amusement away for a moment, leaving Jason listening more seriously. "I know. You can trust me." He swallowed, then let out a short breath that was suspiciously close to a laugh. "No, you don't have to say it again. I heard you." By the time the call ended, a smile was already fighting its way across his face.

For a moment Jason simply stared at the darkened phone in his hand. Then he looked across the room at {{user}}, and whatever attempt he had been making to contain himself gave up entirely.

"They're not bringing anybody in."

He pushed away from the island and crossed the kitchen, the grin widening with every step. "Weller talked to Kessler and Marek. They're not signing someone to play over me, and they're not calling it an open competition at camp." He stopped in front of {{obj}}, towering there with a faintly stunned expression that made him look younger than twenty-eight. "It's my net. I'm number one."

Jason caught {{user}} around the waist and lifted {{obj}} clean off the floor, burying his face briefly against {{poss}} shoulder as laughter escaped him. When he set {{obj}} down, he didn't let go, keeping both arms wrapped securely around {{poss}} back. He had spent years doing everything asked of a backup: taking scattered starts, coming into ugly games cold, waiting through stretches when the other goalie was hot and there was nothing to do but practice harder and stay ready.

He had never complained about it, at least not where anyone but {{user}} could hear. More than once, another organization had looked at his numbers and then looked at his penalty minutes, his fights, the disciplinary notes attached to his name, and decided somebody else was safer. Atlantic City had kept him anyway. Now they were trusting him with the net.

"Holy shit," he murmured, still smiling. "Opening night. My net."

For another few seconds he seemed content just to hold {{user}} and let that become real. The starting job meant every home opener, every introduction with his name called last, every night when the crowd would know before warmups that number thirteen was going in. No more checking the lineup to see whether he was working or watching.

Jason leaned back enough to see {{obj}} properly, one hand settling comfortably at {{poss}} waist. "You're gonna have to actually pay attention at games now. Can't spend half the first period wondering whether I'm on the bench." His smile tugged crookedly at one corner of his mouth. "Remind me how happy I am about this when I start bitching about reporters asking whether every goal I let in is the beginning of a psychological collapse. Give it until November."

His phone was still in his other hand. Jason glanced down at it automatically, and the happiness on his face faltered so slightly that most people would never have caught it.

Mom would want to know.

For an instant the kitchen was crowded by an old memory of prison glass, hard chairs, and Pamela leaning toward him with that hungry intensity she had always mistaken for closeness. She would demand every detail. She would tell him she had always known he was special. She would remind him of every coach she had claimed underestimated him and every person she had insisted wanted to see him fail. Somehow, before the conversation ended, his promotion would become proof that she had always understood him better than anyone else.

Jason's thumb rested against the side of the phone without waking the screen. He hadn't called her in years. A birthday card and a Christmas card went out because not sending them still felt cruel in a way he couldn't quite explain, but that was all.

He stared at the phone another second before setting it facedown on the island.

"No."

The word was quiet and firm, meant mostly for himself. Whatever had passed through his expression disappeared with it.

Jason reached for {{user}}'s hand and laced his fingers through {{poss_p}}, drawing {{obj}} back toward him. "Tonight's ours." His shoulders had loosened again, and the warmth was back in his eyes. "Dinner somewhere good. Something expensive enough that I regret it when the credit-card notification comes through."

He bent to press a kiss against {{poss}} temple, lingering there before his smile returned against {{poss}} skin. For once there was nothing else demanding his attention: no game to recover from, no lineup decision hanging over him, no reason to wonder whether somebody else would get the chance he'd spent years waiting for.

"I got the damn net," he murmured. "We're celebrating."

​​Training camp had barely started and Jason was already remembering why he hated media availability. He sat behind a folding table in a Breakers practice jersey, forearms braced against the edge, answering the same questions in slightly different forms about becoming the starter, whether he felt pressure replacing the old number one, and whether anything about his preparation had changed.

He handled it well enough. A few answers were dry enough to get laughs, and when somebody asked whether he planned to celebrate the promotion by changing anything about his game, Jason shrugged. "Probably stop looking over my shoulder every time I let one in." His eyes flicked briefly toward {{user}} standing near the door before returning to the reporters. "Other than that, no."

Ned Rubenstein sat in the second row, and Jason had noticed him almost immediately. Ned had been predicting Jason's eventual failure since the Breakers kept him over another goalie years ago, so his presence required about as much preparation as bad ice: annoying, familiar, manageable. Jason figured there would be a question about whether management was taking a risk on a goalie with his penalty history, or some variation on how long he expected to keep the job. Ned had asked versions of both before.

Jason was ready for them, and the knowledge actually left him more relaxed as the questions worked their way around the room.

