“Then we protect your work from his story and his story from your work.”
“I understand.”
“Then we’re square,” Gil says. “Go take care of your family.”
When I hang up, Susan is watching me from the bed.
“I am involved with him,” I say before she can ask.
She nods once. “Then don’t lie about that either.”
It is too simple, which makes it impossible to dodge.
Game Six is tonight. In San Antonio.
I have spent the whole morning saying what I am not. Not covering the team. Not writing about Ryan. Not the story. All of it true. None of it explains why I cannot make myself watch this one from a chair in a cardiac ward.
Susan reads it off me before I find the words.
“Go,” she says.
“You just had heart surgery.”
“And I have Bill, two children, and a very good television. I do not need an audience.” Her eyes are tired and certain. “You want to be in that building. So be in it.”
“It is eighty miles.”
“Then stop arguing and start driving.”
I look at the twins on the floor with their cards. At Bill, reading the side of a granola bar like it owes him answers. At Susan, stitched back together and still running the room from a hospital bed.
“Text when you get there,” she says. “And Peyton—” She waits until I look at her. “Watch the whole thing. Not just him.”
I kiss her forehead.
Then I leave Austin with the afternoon already going long, and drive south.
Peyton
Gil gets me into Game Six under the broader assignment, not the Stampede beat. That distinction matters to exactly no one online and to me more than I want it to. I am not here for locker-room quotes. I am here because the story has moved onto the ice whether I like it or not.
I learn the difference between watching a game and reporting one during Game Six.
Watching lets a person follow the puck.
Reporting means watching everything else.
I sit high enough above the press row to see the whole ice, laptop balanced against my knees, recorder tucked into my bag, notebook open to a page already crowded with arrows. The Stampede are not losing yet. That is the dangerous part. Losing announces itself. This is subtler: late changes, bad exits, Ryan looking half a second too long at Evan before the puck moves, Finn playing with his shoulders near his ears.
The opponent smells hesitation and starts feeding on it.
On the ice, Evan has a lane.
Everyone in the building can feel it arrive. Not see it, maybe, but feel the possibility open. A rim around the boards, their left defenseman cheating wide, Zach calling for the weak-side swing. Evan’s first step goes toward the middle.
Ryan’s glove comes up.
Hold.
