Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Character:

Hayden Pike

Additional Tags:

Spoilers for The Long Game, Canon Compliant, outsider pov, Rotating POV, Outing, Accidental Outing, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, Hate mail, Locker Room Homophobia, Hayden Pike Is Doing His Best, Brad Deserved Better, content moderation, Customer Service, Gig Economy, Workplace Comedy, Dark Comedy, Montreal, the mirror - Freeform, brad look in the mirror, Refund Denied, Nobody In This Fic Is Paid Enough, A Zamboni Driver Is Parked In The Wrong Spot, Jackie Pike Knew, So Did Hayden’s Mom, It Was The Hot Dog, Parasocial Relationships, Social Media, Twitter

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-20 Words: 5,121 Chapters: 1/1

for personal, non-commercial use

Summary

Hayden Pike has a 4.9-star rating on FanMail and one rule: never watch it back. Brad from Cornwall gets a very nice video about his truck. Then a lot of people have to clean up after it.

Notes

Hayden Pike had a FanMail rating of 4.9 stars across 1,214 videos. He was prouder of it than of his plus-minus, which was nobody's business.

The trick was the name. You said it at the start and you said it at the end, and you said it like you'd been sitting by the phone all day hoping it would be them. Jackie said he did it like a youth pastor. Hayden said a youth pastor didn't get 4.9 stars. Jackie said "No, babe, they get five, from God," and took the twins to gymnastics.

The first time he'd told Shane about FanMail, at a team dinner in Columbus, Shane had put his fork down very carefully and said, "Hayden. Does Jackie know?" It took the whole appetizer course to establish that it was a different website. Shane apologized four times. Then, for about a year, every time Hayden mentioned a video, Shane would ask in a low, supportive voice whether he was doing okay for money, until Hayden told him to fuck off, and Shane, relieved, did.

He did them in the trophy room, because the light was good and because people who paid ninety-five dollars for Hayden Pike wanted to see the rings, not the dishwasher. He had a ring light from Best Buy and a phone tripod with little bendy legs that Amber had once tried to walk off with like a spider. He had the template in his head so deep he sometimes caught himself doing it to the drive-thru:

Hey, NAME! It's Hayden Pike of the Montreal Voyageurs! I hear THING. JOKE. THING ABOUT THE VOYAGEURS. Happy birthday, NAME. Have a great one, buddy.

Never watch it back. That was the other rule. He'd watched one back in his first month and seen what his chin did when he said "buddy," and that was enough for one life.

Brad's came in on a Tuesday from a woman named Kelsey.

Hi Hayden! My dad Brad is turning 50 on Thursday. He has been a Voyageurs fan since before I was born and he has had a really hard winter (he got laid off from the Walmart distribution centre and then his back went). Could you say something about his truck?? He LOVES his truck. It is a 2014 Ram 1500 and it is blue. Thank you!!! Kelsey G., Ottawa (originally Cornwall)

The kids were going berserk in the living room with Ilya Rozanov's new dog. Shane was going berserk in the living room with Ilya Rozanov's new dog, which was a different kind of berserk, quieter, more horrible to look at. Arthur had lost Chompy again. Somebody was crying in the far bathroom in a way Hayden judged, from long experience, to be fake.

He stood on his spot. He put on his face.

"Hey, Brad! It's Hayden Pike of the Montreal Voyageurs! I hear you're turning the big five-oh, which, buddy, is nothing. You're a baby. I've got a linemate who's in bed by nine." (A joke about Shane, who was in bed by nine-fifteen.) "Kelsey tells me you've got a blue 2014 Ram 1500. Brad. That's a beautiful truck. That's a truck that's never let anybody down. Keep it waxed for me, okay?" He leaned in. "And you hang in there, buddy. Hard winters end. That's why we've got playoffs. Happy birthday, Brad. Have a great one."

He held the smile for a three-count. He hit stop, then send. The app made its cash-register sound.

Behind him, in the mirror Jackie had hung to make the room look bigger, through the side window, on the path between the cedars, Shane and Ilya were kissing like the house was on fire.

He didn't watch it back.

*

Brad Gauthier of Cornwall, Ontario, got the video at 6:51 a.m. on his fiftieth birthday, from his daughter, by text, with eleven exclamation points. He was in the kitchen with a heating pad strapped to his lower back with a bungee cord, which was not what the box said to do with it.

