I touched his face. It was warm, but his skin was pale. Clammy. His eyes were half-open but unfocused. I tapped his cheek twice, firm. “Oliver. Come on. Talk to me.”
Then I tried to move his pads, needing to get to his chest. I made a fist and pushed with my knuckles. This was gonna hurt like a bitch, but I needed him to respond to something, and if it had to be this pain then so be it.
Nothing.
I had his file memorized. Resting HR baseline. Recovery patterns. Known thresholds. The telemetry William flagged theday before. The numbers flashed behind my eyes, but none of them mattered. Not right now. Not with him on the ground.
I knew he shouldn’t have played. I knew that feeling in my stomach, that pit of worry that grew and grew. I let my feelings for him outweigh the right choice, and now… what if…
I kept one hand on his sternum, watching for consistency in his breaths, while my mind tore through worst-case trajectories. My training screamed at me to stay clinical, stay steady, but every beat under my palm felt too faint, too fragile.
Less than ten percent of players who collapsed on the field walked off without consequence. Four percent required full cardiac intervention. Less than one percent experienced sudden cardiac arrest, but I’d seen it happen twice in my career. Once in college. Once during a combine. And both times, that one second before it went wrong—the silence, the stillness—felt exactly like this.
I catalogued symptoms even as my hands trembled. He must have experienced something prior to the fall. Disorientation, vision changes, something we couldn’t see. God, why hadn’t I seen it?
Sudden-onset disorientation. Nonverbal. Nonresponsive. Now, his respirations were shallow, the color drained from his face, and he was completely unresponsive. His name echoed somewhere in my head, a silent plea I couldn’t afford to say out loud.
If this was SVT and not cardiac arrest, he had minutes before this unconsciousness turned into something worse. But if it was neurological—if it was a delayed trauma response from earlier contact—then we were already behind.
Head injuries had a seventeen percent rate of presenting delayed. If he blacked out from a secondary hit, I wouldn’t have seen it. Nobody would. Jay had come after him hard.
I should’ve pulled him when he seemed off in the third.
God, I should’ve pulled him. I should’ve yelled at William, Mac, Booth, Ivy—anyone who would’ve listened. This was on all of us.
He was supposed to be cleared. He was stable this morning. The labs. The telemetry. The echo. The meds. All green. But they missed something. Or I missed something.
And if I missed it—if my blind spot cost him—how was I ever supposed to live with that?
I let him go back in. I told him he was fine. And now he was lying here, still and silent, and I couldn’t breathe past the guilt clawing its way up my throat.
“Pupils reactive but slightly sluggish,” Ivy said, pulling me out of the spiral. They cut his pads off and had an AED on him within seconds.
William reached for the oxygen unit. “We need him off the field. Now.”
I nodded, even though my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I helped stabilize his head, bracing his neck with one hand and his shoulder with the other. His body didn’t resist. No tension. No sign of consciousness.
My throat burned.Come on, Oliver. Please. Don’t let this be it.
We rolled him gently, keeping his spine aligned. His shoulder slumped against the grass. His arm slid off the side of the board. I reached for it, gripping his wrist hard enough to leave marks under the glove.
“You’re okay,” I whispered, uselessly, as my voice cracked. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”
He didn’t react.
The ambulance rolled up, and we lifted him as one unit. Strapped him down. Oxygen in place. Pads discarded on the ground. I could hear the hitch in every breath. But he wasn’t speaking. Wasn’t responding. Wasn’t there.
William stepped in behind the paramedic. “I’ll ride with him.”
“No,” I said, already climbing in. “I’m going.”
He blinked at me. “Sloane?—”
“I said I’m going.” My voice was sharper than it should’ve been. “I know his baseline. I know his file. I’ve been tracking every flag for months. You want the best shot at helping him on the way? You need me.”
He stared at me. So did Ivy. Booth too. Everyone. The entire sideline felt like it went quiet again.
I felt it hit me in the chest. What I admitted. But I didn’t fucking care.
