Then I get in the truck and drive.
The evaluation is in an office building downtown—not a hospital, not a clinical space, just a regular building with a lobby and a receptionist and a waiting area with the kind of aggressively neutral furniture that exists to make people feel neither threatened nor comfortable. I check in. Sit down. Look at my hands.
They’re steady.
I notice this the way I notice things now, which is actually. Not cataloging it for later processing. Just—noting it. My hands are steady. I’m here. I’m going to walk into that office and tell the truth to a stranger and whatever happens after that is going to happen.
That’s all.
Dr. Carmichael is a small woman with reading glasses and the kind of unhurried attention that makes you feel certain whatever you say is going to be taken seriously. She shakes my hand. Gestures to a chair. Sits across from me with a notepad and says, simply: “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Foster.”
So I do.
I tell her about the captaincy. The team. The way I ran practices out of fear and called it discipline and slowly turned a group of talented players into a group of men who were afraid to make mistakes because their captain never let anything be okay.
I tell her about Main Street. Not the sanitized version—the real one. The way the fuel ran out. The way the sidewalk came up to meet me and I didn’t have anything left to do about it.
I tell her about the Post-it board and the breathing exercises and the bingo card and a woman who showed up at my practice with coffee and refused to let me hide. I tell her what I’ve learned, which is less about emotional vocabulary and more about the difference between controlling things and trusting them. I tell her what’s changed in how I lead and why my team is playing the best hockey of the season right now and what I understand about that connection that I didn’t understand in September.
She asks good questions. I answer them.
At one point, she asks me what I do when I feel overwhelmed now, and I think about it genuinely before I answer
“I name what I’m feeling. I reach out to someone instead of retreating. I try to trust that the people around me can handle the truth.”
She writes something down.
The session is ninety minutes.
When it’s over, she shakes my hand again and tells me I’ll hear from the league within five business days and thanks me for my time and shows me to the door.
I stand in the parking lot.
Look at my hands.
Still steady.
I think about the fact that I just spent ninety minutes telling a stranger the truth about myself—the real truth, the one that lives underneath the captaincy and the control and the twenty-sevenyears of armor—and I’m still standing. Still intact. Nothing collapsed.
The thing that almost cost me everything is the only reason I could walk in there and prove I was fine.
The Post-it board. The bingo card. The breathing exercise in an empty equipment room that turned into the first honest moment I’d had in years. All of it. The whole ridiculous, impossible, beautiful process of a woman who refused to let me stay broken.
I get in the truck.
I don’t call. I drive.
The salon chimes when I push through the door. Gisele is mid-cut, a client in her chair, both hands busy, but she looks up the moment the bell sounds the way she always does—already moving toward whatever’s coming before she knows what it is.
She sees my face.
I nod once.
The exhale she lets out is the quietest, most complete sound I’ve ever heard.
She turns back to her client. Keeps cutting.
I sit in the waiting area.