He watched it three times standing up and once sitting down.

"Beautiful truck," he said to the kitchen. "That's a beautiful truck."

He went outside in his socks in March and looked at the truck. It looked back, blue, a little rusted over the rear wheel well. He didn't care. Hayden Pike had said it was a truck that never let anybody down. He wanted to tell somebody, and everybody he'd normally tell was at the distribution centre, which he wasn't, anymore, so at 7:20 a.m. he posted it on Twitter, which he had joined in 2012 to complain to Bell Canada.

50 today. My daughter got me HAYDEN PIKE. He likes my truck. Best birthday ever. Go Voyageurs.

He had eighteen followers. Four of them were Bell Canada.

By lunch he had a reply from a stranger that said brad zoom in. Brad did not zoom in. Brad assumed it was about his gut, which was visible in the profile picture, which was him at the Cornwall Square food court in 2016, and which he had been meaning to change for eight years.

By three his phone was warm in his pocket like a hand warmer. He took it out at the Metro on Brookdale, in the cereal aisle, and it was not his phone anymore. It was a slot machine. The number under his post was going up while he looked at it. Somebody had circled the mirror in red, then blown it up, then put a sad trombone over it. Somebody had put it to a Taylor Swift song. A boy who looked about fifteen had filmed himself watching Brad's video and screaming into a pillow.

He zoomed in.

He stood in the cereal aisle with his heating pad bungeed to his back and a box of Shreddies under his arm and zoomed in on the mirror behind Hayden Pike, and there was Shane Hollander, a guy Brad had watched since he was a teenager with a bad haircut, and there was the Russian from Ottawa, the dirty one, the one who'd slew-footed Plante in 2015 so Plante missed six weeks.

"Huh," said Brad.

A woman needed to get past him to the Cheerios. He moved. He was a polite man.

Kelsey called while he was in the truck.

"Dad," she said. "Don't delete it."

"Why not?"

"Because you'll Streisand it."

He didn't know what that meant and wasn't going to ask.

"Dad, you didn't do anything wrong. Everybody already has it. If you delete it now it looks like you're, like. Ashamed. Or like somebody made you."

"Somebody's going to make me," said Brad, who had just read his replies.

In his replies he was a hero. He was an ally. He was king. He was a homophobe for posting it. He was a groomer, which he had to google in the Metro parking lot, and then sat with the engine off for a while. He was going to burn, according to a man in Red Deer with an eagle for a profile picture. He was "the funniest thing to happen to hockey since the glowing puck," according to The Athletic's Montreal guy, which seemed fair. He was being asked by fourteen different people with anime avatars whether he was okay. He was not okay. He was fifty. He had a heating pad on.

That night, at the kitchen table, while the phone buzzed itself in slow circles on the placemat, he opened the FanMail app for the first time in his life.

Ticket #4471902. Subject: Refund.

Hello I would like a refund on my video from Hayden Pike. Its not his fault. It was a great video. He said nice things about my truck. I just would like to not have it anymore if thats possible. I tried to delete it but other people have it now. My daughter paid so the refund should go back on her card. Thank you, Brad Gauthier, Cornwall ON

*

Marisol Pereira worked Trust & Safety for FanMail through a staffing company called Lumina Workforce Solutions, nights, from the second bedroom of a duplex in Chomedey, above her aunt's. Her average handle time target was forty seconds a ticket. Her actual average handle time was fifty-two, which her lead, Jean-Sébastien, had flagged in her last two reviews with a frowning-face emoji that she thought was unprofessional and that she had saved to her phone.

She had been doing this for two years. In that time she had processed:

A man who wanted a refund because a retired wrestler had said Happy birthday, Dennis and his name was Denis.

A woman who had paid a reality star from Occupied to break up with her boyfriend for her, and then a second woman, the boyfriend's other girlfriend, who wanted to know if FanMail could release the first woman's name.

A minor league mascot whose head fell off at second thirty-one.

Eleven hundred variations on he said my name wrong.

Forty or so Hayden Pikes. She knew Hayden Pike. She knew what his chin did on "buddy." She knew he never did a second take, because sometimes there was a kid screaming at the end of one and he just left it in. She had a soft spot for him that she would not have admitted to Jean-Sébastien under torture, and which was mostly about the screaming kids.

