Lauren smiled at customers waiting to get into Nora’s Café as she breezed past them to start her shift. She was early for work and still the line stretched to the end of the block.
Summer had unofficially arrived and, with it, the shoobies—people who came to the shore only during the summer. They got their name from their unfortunate habit of wearing shoes to walk to the beach when any local worth his or her salt could go barefoot for blocks.
She’d barely have time to run upstairs and change into her uniform, a navy skirt and a pale yellow polo shirt. The building had a second floor with an office, a storage area, and a changing room for the staff. Most of them barely used it, but because Lauren liked to run to and from work, it felt like her personal locker room. She kept her running clothes, sneakers, and a stash of Gatorade in one of the closets.
“Morning, Nora,” she called to her boss, a sixty-something redhead manning the door and putting names on the wait list. Lauren didn’t bother offering to take over the task; Nora liked greeting her customers, especially the first few weekends of the summer.
Lauren signed in on the same clipboard Nora had kept by the kitchen since she’d opened her doors in 2005. Everything was done manually. Lauren took the customers’ orders on an old-fashioned ticket pad, each stub three deep: one for the kitchen, one for Lauren, one for clocking out at the end of the day. It wasn’t that Nora couldn’t afford to upgrade to a computer system, and she was certainly savvy enough to find one that would suit the restaurant. She simply went through life with the attitude of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
But four and a half years ago, Nora had recognized that Lauren was broken. That first winter, Lauren would sit for hours in the café, morning after morning, nursing a coffee. Sometimes she had constructive thoughts, ideas about starting a foundation in Rory’s memory. But most days, she just stared out the window.
Nora didn’t pretend not to know who she was, but she also didn’t watch her from a safe distance and whisper to the other employees. Both scenarios had happened endlessly in Lauren’s final weeks in Los Angeles.
Nora had simply brought Lauren a plate of eggs and bacon and said, “On the house.”
Lauren had looked at her suspiciously. “Why?”
“Because you’ve had a rough few months, and I know what that’s like.” Then she pointed to a painted sign above the table that read AIN’T NO PROBLEM BACON CAN’T CURE.
Lauren couldn’t help but smile. Was the word cure a pun on cured meat, or was she giving the sign too much credit? Either way, she thanked the woman. And it took a few weeks before Nora would accept any money from her for food. It took about a month for Nora to offer her a job.
Lauren glanced at the chalkboard to get a sense of the day’s specials and realized it hadn’t been updated. She called out to Nora for a rundown.
“Goldenberry pancakes, a hot quinoa bowl, a kale–goat cheese omelet,” she said. “I only got half the goat cheese I ordered so be prepared to eighty-six it because of this rush.”
Nora prided herself on an organic menu constructed around as many “super-foods” as possible.
Lauren jotted the specials on her ticket pad, grabbed a piece of chalk and updated the board, and then started taking table orders. She loved the chaotic rhythm of the restaurant. For hours at a stretch, she didn’t have time to think. She barely had time to breathe. When she was really in a groove, it was almost like running.
Lauren was in the zone during the crush of lunch when Nora summoned her to the front counter.
“You have a visitor,” she said in the same moment that Lauren saw the hard-to-miss blonde in cutoffs and mirrored aviator sunglasses.
Lauren fortified herself with a deep breath and marched over to the sister she hadn’t seen since Labor Day weekend, which had been Stephanie’s last visit to the shore.
“Hey,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Didn’t Mom tell you I was coming?”
“Yes, but I mean here. At the café.” She glanced around. “I’m working.”
“Yeah, I know, Lauren. You’re always working or running or some shit and I need to talk to you away from Mom.”
Lauren sighed. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know exactly. Mom has a bug up her butt about something. Did she say anything to you?”
Concerned, Lauren thought back over the most recent phone conversations she’d had with their mother but didn’t see any red flags. “No. I can’t think of anything. Let’s just…see how things go this weekend. Where’s Ethan?”
“At the house with Mom.”
“And Brett?”
Lauren barely knew Stephanie’s husband of a year and a half; he and Stephanie had eloped after dating for two months.
“He’s not coming.”
“Okay, well. I’ll see you later.” She turned around and eyed her tables.
“One more thing: I need to stay here for a few weeks. Maybe a month.”
Lauren turned back to her. “At the shore?”
“Yeah. At the house.”
No. This could not be happening. Summer weekends, she could tolerate. But weeks at a stretch?
“Stephanie, I know it’s beach season and the house is technically a beach house but it’s my home. If I lived in Philly, you wouldn’t just show up and say, ‘I’m moving in for the summer.’”
“At this point, I would. I’m getting divorced, and I have nowhere else to stay.”
Divorced. Lauren couldn’t even begin to act surprised.
“What about Mom and Dad’s?”
Stephanie shook her head. “That’s a no-go.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure. It was actually Mom’s idea that I stay here this summer.”
What? “I can’t deal with this right now, okay? Just—go. I’ll see you back at the house.”
Lauren made a beeline for the kitchen. She wanted to be consumed by the heat, the clanking of dishes, the controlled chaos. She wished the lunch hour would stretch on forever.
