"I know," he said. Two words. Then, quieter: "I've known since the night you stopped answering."
I waited.
"I want to hear it all," I said. "Not what you were feeling. What happened?"
He told me. Flat. Chronological. Three teams called within the same week. My name appeared in two of the three packages—different configurations and different returns, but I was the common variable. The Ironhawks' front office was listening, which in trade-deadline language meant the door was open. Kieran's agent flagged it. Kieran went to his agent with acounter-offer: sign the extension early, below market value, with a structure that made a specific trade configuration impossible with the salary cap.
"You took less money," I said.
"Yes."
"How much less?"
A pause. "Enough to matter."
"How much?"
"Two million over three years."
The number landed.
"And you didn't tell me."
"No."
"Because."
He exhaled. "Because you would've demanded a trade yourself before you let me do it. You would've called your agent and told him to—"
"That's my call."
The sentence cut him short. I held his gaze across the narrow booth, close enough to see the places where fatigue had pooled under his eyes.
"Whether I stay or go, whether I fight or fold, whether I let someone rearrange their life around mine—that's my call to make. You took it. For three weeks I didn’t know if what we had was real or just convenient. I never want to stand on that ice again, not knowing."
Kieran closed his eyes.
"I'm not asking you to apologize again. You already did. I'm telling you the terms." I leaned forward. "No more decisions about me without me. No managing or protecting me from information you've decided I can't carry." My hands were steady. "I have carried things you don't know about since I was seventeen years old. I carried them here. I can handle the weight. What I can't handle is someone I—"
I stopped. The word was right there. Three weeks of anger hadn't killed it. Three weeks of silence hadn't starved it. It sat in my throat, balanced, waiting for me to decide whether to release it.
I pulled back. Not yet.
"—someone I trust deciding I'm not strong enough for the truth."
Kieran swallowed. I watched it happen—the shift in his neck, briefly exposing the tendon I'd kissed when the world had narrowed to the sound of his breathing and nothing else had mattered.
"I hear you," he said. "All of it."
"Do you agree?"
"Yes."
He shifted forward. His knee touched mine under the table, brief, accidental, withdrawn immediately. The spot stayed warm after he pulled back. Neither of us acknowledged it.
"I treated your fear like it was more breakable than mine. I decided my fear was strategic, and yours was just—desperate. And that assumption is the thing I have to sit with. Not the decision. What was underneath it."
Dartboard thwack. A glass set down on the bar. Someone's laugh, brief and unrelated.