Her sister Fátima was getting married in three weeks, at Santa Cruz on Rachel Street, and Marisol was the maid of honour, and she had to give a speech. She had a document open on her other monitor called SPEECH that said, so far, Hi everyone! For those who don't know me I'm Marisol, which she had written on a Tuesday in February.

At 1:14 a.m., Ticket #4471902 came into her queue with two flags on it, one automatic, one human.

REFUND_REQUEST

THIRD_PARTY_IN_FRAME (escalated by: social listening team, see attached)

The attachment was forty-one links.

She read Brad's ticket first. She read it twice, and then a third time, the part where he said it was a great video. Then she opened the order and watched Hayden Pike tell Brad from Cornwall that he had a beautiful truck.

She knew it was coming. The links had told her. She watched it anyway, as a professional, with her headphones on, frame by frame through the mirror, because the policy said identifiable, and her job was to decide.

Third party: any individual appearing in a video who is not the Talent or the Purchaser.

The definition had always seemed fine to her. Tonight it seemed to cover pretty much everybody alive.

At frame 1,880 they were two shapes on a path. At frame 1,904 they were identifiable. At frame 1,920 the taller one, who she was now being told by forty-one links was Ilya Rozanov of the Ottawa Centaurs, put his hand on the back of the other one's head, and Marisol, who had seen a great deal of terrible footage in two years, a great deal, including one video she was still not allowed to talk about and saw sometimes when she closed her eyes in the shower, took off her headphones and sat back in her chair.

It wasn't terrible. That was the problem. She didn't have a flag for it.

She went back. At frame 1,872, before the kiss, the taller one turned his head toward the house, toward the window, toward the mirror, for about eleven frames. Like he was checking. Or like he heard something. Or like nothing, like a man on a path turning his head, which men did.

She typed possible awareness of recording? into the escalation notes.

She looked at it.

She deleted it.

She typed Third parties are clearly identifiable. Video is no longer on FanMail's public surfaces (Talent has never enabled public sharing). Primary distribution is purchaser's Twitter. Recommend Legal.

She pinged Jean-Sébastien, who was supposed to be awake.

Jean-Sébastien: lol

Jean-Sébastien: wait

Jean-Sébastien: is that who i think

Jean-Sébastien: ok DON'T TOUCH IT. legal. im calling LA

Jean-Sébastien: also why is your AHT on this 9 minutes

Then there was Brad. Brad was not Legal. Brad was a refund request, and refund requests were Marisol, and Marisol had a macro for it.

Hi {customer_first_name}, thanks for reaching out! We're so sorry to hear your FanMail experience wasn't everything you hoped for. Per our policy, refunds are not available for videos that fulfill the original request. We hope you enjoy your video!

She looked at the original request. Could you say something about his truck??

He had said something about the truck.

She sat there for a while with the cursor in the box. Downstairs, her aunt's dog started barking at the recycling truck, which came at two on Wednesdays, which was insane, which every person on the street had complained about to the city, and which was not, she understood, what she was supposed to be thinking about.

She didn't send the macro. She typed:

Hi Brad. I'm sorry. I'm not allowed to refund this one because Hayden did what Kelsey asked. I've sent it to people above me. It might take a while. Happy birthday. -M

She looked at -M. They weren't supposed to sign tickets. She deleted it, then Happy birthday, then the whole thing. Then she sent the macro, because the macro was what the job was, and because Brad from Cornwall would get it either way at 1:41 in the morning, and it would say We hope you enjoy your video! whatever she did.

She opened SPEECH.

Hi everyone! For those who don't know me I'm Marisol

She closed SPEECH.

*

Denis Brisebois had been equipment manager for the Montreal Voyageurs for thirty-four years and had sharpened Shane Hollander's skates since Hollander was eighteen and weighed about as much as a full hockey bag. He knew Hollander's hollow (five-eighths, which was unusual, and which Hollander would explain to you for twenty minutes if you made the mistake of asking), his tape (white, toe to heel, one wrap over the blade, no wax), and his laces, which he did up in the stall in the same order every game since 2009 and which he double-knotted on the left and not the right, for reasons Denis had never asked about and had decided were religious.

The lineup sheet came down from Theriault's office at 9:40. Two words were circled in red pen in the coach's square handwriting.

HOLLANDER, SCRATCH (LIGUE).

