“You’re done for today,” I said, keeping my tone even. “William signed off on the panel. You’re cleared to leave the facility.”
His eyes flicked toward me for a second, but then he stared at the ground. My breath caught in my throat, the urge to move toward him and touch him overtaking me. I felt for him, for the devastation on his face.
He said nothing, so I continued. “You’ll report back to me tomorrow morning. No morning workout. No team drills. You’re on rest protocol until I say otherwise.”
He nodded once, barely more than a twitch.
“Did they ask what happened?” he asked finally, voice quiet.
“They asked what they needed to know, that was all.”
He swallowed hard. “Did you tell them?”
“No.”
That got him to look at me. His eyes weren’t angry. They weren’t grateful either, just exhausted.
“I told them it was cumulative stress,” I added. “That you’d been trending up and finally hit a limit. That’s the truth. I didn’t repeat anything said in that meeting. I didn’t frame it as emotional or physical instability. I didn’t submit anything that would flag you to the League.”
“You sure they believed that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He ran a hand over his face, slow and deliberate. “I’m not soft.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
His shoulders tensed again. “But that’s what they think now, right? Booth. Mac. Everyone.”
“No,” I said. “What they see is a player with abnormal vitals under performance stress. What they trust is the medical team’s assessment. That includes mine.”
He didn’t answer, but the tension shifted. He was less defensive. More exposed.
I checked my tablet. Pulled up his sleep log, hydration tracker, stress index. The data told me he was stable enough to walk out on his own. But nothing on the screen explained the fact that he hadn’t said more than twenty words since his monitoring.
“Your resting HR dropped sixty points since the episode,” I said. “That’s significant. And good, especially you not being symptomatic with that drastic of a drop.”
He didn’t react and kept staring at the wall.
I wanted to sit down. I wanted to talk to him like I had in the closet, quiet and slow, nothing between us. But I couldn’t do that here. I couldn’t cross that line again—not with the weight of that meeting still pressing into my ribs.
So I stood still and kept my tone professional, knowing that the second I got home I’d go to him.
“I’ll be running your neurocognitive screen first thing tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll text you the time. You’ll need eight hours of sleep and no pre-workout supplements. No film. No lifting. Just rest.”
“Right.”
“Are you okay to go home alone? Or do you want me to schedule something for you?”
He hesitated. “No, I can handle it.”
“Okay, I’m trusting you and your assessment of your body. You did everything right in that moment,” I said. “You didn’t push it. You didn’t hide. You let me help. That matters.”
He finally met my eyes, a flicker of unease there. “I wish you hadn’t seen it.”
“Oh, I’m glad I did.”
He blinked, taken aback. “What do you mean?”