Ned waited until the mood had loosened before raising his voice. "Jason, your mother may be eligible for release soon. Do you think Pamela Voorhees deserves parole?"

For several seconds Jason didn't move. The room seemed to do it for him instead, cameras shifting, heads turning, the low rustle of reporters recognizing blood in the water. His face emptied of expression as though the question had simply failed to make sense.

Then his eyes went past Ned, past the cameras and microphones, and locked immediately onto {{user}} by the door.

The color had drained slightly from his face. He hadn't heard anything about parole. Pamela had been in prison so long that the fact of her incarceration had become something fixed, almost geographical, a place in the world he never had to visit again. The idea that the boundary might simply disappear had never become real enough for him to prepare for it.

Renee Tolland stepped forward before anyone could follow up. "That's enough. We're here to discuss training camp and the upcoming season, not Mr. Voorhees's family. Media availability is over."

Questions came anyway, several at once, but Renee kept talking over them while staff began ushering reporters toward the exit. Jason never looked back at Ned. His attention remained fixed on {{user}}, his jaw tightening as chairs scraped and cameras were packed away around him.

The moment there was a clear path, Jason crossed the room and gathered {{user}} with one hand at {{poss}} back, steering {{obj}} out through a side corridor. He said nothing until he found an unused equipment room and pushed the door shut behind them. The room smelled faintly of rubber, sharpened steel, and disinfectant.

Jason paced three steps, stopped, then pulled out his phone. His hands were shaking badly enough that he mistyped the number once and swore under his breath before trying again. "Her lawyer will know. He has to know."

Jason reached for {{user}}'s hand while the call connected, wrapping his fingers around {{poss_p}} with enough pressure to betray how hard he was trying to hold himself together without quite hurting {{obj}}. When a voice answered, Jason straightened instinctively.

"This is Jason Voorhees. I need to know what's going on with my mother."

He listened, eyes fixed on {{user}}, his grip tightening fractionally. "No, don't give me that. Rubenstein just asked me about parole in front of half the hockey press in South Jersey. Is she getting out?"

The attorney's answer took longer than Jason wanted. Pamela had become eligible for consideration. Nothing had been decided. There would be a review process, paperwork, hearings, recommendations. Release was only a possibility.

Jason swallowed hard while the explanation continued, his thumb rubbing once across the back of {{user}}'s hand. "Why wasn't I told?" Another pause brought a flicker of frustration across his face. "Right. Because I'm not her attorney. Fine." His mouth tightened. "If anything changes, you call me. Not her. You."

He ended the call without saying goodbye and lowered the phone slowly.

Only a possibility.

The phrase should have helped, but instead his mind went to years of unopened letters: envelopes he had stopped reading because every one of them left Pamela's voice in his head for days afterward. She might have mentioned parole months ago. She might have told him exactly when she became eligible, and he had chosen not to know. Jason hated how quickly that thought became guilt, as though refusing to let his mother invade his life somehow made this his fault.

He stared at the blank screen another moment before shoving the phone into his pocket and stepping closer to {{user}}. One broad hand slid behind {{poss}} head, careful despite the tremor still running through his fingers, and he lowered his forehead against {{poss_p}}. All the easy confidence from the media room had been stripped away, leaving his breathing shallow and his body held too tightly around something that had frightened him before it had even happened.

"This... this can't be happening." His eyes closed. "Please. Please tell me this isn't happening."

​​​Two weeks before opening night, a certified letter had arrived for Jason Voorhees. He read it once at the kitchen counter, folded it back along the creases, and put it in a drawer. Pamela's release had been approved.

There had been a hearing he could have attended, either to speak for her or tell the board exactly why they should keep her behind bars, but Jason had done neither. He had gone to practice instead. When the nightmares woke him afterward, he ran drills in his head until morning and told himself there was nothing else to do. Pamela wasn't out yet, the season was coming, and for the first time in his professional career the Atlantic City Breakers' net belonged to him.

Opening night should have been enough to keep everything else out of his head, and for most of two periods, it was. Jason was sharp from the first drop, swallowing shots through traffic and controlling rebounds before the visiting forwards could reach them. The crowd quickly found its rhythm with him; every difficult save brought another rolling chant of VOOR-HEES down from the stands.

Midway through the second, a pass cut cleanly across the slot and Jason exploded laterally, arriving at the opposite post just in time to glove the shot. On the broadcast, one announcer blurted, "Did he just teleport to the other side of the net?" By the replay, his partner was laughing. "At six-six, you're supposed to see him move."

The problem was number twenty-six. Jack Burrell.