The Ligue part meant it wasn't Theriault's call. Denis looked at it for a long time. Then he did the thing he did every game day, which was to hang the jerseys, home whites, on the hooks above each stall in lineup order, with the nameplate showing. When he got to Hollander's hook he stood there with the jersey over his arm.

You didn't hang a scratch. That was the rule. A healthy scratch got his jersey hung in the back room with the extras and the third alternates, on the steamer rack, and nobody looked at it.

He hung it in the back room on the steamer rack. Then he steamed it, which it didn't need. Then he hung it back up and stood next to it with a coffee from the machine, which was terrible and which he drank every day.

Gaëtan from the Zamboni came in for his coffee and saw him.

"Qu'est-ce que tu fais là?"

"Rien."

"C'est son chandail?"

"Rien, Gaëtan."

Denis and Gaëtan had not spoken in a complete sentence since 2014, over a parking space, the one closest to the loading dock. It was Denis's. It was assigned to him, in writing, on a laminated sheet that Denis had kept in his glove box for eleven years, and Gaëtan parked in it anyway, every day, his Silverado with the Bruins sticker that he said was ironic. This had nothing to do with anything. Denis thought about it every day of his life.

Gaëtan looked at the jersey, then at Denis.

"Bon," said Gaëtan, who was sixty-four and had six grandchildren and had once driven the Zamboni through the glass at the old Forum in front of Jean Béliveau, and he went back out with his coffee without saying anything else, which was the nicest thing he had done in eleven years. Denis hated him for it.

Then the boys came in.

Denis heard it from the back room, through the open door, the way he heard everything. Thirty-four years in a room taught you that the boys said everything in French they thought the anglos wouldn't follow, and everything in English they thought the francos wouldn't care about, and that both of these were wrong, always, about everybody.

Comeau first. He was loud before he opened the door.

"Voyons donc. Il se changeait à côté de nous autres depuis dix ans."

Then somebody, Lévesque maybe: "Pis Pike le savait."

"Pike le savait pas, voyons, Pike sait rien."

"Pike le savait. Regarde son visage."

Then: "Ostie qu'il nous a pris pour des caves."

Denis knew what Hollander's French was, because Hollander spoke it to him every week about the hollow. It wasn't the press conference kind. It was Ottawa school French, half-forgotten by twenty, and the rest learned in this room, from the boys, from Denis, which meant that Shane Hollander had learned his best French from exactly the people who were standing outside his empty stall saying this.

The outer door opened at 10:58. Denis stepped into the back-room doorway with his coffee.

Hollander came in with his bag over his shoulder, walking the way he walked out of the tunnel in the playoffs. The room went dead quiet. Not the hockey kind, Denis thought. Church, the bad kind, a funeral where nobody liked the guy in the box.

Hollander put his bag down at his stall. He looked at the empty hook where his jersey wasn't. Denis saw him see it.

Then Hollander turned around and put his arms out, both of them, palms up, like a man showing he didn't have a weapon, or like a guy at a wedding about to be told to dance.

"Now you know," he said.

Somebody laughed, one bark, mean, and stopped. Boiziau snorted and turned his back and stood with his face to his own stall like a kid in a corner.

Pike walked straight across the room and sat down at Hollander's stall, on the bench, without looking at anybody, and started taking his shoes off. He wasn't even dressing today. He had a dentist at two and had complained about it to Denis for a week. He took his shoes off anyway.

Hollander sat down next to him and undid his laces. Left first. Double knot.

He did them up again.

Denis went back into the back room and stood next to the steamer rack. He had his own opinion about all of it. He was sixty-one. He'd been raised by his grandmother in Rosemont and taught by the nuns at Saint-Esprit, and he had a nephew in Sherbrooke who was a tapette, that was how Denis's whole family said it, at Christmas, while the nephew passed the tourtière, and nobody, including the nephew, had ever made a thing about it. His opinion was complicated and none of it was anybody's business. He thought Rozanov was un fendant, a showboat, a cheap-shot artist with a grin you wanted to put a puck in, and had always thought so, since Rozanov was nineteen. He was going to keep on thinking so. That had nothing to do with this either.

He had to re-steam the jersey now. He'd been holding it.