Summer hadn’t even started, and it couldn’t get any worse.
Matt knew he had Craig’s attention. He fast-forwarded the reel to his latest interview and paused it.
“Last week I spoke to a former assistant coach with the Flyers who’s at Villanova now.”
Matt hit Play, and the Hatfield Ice Arena, home ice to the Villanova men’s ice hockey team, filled the screen. The coach, John Tramm, sat on a bench, the empty rink in the background.
“I can’t talk specifically to Kincaid’s situation because I didn’t know the guy,” Tramm said.
“Of course. I’m just trying to establish the overall climate in the NHL,” Matt said.
“The time period you’re looking at—Kincaid’s two seasons—were right before things began to change.”
“What changed?”
“Starting in, maybe it was spring 2011, if a guy took a hit to the head, he’d be removed from the game and evaluated by a doctor.”
Matt leaned forward. “Are you saying that prior to 2011, that’s not how players were treated?”
“There was no hard-and-fast protocol for players who took a hit to the head. So they’d sit on the bench and the team trainer would evaluate them. And there is the expectation for the player to just shake it off. Hockey culture demands resilience. Guys feel pressure to prove their toughness, and, frankly, they know they can be replaced. Especially the rookies.”
“I understand there’s a class-action lawsuit by about a hundred retired players,” Matt said.
Tramm nodded. “Yes. The lawsuit is in light of the new research about CTE.”
Matt knew all about CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disorder. Matt still couldn’t believe that he’d found a head-injury angle on the Rory Kincaid story. At first, he’d doubted himself. He thought he was projecting. He’d been obsessed with head-injury consequences for over a decade, ever since his older brother came back from Afghanistan. Everyone knew it was a problem for wounded warriors. And people knew it was a problem for pro athletes. But in Rory Kincaid, he might have found an intersection, a perfect storm that had taken down America’s golden boy.
“Now researchers are looking at the brains of deceased former players,” Tramm said. “One of the first to be studied was one of our guys, Larry Zeidel. He was a Flyer. Nickname was Rock. A great guy—everyone loved him. Then he retires and suffers from debilitating headaches. Starts having a bad temper, gets violent, makes crazy financial decisions. Impulsive decisions. His entire life fell apart.”
His entire life fell apart.
After more than four years, Matt finally had his film.
Craig, however, seemed less sure.
“So the film is no longer about a war hero?”
“It’s bigger than a story about just one war hero. It’s told through that one hero to question a system that fails these athletes, just like it fails our wounded warriors. We live in a society that hails these guys as heroes, then does nothing to help them when they need it.”
If Matt had known all those years ago what he knew now, maybe he could have saved his brother. Maybe, if this film got made, others would have the chance to save their own brothers, or sons, or daughters.
Craig sighed. He glanced up at the storyboard, then around the room.
“I know you had doubts about this film,” Matt said. “Maybe it wasn’t saying anything big enough. But I hope this new angle changes that.”
“Where can we talk privately?”
“Let me check the conference room.”
Mercifully, it was empty. Matt closed the door while Craig paced in the tight space.
“My doubts aren’t just about the film, Matt. You really blew things up with that project you walked away from four years ago.”
Matt crossed his arms, nodding. “I know. That was…unfortunate.”
“Unfortunate? You cost Andrew Dobson a lot of money.”
Matt should never have agreed to do the documentary about the rock star. It had been producer Andrew Dobson’s idea; Matt had been between projects and he agreed. And then Rory Kincaid was killed, and Matt was reminded of why he’d gotten into the business in the first place. After a few months of trying to finish the musician project, he realized his heart wasn’t in it. He had to follow his passion, his instincts. “You can find another director to get it to the finish line,” he’d told his producer.
Bridge officially burned.
“I also made Andrew Dobson a lot of money,” Matt said. “I got Andrew an Academy Award nomination for the last film we did together!”
Craig nodded, rubbing his jaw. “Okay, this is the situation: You have a theory. It’s an interesting one. But there’s no smoking gun.”
“I’ll find it.”
“What does his widow have to say about all of this? His mother?”
“His mother died last year, before I was onto this. And the widow is completely off the grid.”
His failure to locate Lauren Adelman Kincaid was the greatest frustration of his career. The amount of time and money he’d spent trying to track her down had almost sunk the project. The woman had no social-media footprint, no driver’s license, and no real estate rental or purchase records. Her old friends either wouldn’t talk to him or swore they were no longer in touch with her. Her former brother-in-law threatened him with a lawsuit. And her family in Philadelphia refused to speak with him. Well, her sister agreed to a meeting, then backed out at the last minute and never responded to his follow-up calls or e-mails. He’d hired a private investigator. He’d considered illegally obtaining her tax filings, but he hit a wall without her Social Security number.
Craig walked back to Matt’s desk, stared pensively at the storyboard on the wall. After a long silence, he said, “Without interviews with the widow, someone to corroborate what you’re saying, this film is too speculative. I’m sorry, Matt. I can’t invest in it. But I wish you luck.”