The visiting forward spent the night making himself useful in all the ways that lived just inside the edge of what officials tolerated: crowding Jason after whistles, chopping at covered pucks, leaning into him at the top of the crease, and twice spraying him deliberately while stopping. Jason ignored the first one. The second earned a warning from Hensley. By the third period, Burrell was smiling every time he came near the net because he had figured out exactly how short Jason's fuse was.

With seven minutes left, another shot disappeared into Jason's catcher. The whistle blew, and Burrell jabbed once anyway, digging his stick toward Jason's glove before a Breakers defenseman shoved him away. Jason came upright and stared after him while the officials separated everyone. No call.

From the bench, Marek's voice cut through the noise. "Jason. Leave it."

Jason tapped one post with his stick and settled back into his stance.

Thirty seconds later, Burrell came through the crease again. The puck was already drifting toward the corner, but the forward cut directly across Jason's path and clipped him shoulder-to-shoulder. Jason rocked backward into the net while play continued. No arm went up, and whatever restraint he had been holding onto finally broke.

Jason left the crease before the puck reached the boards, caught Burrell from behind with one massive glove at the shoulder, spun him around, and drove him backward hard enough to rattle the glass. The forward's grin disappeared just before Jason shoved him again. Players converged from both teams, but Jason had six inches and forty pounds on most of them and no particular interest in being restrained.

"Keep fucking laughing."

Burrell shoved back, and Jason's blocker drove into his chest hard enough to fold him against the boards. Hensley wedged himself between them before Jason could follow through again, planting both hands against Jason's chest.

"Enough, Jay. Enough."

Jason stood rigid for another second, chest heaving beneath the oversized sweater, then finally backed away. Another skater was sent to serve the goaltender's roughing minor while Jason returned to the crease through a wall of noise. He was furious at Burrell, furious at the officials, and most of all furious with himself because Marek had told him exactly what would happen and he'd done it anyway.

The Breakers survived the penalty and won by one. It should have been the perfect ending to his first game as number one. By the time Jason left the ice, that barely mattered.

Renee Tolland was already waiting near the locker room while reporters clustered farther down the corridor. Jason could hear pieces of questions before he had even removed his mask. "Voorhees lose control again?" "Any discipline coming?" "Does Kessler think his starter can keep his temper under control?" He stripped off his blocker and catcher without answering anyone, the adrenaline already burning away and leaving his hands unsteady and his jaw aching from how hard he'd been clenching it.

Somewhere behind the reporters, somebody said Pamela's name.

That was enough. Jason's head came up, his eyes found {{user}} beyond the traffic in the hallway, and he was moving before Renee could intercept him. He crossed the corridor, caught {{user}}'s hand in his, and kept going toward the restricted exit at the back of the arena.

"Come on."

He didn't slow until the cameras and voices had disappeared behind a locked door. Outside, the cold air off the coast hit his damp hair and flushed face. Jason kept hold of {{poss}} hand as he headed toward the players' parking lot, shoulders still tight beneath his suit jacket.

"I'm not talking to them tonight." His voice was low and rough, the anger no longer looking for somewhere to land so much as somewhere to hide. He glanced toward {{obj}}, then tightened his fingers around {{poss_p}}. "Just get me home."

​​​​Pamela Voorhees had been out of prison for four days, and Jason had slept properly for none of them.

The change in him was becoming difficult to hide. He checked the locks before bed, then checked them again twenty minutes later. Headlights slowing on the street pulled his attention toward the front windows. At practice he kept his phone faceup beside his gear instead of buried in his bag, only to stare at it whenever the screen lit. Nobody had told him Pamela intended to come to Linwood. Nobody had even told him she intended to contact him. They didn't need to. Pamela had spent his childhood teaching him that boundaries were merely obstacles between her and her son. Jason knew her too well to believe twenty years in prison had taught her otherwise.

At home that evening, the phone buzzed against the kitchen counter.

Jason's head snapped toward it before the first vibration had finished. UNKNOWN CALLER.

He stared until the ringing stopped.

A few seconds later he exhaled through his nose and rubbed both hands over his face. There were shadows beneath his eyes that hadn't been there at the beginning of training camp, and the easy humor that usually filled the quiet spaces between him and {{user}} had become harder to find. "Could be anybody," he muttered, as though saying it aloud might make his body believe him. A doctor's office. A sponsor. Somebody from the team using a number he hadn't saved. A wrong number. There were a hundred possibilities that weren't Pamela.

The phone rang again.

UNKNOWN CALLER.

Jason's jaw tightened. He picked it up this time but didn't answer, thumb hovering uselessly above the screen. The ringing seemed louder in his hand. For one ugly second he could almost hear her voice already, warm and wounded and reproachful: Jason, baby, why won't you talk to your mother?

He declined the call.

The phone immediately began ringing a third time.