*

The draft lived in a Google Doc in the Communications shared drive under Statements > Player Conduct > DRAFT_PH_SH_IR_v3. Becca Sorensen had written v1 at 11:40 the night before, from her apartment in Astoria, in the clothes she had worn on a date with a man named Cody who worked "in payments" and had explained Bitcoin to her for two hours at a wine bar on Ditmars, and v2 at 6 a.m. from the train, and v3 at her desk on the 14th floor while the senior VP of communications stood behind her chair eating almonds.

She was twenty-seven. She had been at the league three years. She had a statement template for everything. She had templates for suspensions, for deaths, for a player arrested in Arizona, for a player arrested anywhere else, for Pride Night, for a player declining to wear the Pride Night warmup, for a fan injured by a puck, for a fan injured by a different fan. She had once written a statement about a goat. All of them started the same way, with the league's full name, because Mr. Crowell liked it.

What began as a lighthearted prank between longtime friends and teammates has unfortunately been taken out of context online.

That sentence was hers. She'd written it at 6:14 a.m. on the 7 train, next to a man eating a whole rotisserie chicken out of the bag, and she had felt, when she wrote it, the specific little click of a sentence that would work. She had been proud of the "unfortunately." It did a lot.

"Is it a prank on Pike or by Pike?" the senior VP said through almonds.

"On," said Becca. "Mr. Crowell said on. Pike's known for his pranks."

"Is he?"

"He's known for, like, the FanMail stuff. And he's a dad. Dads prank."

The senior VP considered this and ate an almond.

At 2 p.m. she was in the meeting because somebody had to take notes, and she was the somebody. Mr. Crowell's office had a view of the park and a bowl of the good mints and a framed photograph of Mr. Crowell with Wayne Gretzky that she had been told, in her first week, to always describe as "with Wayne." Mr. Crowell had silver hair and a way of sitting very still, like a cat watching a bird feeder.

They came in together. Both of them were in suits. Rozanov had clearly been told to wear one. On his way past her chair he took two of the good mints out of the bowl, unwrapped one, put it in his mouth, and put the other one in his pocket, looking at her the whole time with a completely neutral face, as if she were a vending machine that had paid out.

"Coffee? Water?" said Becca.

"No," said Hollander.

"Yes," said Rozanov, crunching.

She took notes. She was good at it. Prank: proposed. Under that, SH: no. Then that Mr. Crowell said the wedding was "not something the league is in a position to support at this time." She wrote SH: lawyer? and then SH: names Baldwin, Lundin and underlined them, because Legal would want that. She wrote down what Mr. Crowell said next, word for word, because he said it slowly, like he wanted it written.

You'll be jokes.

She looked at it on her legal pad in her own handwriting.

Then Hollander stood up, and said "I choose him," and said "Come on, Ilya," and Rozanov stood up too, and finished his water, and set the glass down on Mr. Crowell's desk on the wood, not on the coaster, which was right there.

They left. Mr. Crowell sat very still for a while. Then he looked at the glass.

"Rebecca," he said, "would you."

She took the glass.

Two days later, at 8:02 p.m., the statement went up on Instagram, on both their accounts at once. It wasn't hers. It was from their agent, it was four paragraphs, and it didn't contain the word "unfortunately." There were four photos under it. Becca looked at them at her desk with her coat on: a dock somewhere; two men in a car, one asleep; a kitchen with a cake in it; a dog. She swiped through them twice.

At 9:30 an email went around Legal, then went around Communications by accident, because somebody hit reply-all, that said Hollander's representation had "indicated the existence of a recording of Tuesday's meeting."

Becca thought about the recording, and what was on it, all the way home on the 7 train. Coffee? Water? That was her. That was fine. Then forty minutes of Mr. Crowell, and Hollander, and Rozanov crunching a mint, and somewhere in there, she was almost sure, when Mr. Crowell had said the thing about the prank, she had laughed. Just a breath. A little heh through her nose, the kind you did in meetings when your boss made a joke, to show you knew it was one.

She couldn't remember if she'd done it. She thought she had. Maybe.

On her phone, Cody from payments had texted: had fun last night! wanna do it again?

She looked at it for a long time on the train. Then she opened her drive and dragged DRAFT_PH_SH_IR_v3 into a folder called ARCHIVE. She didn't delete it. You never deleted anything at the league. Somebody always asked for it later.

