They'd kept the Zamboni, the chair legs, and the water bottle. Every moment that I looked ridiculous. They'd thrown away everything else.
This wasn't humiliation. This was something else.
It was someone looking at everything I was—the hockey brain, the leadership, the way I saw plays before they happened—and deciding none of it was worth keeping.
This was being told I was only one thing.
The mess. The joke. Too much.
Twenty-three years of trying to be more than that, and they'd cut it all away in twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
I closed the laptop and sat back down on the edge of the bed.
I waited for the spiral—racing thoughts and a desperate urge to move or talk or find something small to control. I waited for my brain to start listing all the ways I'd been stupid and naive and too much and not enough.
The spiral didn't come.
Instead, there was something else. It was like the moment before a faceoff—when the ref was about to drop the puck, and the crowd noise fell away, and there was nothing except the ice, the opponent, and the frozen half-second before everything started moving.
Game-still.
That's what Hog called it. The thing that happened to good players when the pressure peaked—not panic or paralysis. It was a laser focus that burned away everything unnecessary.
Now it filled the whole room.
I could leave. Go back to Jake's. Wait for Adrian to come find me with his explanations, and hisI was trying to protect you.
I could let him control the story. Again.
Or I could be here when he walked through that door. I could watch his face when he realized I already knew everything—without getting to prepare or frame it, and without getting to decide which version of the truth I was allowed to receive.
I was going to sit in his space and let him feel what it was like to be seen without consent.
My hands stayed still.
I didn't count tiles. I didn't straighten the laptop. I didn't do any of the things I usually did when silence got heavy. It wasn't heavy anymore.
It was just silence.
I thought about the night in his car. The fog on the windows. The way he'd said,You're not too much, Pickle. You're not the extra.
He'd sounded like he meant it.
Maybe he had. Maybe he'd meant it and still sent the footage anyway. Maybe those things weren't as opposite as I wanted them to be.
That made it all harder. It would be easier if he'd been lying the whole time. It would be easier if the tenderness were fake.
I didn't think it was.
I thought he'd meant every word and still made the choices he made. I didn't know what to do with that.
Thunder Bay's Favorite Disaster.
My whole life, people told me I was too much. Too loud. Too chaotic. Too everything.
Turns out I was too much for their story. They needed me smaller. They needed me to fit in a box that made sense to people who'd never watched me read a play before it happened or hold a rookie together when he was falling apart.
I was done fitting into boxes—so done.