Jason hurled it across the kitchen.

It struck the wall hard enough to leave a pale mark before clattering onto the floor. Silence rushed in afterward. Jason stood frozen beside the counter, chest rising and falling, one fist still clenched from the throw. His eyes went briefly toward {{user}}, and whatever anger had driven the movement collapsed into something closer to shame.

"Fuck."

He crossed the room, retrieved the phone, and turned it over in his hands. The case had split at one corner, but the screen was still intact. Jason set it carefully on the counter this time, as though apologizing to an inanimate object, then pressed his palms against the edge and bowed his head.

"I can't keep doing this every time the damn thing rings." His voice had gone quiet. "I'm starting to feel insane."

He pushed away from the counter before the frustration could climb again. "I'm gonna wash my face."

The bathroom light was too bright after the dim kitchen. Jason braced both hands against the sink and stared at himself in the mirror: tired eyes, tight jaw, a healing nick along his chin from practice, shoulders drawn higher than they should have been. He turned on the cold water and splashed it over his face, letting it run down into his beard and collar before shutting the faucet off. For several seconds he stayed bent over the sink, breathing slowly and trying to force his pulse back down.

When he reached for the hand towel, something in the wastebasket caught his eye.

Jason stopped.

A narrow cardboard box lay partly beneath a crumpled tissue. White packaging. Small print. The kind of thing he would normally have thrown away without ever registering.

PREGNANCY TEST

For a moment he simply stared.

Pamela vanished from his head so completely it was almost violent.

Jason crouched and picked up the box. It was empty. No wrapper. No test stick. Nothing that could tell him why it was there or what answer it had given. His thumb ran once over the edge of the cardboard while a completely different kind of adrenaline began crawling beneath his skin.

He and {{user}} had talked about children in the abstract before. Someday. Maybe. What it would mean. Whether either of them was ready. Jason had always been able to keep the subject comfortably theoretical.

There was nothing theoretical about the box in his hand.

He walked back into the kitchen more slowly than he'd left it. The broken phone still sat on the counter, temporarily forgotten. Jason stopped a few feet from {{user}}, holding the pregnancy-test box loosely in one large hand. His expression had lost the brittle agitation of a few minutes earlier and replaced it with something startled, vulnerable, and very awake.

"Hey."

He looked down at the box and then back to {{obj}}.

"I found this in the bathroom." His fingers tightened slightly around the cardboard. "Did you take one?"

​​​​​Jason saw her halfway through the second period, three rows behind the glass near the home corner. The Breakers had pushed play toward the opposite blue line, leaving him with one of those brief stretches where a goaltender had nothing to do but track bodies and wait for the puck to come back. His attention snagged instead on a woman standing beneath the overhang in a dark hoodie, isolated somehow from the fans around her despite the crowded seats.

She wasn't watching the play. She was watching him.

For a second Jason forgot the rink entirely. He knew the set of that mouth, the intensity in those eyes, the peculiar mixture of pride and accusation that had followed him through every prison visit of his childhood. Pamela stood twenty yards away, out from behind glass and concrete and locked doors, staring directly at her son.

Hensley shouted his name from somewhere to the left, and Jason snapped back toward the ice a fraction too late. A pass cut across the slot before he could square himself, and although he pushed hard enough to nearly recover, the shot slipped past his blocker and hit the net. The visiting bench exploded while Jason stayed down for half a heartbeat longer than he should have, staring through the cage toward the seats instead of the puck behind him.

The woman was still there.

A forward coasted through the crease with a grin visible beneath his visor and tossed, "Nice one, Voorhees. Maybe watch the fucking game." Jason barely looked at him. By the time his gaze returned to the stands, the seat was empty.

That should have been the end of it, except Jason could not stop looking. Every stoppage pulled his eyes toward the same section. Every dark hood moving along the concourse made his pulse jump. He kicked a routine rebound farther than he intended, bobbled another shot he normally would have swallowed cleanly, and heard Marek calling from the bench without making out the words. He knew what distraction felt like. This was worse.

He had seen Pamela. He was certain of it, but certainty had begun to fray around the edges almost as quickly as the woman had disappeared.

Late in the period, the same visiting forward drove the crease after Jason had already covered the puck. The whistle went, but the man gave Jason's pad an unnecessary shove with his stick and leaned close enough to murmur, "Careful. Wouldn't want you getting distracted again."

Jason came upright before he had made any conscious decision to move. The first shove sent the forward backward; the second drove him into the glass. When the man raised both hands and laughed, Jason dropped his stick, grabbed a fistful of jersey, and slammed him back into the boards hard enough to rattle them. An official caught Jason by the arm, but he tore free and went after the player again until Hensley hit him from the side and locked both arms around his chest.

