Volsky and I were on bikes, side by side. The rehab corner. The damaged goods row.
We’d been here before—literally and figuratively. Both of us sidelined at different points last season. I had missed the first half due to my freak accident. Stairs, dog, heartbreak. The holy trinity of career-ending bad luck. Volsky had missed the playoffs due to a torn rotator cuff and we’d gotten trounced in the first round anyway. Four games. Clean sweep. The kind of exit that lived in your chest for months afterward like a stone you couldn’t dislodge.
Between the two of us, we’d cost the Frost their best forward line at the worst possible time. We didn’t talk about it directly. We didn’t need to. It lived in the space between us on these bikes every morning—a shared debt we were both methodically paying down.
The A on my jersey made it worse. Alternate captain. A leadership role I’d earned over six seasons and then I’d spent half of last year watching from the press box while the team carried on without me. Morrison never said anything but I feltit—the weight of the letter I hadn’t been healthy enough to deserve.
Thomas had us on a modified program. Controlled cardio, nothing that would torque the knee or load the shoulder beyond what he’d mapped out on his increasingly detailed spreadsheet. He monitored us like we were expensive equipment being brought back online after a system failure.
“How was your weekend?” I asked, watching my RPMs on the display.
A beat of silence. Volsky’s default before answering most questions. “Good. Ran the lakefront path Saturday morning. Bradley made dinner.” A brief pause. “He tried a new gluten-free pasta recipe. It was actually decent.”
“High praise.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. “I’m not really a foodie. It kills him. And my sister.”
I pushed the pedals harder, watched the numbers climb.
“You alright?” Volsky asked. Not prying. Just noticing. He noticed everything.
“Fine. Knee’s a little tight this morning.”
He accepted that without comment.
It was a lie. My knee was fine. I couldn’t exactly explain why I’d gone quiet—why my chest had tightened when he saidBradley made dinner. Three ordinary words. The kind of detail that meant you had someone waiting at home.
I used to have that. Ten years with Mackenzie. Now I had an empty apartment and a dog who deserved more walks than I had time to give him.
I pushed the pedals harder and didn’t think about it.
Across the room, Morrison murmured something that made Avery laugh—loud and sudden. Morrison didn’t even crack a smile but his eyes crinkled at the corners. It was strangely reassuring to watch him: a body that had absorbed a decadeof professional contact and he was still here at eight in the morning, doing jumping lunges without complaint. The engine of this team on the ice and off it. First line center. Captain. The axis everything else rotated around.
We needed him healthy. We needed Volsky’s shoulder dialed in. We needed my knee to hold.
Minnesota wasn’t going to sweep us again.
“Bradley coming to the home opener?” I asked, because the silence had started to feel like a door into my own head and I didn’t want to go through it.
“Yeah.” Something in Volsky’s expression shifted—barely perceptible, like a change in light. “He wouldn’t miss it.”
“Good. We need all the support we can get.”
“He’s still upset about that goaltender interference call from the playoffs.” Volsky shook his head. “Brings it up at least once a week.”
“The one in Game 3? Total bullshit. It was a clean goal.”
“I know. He knows. He’s made a PowerPoint about it.”
I laughed. “A PowerPoint?”
“With diagrams.” Volsky’s mouth twitched. “He’s very passionate.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Having someone in your corner like that.”
Volsky glanced at me—steady, unhurried, the way he looked at everything.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It is.”