*

That night, after Brossard, after It is okay, after he'd sat in the car in his own driveway for twenty minutes listening to the engine tick, Hayden stood in the kitchen while Jackie loaded the dishwasher, the way she loaded it, which was wrong, which he had stopped saying in 2019.

"I keep doing it," he said.

"Doing what?"

"The voice." He leaned on the island. "I said sorry to him. At the door. I said, 'Shane, buddy, I am so sorry,' and I heard it. Jackie, it was Hey, Brad. I did a FanMail at my best friend."

"You didn't."

"I held the smile after."

Jackie closed the dishwasher. She didn't laugh, which was how he knew it was bad.

He hadn't said the other thing. He'd driven over the bridge practicing what he was going to say to Shane and Rozanov, and he had said most of it, the sorry and the mirror and the never-watching, and Rozanov had said It is okay in that flat voice like a weather report, and Shane had hugged him at the door with his face very calm, the face he wore after a loss when he'd already decided it was his fault and was going to fix it alone. Hayden had driven home in the right lane at a hundred and five on the Champlain with the hazards on for some reason. He had not said the other thing, because it was disgusting, and because it was true.

"I liked being the only one," he said.

Jackie looked at him.

"Who knew. On the team." He pressed his thumb into the granite, hard, like he could leave a mark. "Nobody knew but me. Since the stairwell. I was so careful. I was so fucking good at it, Jackie, I was so good at it, I was better at that than at hockey. Comeau'd say some shit and I'd laugh and I'd think, you don't know anything about him. I know."

He stopped.

"That's sick," he said. "Right? That's a sick thing to be upset about."

"Yeah," said Jackie. "A little."

He nodded. He'd wanted that.

"You weren't the only one," Jackie said. "For the record."

"Since when?"

"The cottage. Two summers ago. He ate a hot dog."

Hayden stared at her.

"Shane Hollander," said Jackie, "ate a hot dog. With mustard. Off the barbecue. Rozanov handed it to him. I watched him eat the whole thing and I went inside and I told your mother."

"You told my mother?"

"Your mother knew," said Jackie. "Your mother's known since the wedding. She said he looked at Rozanov at the reception like a dog looks at a closed door." She dried her hands on the dish towel. "We were all very good at it too, Hayden. Go take a shower. You smell like the Champlain."

He went upstairs. He didn't take a shower. He sat on the edge of the tub in the dark with his phone and opened FanMail and looked at his own face, 4.9 stars, Hayden Pike, Montreal Voyageurs, Responds in 24 hrs. He found the button that said Pause my profile and pressed it. It asked him if he was sure, then why. There was a dropdown. Taking a break. Too many requests. Personal reasons. Other.

He picked Other. A box opened for him to type in. He sat there with his thumbs over it until the screen went dark by itself.

*

The next night, at 1:00 a.m., Marisol logged in and her queue said 4,112.

It said 4,112 because when a Talent paused his profile, the requests didn't stop. You could still send one. It said so in section 4.3. It went into a holding queue, and the holding queue had a counter, and Trust & Safety had to clear anything flagged in it by keyword, and tonight the keyword was mirror.

hi hayden!! could you please film in the trophy room thank u

please stand a little to the left

for my wife's birthday, she's your biggest fan, we're both 60 and both men and we got married in 2004 and nobody filmed anything back then. just say hi to us. Roger & Phil

brad look in the mirror

brad look in the mirror

brad look in the mirror

Hi Hayden it's Kelsey again, Brad's daughter. My dad is okay. He says to tell you it's not your fault and he still likes the video and the truck is fine. Please don't send anything back, you're paused. I just wanted you to know.

She flagged Kelsey's to go through to the Talent anyway, which she wasn't supposed to do, and which nobody would ever check.

Under the profile, in the reviews, which were also off-limits, his rating had gone down overnight from 4.9 to 4.6, because people who had never ordered anything had found a way to leave stars. Most of the new ones were one star. Some were five. She had macros for both. One was three stars, from an account made at 11:52 p.m., with no photo.

didn't say my name right but it's fine i just wanted to be in the room

She didn't have a macro for that one. She left it up.

At 1:41, the system auto-closed Ticket #4471902 for inactivity. Brad hadn't replied to the macro. He didn't appeal.

Downstairs her aunt's dog started in on the recycling truck. It was Thursday. It shouldn't even have been there.

*