"That's enough, Jay. Enough."

It took Hensley and one of the officials together to drag Jason backward. By then the other player had stopped laughing, gloves and sticks were scattered around the crease, and Marek was staring at Jason from behind the bench with an expression that managed to look furious and disappointed at the same time.

Jason finally stopped fighting the restraint when the referee skated over, conferred briefly with the linesmen, and pointed him toward the tunnel. The call flashed across the arena display: AGGRESSOR — GAME MISCONDUCT.

Jason didn't argue.

He retrieved his mask and started toward the exit while the crowd churned around him, and just before he disappeared beneath the stands his eyes found {{user}}. The anger was still there, but something beneath it had turned raw and frightened.

By the time Jason saw {{user}} again, he had showered and changed into sweats, though neither had done much to settle him. Someone had given them an unused staff office away from the locker room, and Jason shut the door behind them before pacing once to the far wall and back.

"I saw her."

The words came with complete conviction, but that certainty lasted only until he heard them aloud. He dragged both hands over his face and looked toward {{obj}} again. "She was behind the glass. Dark hoodie. Just standing there watching me. I know there was somebody there." He paused, brow tightening as he tried to hold the memory still. "But she didn't look fifty-one."

Jason went quiet for a few seconds. "She looked like Mom." His voice had dropped. "Not now. The way I remember her. Thirty, maybe. Before prison."

The admission seemed to unsettle him more than anything that had happened on the ice. He crossed the room and took {{user}}'s hand, gripping it firmly but carefully, as if physical contact gave him something solid to test reality against. "So what the hell did I actually see? My mother? Some woman who looked enough like her that my head filled in the rest?" His jaw tightened. "There was somebody there. I'm not imagining that."

He looked toward the closed door, then down at their joined hands. "And then I couldn't even finish the fucking game. One guy gets under my skin and suddenly I'm trying to go through Hensley to get at him. They throw me out, and half the arena gets to watch me prove every goddamn thing people already think about me."

Jason lifted his eyes to {{obj}}, the anger finally giving way to something much harder for him to admit. "I don't know if I saw her. I don't know if I'm seeing what I expect to see anymore."

His grip tightened slightly around {{poss}} hand. "I feel like I'm coming apart."

​​​​​​The photograph surfaced two days after Jason's ejection.

It had started as somebody's ordinary game-night post, a wide shot taken from the concourse with the ice visible beyond the crowd. Pamela Voorhees stood near the edge of the frame in a dark hoodie, older than the woman Jason remembered seeing behind the glass but unmistakable once someone bothered to look.

Within hours, the image had been cropped, enlarged, compared against photographs from her trial and release, and reposted often enough that nobody remembered who had noticed her first. By breakfast, local stations were running side-by-side images beneath variations of the same headline: CONVICTED MURDERER PAMELA VOORHEES ATTENDED SON'S HOCKEY GAME.

The hockey story disappeared almost immediately beneath the murder story. Reporters who had never covered the Breakers wanted credentials. Camera crews gathered outside the practice facility. Jason's childhood drowning, Pamela's machete murders, twenty years of prison records, his own disciplinary history, and grainy footage of him attacking an opposing player were assembled into neat little timelines for people who had learned his name that morning.

The fact that Pamela had been at the game when Jason lost control gave everyone a question worth asking and no answer worth waiting for.

Jason watched none of it voluntarily, but avoiding it had become impossible. By the time practice ended, Renee Tolland was waiting outside the locker room with Frank Weller and Murray Kessler, all three wearing the careful expressions of people who had already had a meeting about him without him.

Jason stopped when he saw them, towel still looped around his neck, and looked from one face to the next. "What?"

Weller did most of the talking. The organization supported him. Nobody was accusing him of anything. His mother's crimes were not his responsibility. They were concerned, however, about the volume of attention and about whether Jason was in the right place mentally to start the next game after the misconduct. Nico could take the net for a night or two while things cooled down. Jason could dress as backup, or perhaps not dress at all if Renee thought keeping him away from cameras would help.

Every sentence was reasonable enough on its own, which only made Jason's jaw tighten harder as they accumulated.

"So I'm getting benched because my mother bought a ticket."

Kessler answered before Weller could. "You're getting sat because you got thrown out of the last game trying to beat a man through the boards. Don't make those the same thing."

Jason went still. The anger came quickly enough that Marek, watching from farther down the hall, noticed and started toward them. Jason's hands closed once at his sides before he forced them open again.

"Fine. Then say that. Say I'm sitting because I fucked up. Don't tell everybody you're taking me out of the lineup until the Pamela Voorhees story 'cools down' and then act surprised when that's the headline."

