The silence lasts longer than any silence I’ve sat in with this man. Long enough that my hands want to find the arms of the chair, want to grip, want to do the thing hands do when the body needs to hold onto a surface. I keep them still. He is owed this time. Every second of it.
When he finally speaks, his voice is quieter than before.
“I need to audit the file.” He picks up his pen, sets it back down. “The clinical record. I need to go through it independently before I can say anything about where that stands.”
I hear what he is not saying. He is not saying the work was good. He is not saying what he said all season when he stood in my doorframe with his coffee and told me the Marchetti case was the best work this department had produced. He is putting that sentence back in his pocket and locking it there until he has looked at every chart note and every measurement with new eyes, and until he does, the work I know is clean does not have his name next to it.
“Understood.”
“Tyler handles the follow-up session on the shoulder. The close-out.”
“Understood.”
“That’s not a punishment. That’s protocol.”
“I know.”
“You also know what this looks like from the outside. Two men. One of them medical staff. In this league.” He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “That’s why it goes by the book. Every stepdocumented. Because if it comes out sideways, the book is the only thing I can point to that protects either of you.”
“Understood.”
He stands. I stand. He doesn’t extend his hand and I don’t expect him to. He picks up his coffee and looks at me, and what I see in his face is not the man from the doorframe. Not the man who squeezed my shoulder on the first day. It is a man deciding how much of what he built this year is still standing, and he does not have the answer yet, and he is not going to pretend that he does.
“Close the door on your way out.”
I close it. The latch clicks and the corridor opens in front of me, full light now, the overhead fixtures at their morning setting. Tyler’s station is to my left. His coffee is cold on the desk and the Marchetti follow-up is his now. The sting of that is real and small and exactly the size I calculated before I walked through Gary’s door.
The hallway stretches toward the exit. Past the weight room where the first equipment sounds are starting, metal on metal, somebody’s early set. Past the staff kitchen where two voices I recognize are talking about the road trip. Past my treatment room, door open, station arranged, the table clean and ready for the next body that won’t be his.
I push through the exterior door. Late March air, the early humidity that tells Atlanta spring has stopped asking and started arriving. The parking lot has filled while I was inside. Players’ cars, staff, the building continuing its morning around a conversation it doesn’t know happened.
I sit in my car with the engine off. The building behind me. The pen against my chest. I pull out my phone and look at Teo’s text from this morning, the two words still on the screen.I’m here.
I type back.Done. I’m okay. Tell you everything tonight.
Three dots. Then:I’ll be at your place.
Not asking. Not waiting for an invitation. Just showing up, the way he has been showing up since the first day he walked into my treatment room and rearranged the air. Voluntary. Chosen. Here because he wants to be here, not because a chart or a schedule or a shoulder put him in the room.
I start the engine. My hands are steady on the wheel and the sun is on the windshield and the pen is in my pocket and I don’t know yet if the file survives the audit. I don’t know what Gary’s face will look like the next time I see him. But I said the true thing instead of the clean thing, and the man on the other end of that text is going to be in my apartment tonight, and there is a space inside my chest where a wall used to run through the middle of it. The wall is not gone. But there is a door in it now. And I walked through.
?
Chapter 28 — TEO
I’ve been to the second floor twice since September. Once when I was a name on an expansion draft list and they put me in a chair and said welcome to Atlanta. Once when Grayson asked about the shoulder at mid-season and I gave him the answer that sounded like progress and he let me keep it.
Today is the third time. Zay is next to me.
Not the measured distance from the treatment room hallway. Not the calculated gap from the months when we timed our exits and counted the seconds between leaving the same door. Just next to me, walking at my pace, his badge clipped straight, the rollerball pen in his breast pocket with the firebird on the clip. The pen I gave him because his facility pen kept skipping and I couldn’t watch him fight with it anymore. He’s carrying it to a meeting about us. I think he knows what the gift was.
Gary called him yesterday. Standard process. The disclosure needed to move up the chain. Grayson wanted both of us. Zay told me on the phone, his voice steady and already mapped, the preparation audible underneath the calm.
“Together?” I asked.
“Together.”
The same word from his kitchen, where Nan’s collards were in the fridge and his hand was on my chest and neither of us knew how many rooms we’d have to walk through before the walking was done.
