I’ve been lying on my bed since eight, fully dressed, staring at the ceiling, doing the thing I’ve been doing for three days which is running the same calculation over and over with slightly different variables and arriving at the same answer every time: I don’t know how this goes.
I’m not good at not knowing.
I’ve built my entire adult life around eliminating not knowing. Around preparation and strategy and controlling every variable until the outcome is as certain as anything can be. It’s served me well in hockey. It’s served me catastrophically poorly in everything else, which is the thing I’ve been slowlyunderstanding since a woman showed up at my practice with coffee and a bingo card and refused to let me pretend I was fine.
I get up. Go to the kitchen. Make coffee I don’t need at ten PM because my hands want something to do and the precise measurements of the French press gives me a focus that isn’t tomorrow.
Four scoops. Two hundred degrees. Four minutes.
I set the timer. Watch it count down.
The kitchen is quiet. The refrigerator hums. On the counter, because she left it here two weeks ago and neither of us moved it, is a lip balm that belongs to Gisele. Small, slightly battered, the particular brand she buys in bulk because she goes through them constantly. She leaves them everywhere. I’ve found three in my truck.
I’ve been putting them in a drawer in the bathroom instead of throwing them away.
The timer goes off. I pour the coffee. Sit at the kitchen table and look at the wall and try to do the thing she taught me to do.
Name it.
Okay. What am I feeling right now, at ten-fifteen PM, the night before a league-appointed psychiatrist is going to decide whether I’m fit to lead my team through a playoff run?
Fear. That one’s obvious, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Fear of the evaluation. Fear of the suspension. Fear of what a suspension does to a team that has just figured out how to be a team.
Underneath that: exposure. The specific exposure of having your worst moment on record somewhere. Of knowing there’s a file with your name on it and a video and a list of witness statements and somewhere in a league office someone read all of it and made a judgment before they ever met you. I’ve spent my whole life controlling what people see. This is what happens when you can’t.
Underneath that: something that takes longer to locate.
Grief. That’s the word that finally surfaces, and it surprises me when it does because I didn’t know I was grieving anything. But I am. I’m grieving the version of myself who never had to worry about this. The closed-off, controlled, impenetrable version who felt nothing and therefore risked nothing and therefore had nothing to lose.
That man was miserable. I know that now. But he was safe.
I am not safe anymore.
I have a team that trusts me and plays better when I’m present and is four wins from a playoff spot because something changed in how I lead them. I have a mother who saved a prom photo behind her bar for twelve years and invited the woman in the photo to dinner as my girlfriend. I have brothers who showed up to a photo booth at a bar and made faces at a camera because someone they love asked them to.
I have Gisele.
I have her products on my bathroom shelf and her lip balm on my kitchen counter and the specific weight of her in my chest that has been there since we were seventeen years old. I didn’t have the language for it and have spent thirty years finding other things to call it.
I have everything.
And tomorrow, someone I’ve never met is going to ask me questions I have to answer honestly and then decide if I get to keep it.
I sit with that for a long time.
The coffee goes cold. I drink it anyway.
At some point, I pick up my phone. Her name is on the screen before I’ve decided to open it, which is its own kind of progress—my body knowing where it wants to go even when my brain is still arguing about whether that’s smart.
I look at the time. Eleven-forty.
I put the phone down.
She has the Luxe launch in eleven days. She’s been running on four hours of sleep and Derek emails and the particular focused energy of a woman building something that matters. I am not calling her at eleven-forty PM because I can’t sleep and I’m afraid of a meeting.
I’m not that man anymore.
The man I’m trying to be handles the nights alone when he needs to and reaches out when he actually needs to and knows the difference.