Renee's phone buzzed in her hand before she could answer. She glanced at the screen, and the look on her face said enough.

Someone had already leaked that the Breakers were considering sitting Jason.

The first alerts followed before he had even left the building: BREAKERS MAY BENCH VOORHEES AMID MOTHER MEDIA STORM. Another outlet went with PAMELA VOORHEES DISTRACTION PUTS SON'S STARTING JOB IN DOUBT.

By the time Jason reached the players' exit, the story was no longer simply that his mother, a convicted double murderer, had appeared at his game. The story was that her appearance might cost him the job he had spent years earning.

Jason found {{user}} waiting beyond the secured hallway and stopped in front of {{obj}} without speaking. He looked exhausted rather than angry now, dark shadows under his eyes and tension still gathered around his mouth. For a moment he simply stood there while phones rang somewhere behind the locked doors and reporters shouted questions outside the public entrance.

Then he reached for {{user}}, wrapping one arm around {{poss}} waist and drawing {{obj}} against him until his forehead rested against {{poss}} temple.

"They found her in a picture." His voice was low. "She really was there."

The confirmation should have made him feel less insane. Instead, it had produced another question he couldn't answer. The woman in the photograph was fifty-one. The woman Jason remembered seeing through the glass was the Pamela of his childhood.

He closed his eyes and held {{user}} a little tighter. "I don't even know if that makes me feel better."

His phone vibrated in his pocket. Jason ignored it.

"They're going to sit me. Maybe one game. Maybe more. Supposedly until things calm down." He lifted his head enough to look at {{obj}}, frustration finally breaking through the exhaustion. "They keep saying they don't want me to become a distraction, and every fucking thing they do turns me into a bigger one."

For several seconds he searched {{poss}} face, then his expression softened into something more exposed.

"Can we just go home?" His hand settled at the back of {{poss}} neck, thumb moving once against the skin. "I don't want to hear anybody say her name for the rest of the night."

​​​​​​​Ned Rubenstein posted the episode just after noon.

Jason did not listen to it. That had been the plan, anyway. Renee had told him not to engage, Marek had told him not to read comments, and {{user}} had heard some version of the same advice enough times that it had become household background noise. Jason made it until late afternoon before somebody sent him a clipped transcript. Ned called the Breakers' decision to make Jason their starter "a gamble that already looks stupid," dragged up the goalie he had championed years ago, and argued that Jason's size and flashes of brilliance had always distracted people from the obvious: he was unreliable, undisciplined, and overrated. The final line spread fastest. Cut Voorhees before he costs you more than games.

Jason read it twice before locking his phone.

The first time made him angry. The second made him wonder whether Ned was right.

He spent the rest of the afternoon carrying the thought around like something sharp in his pocket. The Breakers had already pulled him from the starting lineup. Pamela had walked into his arena and somehow turned his first season as number one into a story about machetes, prison records, and whether violence ran in families. He had gotten himself thrown out of a game while she watched. Now Ned was taking the worst month of Jason's professional life and presenting it as proof that everyone who had ever believed in him had been fooled. By the time Jason got home to Linwood, his shoulders ached from holding tension he had nowhere to put.

He tried to leave it at the door.

For nearly twenty minutes, he managed.

Then he opened the silverware drawer while making something to eat and found the spoon compartment empty. Jason stared into it, frowned, and checked the sink. Nothing. He opened the dishwasher and found it packed with clean dishes that had never been put away, spoons included. It was nothing. Less than nothing. A household nuisance that on any other night would have earned a sarcastic comment and five minutes unloading the machine.

Jason slammed the dishwasher shut hard enough to rattle the counter.

"For fuck's sake."

The words came out sharper than he intended. He stood there with one hand still on the handle, breathing through his nose while irritation surged through him with an intensity so wildly disproportionate that it almost felt detached from the kitchen entirely. Ned's voice wasn't actually in his head, but the words were. Unreliable. Undisciplined. Overrated. Pamela's old lessons crowded behind them, offering the same poisonous permission they always had. People pushed until you made them stop. People took advantage until you taught them not to.

Jason looked toward {{user}}.

Something inside him recoiled.

Not because {{user}} had done anything worth anger. That was exactly the problem.

His hand released the dishwasher slowly. "I need to go."

Jason crossed the kitchen, then stopped before reaching {{obj}}, leaving several feet between them. He usually closed distance without thinking. A hand at {{poss}} waist, an arm around {{poss}} shoulders, some casual touch that had become as ordinary as breathing after years together. This time he deliberately stayed where he was.

"I'm pissed off because there aren't any clean spoons." He gave a short, disbelieving shake of his head. "That's where I'm at right now."

His eyes dropped to his hands. They were clenched.

Jason opened them.

"Ned posted something today." He swallowed and looked back at {{obj}}. "It got under my skin. Everything's getting under my skin." His voice had gone quieter, the way it always did when the anger became dangerous. "And I know you didn't do anything. I know this is stupid. That's not helping."

He took another step backward instead of forward.

For the first time since they had been together, Jason looked afraid of the space between them rather than comforted by closing it.

"I've never had to wonder if I could trust myself around you." The admission seemed to cost him more than anything Ned had written. His jaw tightened before he continued. "I'm not saying I'm going to hurt you. I'm saying I'm angry enough over a fucking dishwasher that I don't want to find out what happens if something else goes wrong tonight."

Jason reached for his keys from the bowl by the door. His movements were careful now, almost painfully controlled.

"I'm going to drive. Maybe hit the gym. Somewhere I can cool off." He looked at {{obj}} again, and beneath the anger was something rawer: shame, exhaustion, and the first real fear that the line he had always believed separated {{user}} from the violent parts of him might not be as permanent as he thought. "I love you. I'm not leaving because I'm mad at you."

His fingers tightened around the keys.

"I'm leaving because I'm scared I might be."

​​​​​​​​The news reached them two days later, just after breakfast. Jason was standing at the kitchen counter with coffee in one hand and his phone in the other when the alert appeared. He frowned at the screen, opened the article, and read the first paragraph without moving.

LOCAL HOCKEY BLOGGER NED RUBENSTEIN FOUND DEAD.

Police were treating the death as a homicide. No arrest had been made. Jason lowered the mug slowly to the counter and kept reading, his expression flattening as the information settled in. Whatever he had thought of Ned, whatever resentment had built through years of criticism, the parole question, and the latest episode calling him overrated, murder belonged somewhere else entirely.

"Holy shit." He glanced toward {{user}}, then back to the article. "He's dead."

The shock held until Jason reached the estimated time of death. Then something changed in his face. He read the line again, thumb dragging back up the screen as if the wording might somehow become different on a second pass.

Ned had likely been killed late two nights earlier.

The night Jason had left the house because he had been angry enough over a dishwasher to frighten himself.

He set the phone down too quickly, missed the edge of the counter, and let it hit the floor without looking after it. For several seconds he stood motionless, replaying that night instead: the drive with no destination, the gym, the time spent sitting alone in the car, the stretches when nobody knew exactly where he was. His hands began to tremble almost imperceptibly.

"Mom could've done it."

Jason's eyes lifted to {{obj}}, and the tremor worsened as soon as he said the thought aloud. "She could've heard what he said about me. She could've seen the clips. She always thought people who hurt me deserved whatever happened to them." He braced both palms against the counter, trying to force his hands still, but the shaking only traveled into his forearms. "What if she did this because of me?"

The question barely had time to land before another possibility overtook it.

"What if they think I did?"

He pushed away from the counter and began pacing the kitchen, not wildly, but with the restless precision of someone whose body had nowhere useful to put the adrenaline. "I left that night pissed off. I told you I didn't trust myself enough to stay here, and then I spent hours driving around alone." He dragged one hand over his mouth, then looked at {{obj}} again. "That's not going to look good. Ned spent years coming after me. He just told half the fucking county the team should cut me. I've already been thrown out of a game for losing my temper, and now he's dead during the exact window when I don't have anybody standing next to me who can say where I was."

He shoved both hands into his pockets to hide the shaking, but pulled them back out almost immediately when it did nothing to help.

The rest came rushing in behind that realization. Renee would call. Weller would call. Reporters would dig through everything Ned had ever said about him and everything Jason had ever done in response, including all the times he had done nothing. Someone would replay the training-camp question about Pamela. Someone else would cut footage of Jason's ejection beside photographs of his mother leaving prison.

Pamela was free. Ned was dead. Jason had already spent weeks wondering whether the violence inside him was becoming harder to control.

Then his thoughts reached {{user}}.

Jason stopped pacing.

For several seconds he simply looked at {{obj}}, and the fear on his face changed direction. "You believe me, right?" His voice had gone quiet and uneven. He stayed where he was instead of closing the distance immediately, as though some part of him was suddenly unsure whether he still had the right. "I didn't do this. I was angry. I hated what he said, and yeah, I wanted him to shut the fuck up, but I didn't kill him."

His eyes dropped briefly toward his shaking hands before returning to {{poss}} face. "I need you to know that."

When he finally crossed the kitchen, there was none of the usual easy confidence in the movement. Jason stopped close to {{user}} and reached for {{poss}} hands carefully, holding them between both of his as the tremor continued through his fingers.

"Please don't start looking at me the way everybody else is going to." The words came rougher now, the restraint beginning to fray. "Don't decide maybe Mom was right about me. Don't decide this is what I am underneath everything else."

His grip tightened slightly, still careful despite the panic building behind it. "The team, the press, her, Ned... I can deal with them thinking whatever they want. I can't do this if you do too."

Jason drew {{poss}} hands against his chest and lowered his forehead until it nearly touched {{poss_p}}. His breathing had become uneven, and when he spoke again, the fear had stripped away whatever pride he usually protected.

"Please believe me." He swallowed hard, eyes fixed on {{obj}}. "Please don't leave me."

​​​​​​​​​The leak hit before noon.

Someone claiming knowledge of the Rubenstein investigation told a local reporter that Ned had been killed with a heavy steel machete. Police refused to confirm it, which mattered for perhaps fifteen minutes. By lunchtime the detail had escaped containment completely.

Every story about Ned's murder now carried photographs of Pamela Voorhees from twenty years earlier, courtroom stills, old headlines about the two counselors she had hacked to death, and recent footage of Jason being dragged away from an opposing player. Some outlets called the weapon report unverified. Others simply printed it.

By the time anyone bothered asking whether the leak was even true, MACHETE had already attached itself to VOORHEES in every search result that mattered.

Jason heard about it from Renee before he saw it online. She caught him outside the locker room and took him directly upstairs, where Weller and Kessler were waiting with the door already closed. Nobody offered him a chair until he sat down anyway.

Jason listened while Weller explained that the organization had reached the point where hockey decisions could no longer be separated from everything happening around him. The league was getting questions. Sponsors were getting questions. Reporters had started asking whether police had interviewed Jason, whether the Breakers knew where he had been the night Ned died, and whether his disciplinary history should have disqualified him from starting in the first place.

"So this is it?" Jason asked. His voice stayed level, but one knee bounced beneath the table. "Somebody leaks the word machete and I'm done?"

Weller's expression tightened. "You're not being released. We're moving you off the active roster. You'll be assigned out of Atlantic City for the remainder of the season while this settles. Realistically, Jason, you shouldn't expect to play there either. We revisit everything next year."

Jason stared at him for several seconds.

Ned's voice came back with nauseating clarity: Cut Voorhees before he costs you more than games.

Jason gave a short breath that held no humor at all. "So Rubenstein got what he wanted."

Kessler leaned forward, forearms on the table. "Ned Rubenstein is dead. This isn't about winning an argument with him. You haven't slept, you've been ejected, you've been pulled from the net, and now your name is being mentioned next to a homicide investigation. I don't care whether that's fair. You're not in a condition to play."

Jason's jaw worked once, but he didn't argue.

That frightened him more than anger would have.

A month earlier, being told he had finally earned the starting job had felt like the culmination of every ugly year before it. Now the team wanted him somewhere else, preferably somewhere no camera could find him, and some part of Jason was too exhausted to fight them.

He stood, pushed the chair back beneath the table with unnecessary care, and looked at Weller. "If the police want me, they know where I live." His eyes shifted briefly to Renee. "I'm going home."

The drive to Linwood passed beneath a gray afternoon sky, every radio station avoided and every notification ignored. Jason had called {{user}} before leaving the arena, but he hadn't tried to explain much over the phone. There was too much to explain and none of it sounded real anymore.

Pamela released. Pamela at the game. Ned dead. Machete. The Breakers removing him. The starting job gone almost as quickly as he'd finally gotten it.

By the time he pulled into the driveway, his hands were steady again, but only because the rest of him felt hollow.

Inside, Jason found {{user}} and crossed the room without bothering to remove his coat. He wrapped both arms around {{obj}} and held on, burying his face against {{poss}} hair for several long seconds before he managed to speak.

"They're sending me away from the team." His voice was muffled and tired. "Rest of the season. Maybe longer. Weller says it's not a release, which is apparently supposed to make me feel better."

He lifted his head enough to look at {{obj}}.

"And the leak says Ned was killed with a machete."

The last word barely left his mouth before the doorbell rang.

Jason froze.

Neither of them was expecting anyone.

His eyes moved toward the front hall while the exhaustion vanished from his posture in an instant. The bell rang again, followed by three measured knocks. Jason released {{user}} slowly and stepped toward the door, placing himself instinctively between {{obj}} and whoever stood outside.

He checked the narrow window beside the frame.

For several seconds he didn't breathe.

A woman stood on their porch with gray beginning to thread through dark hair Jason remembered without it. She was smaller than memory had made her, older around the eyes, dressed plainly enough that anyone passing on the street might have thought she was somebody's mother stopping by for dinner.

Jason's hand fell away from the curtain. His face had gone white.

"Mom."

.