"I'm going to tell him," I say.
"When?"
"After her boards. She takes the NCLEX soon, and she's stressed enough. I don't want to blow up her life right before?—"
"There's always a reason to wait." Mayhem stands. Looks down at me. “But silence can cut deeper than truth sometimes.”
He leaves. The door clicks shut, and I sit on the bench with my towel and my water bottle and the echo of the truest thing anyone has said to me in weeks.
Practice ends, and I'm in the recovery pool when my phone buzzes on the deck. I grab it with a wet hand, expecting Ella.
It's a link from Spinner. A podcast clip. The message says:
heads up, bro.
I click it, and my father's voice fills the room.
"—well, you know, it's a different league now. Soft. When I played, you taped it up and got back out there. My kid's sitting out with a sprained knee like it's a broken femur. I didn't raise him to be?—"
I close the clip.
My hand is shaking. Water drips from my fingers onto the screen, blurring the progress bar, and I watch the seconds tick on a podcast I'm not going to finish.
Spinner appears at the door, already dressed. "You okay? I shouldn't have sent that."
"What podcast is that?"
"Some sports talk thing. They asked him about your timeline and he just … went off." Spinner leans against the doorframe. "It's not a big show. Nobody listens."
"Somebody listened enough to send it to you."
He winces. "My agent flagged it. He's got alerts set for the team.”
I climb out of the pool and towel off, moving mechanically. My father went on record, publicly, spouting his disapproval of me.
I can already see the headlines. HOUSER SR. QUESTIONS SON'S TOUGHNESS. The comment sections write themselves. People who remember what my father did, people who think the apple doesn't fall far, people who'll use this to paint me as either too soft or too much like him, depending on which narrative gets more clicks.
"Don't read the comments," Spinner says.
"I wasn't going to."
“Sure you weren’t.” Spinner playfully punches my shoulder, muttering something about his mama, and heads out.
I gather my stuff and drive home, where the condo is dark. Rookie’s got a media appearance, and I’m assuming Ella’s still at work, so I just sit on the couch like a masochist and listen to the full podcast.
In the twelve-minute interview, my father talks about his own career for most of it—glory days he describes full of hits, playoff runs, and concussions. He makes his suspension sound like a conspiracy to ruin him rather than the right call after a dick move.
"That hit wasn't as bad as they made it," he says, and the host doesn't push back.
Then Dad pivots to me, and the tone shifts to something I recognize from every phone call, every voicemail, every family dinner where he'd watch game tape at the table and point out my mistakes between bites of steak.
“Howie Junior’s got talent. Nobody's denying that. But talent without grit is just entertainment. You've got to be willing to sacrifice. I played with a torn rotator cuff in the playoffs. Broken hand. You think I sat out for a sprained knee?"
I lock the phone, setting it face-down on the coffee table. Then I press my palms against my eyes.
The thing about my father is that he's not entirely wrong. To the outside world, it looks exactly like what he's describing, a nepo baby with a famous last name who doesn't have the grit to push through.
And the worst part — the part that sits in my stomach like a stone — is that he'd say it's exactly what he'd expect from me. The party boy. Always chasing the next good time instead of focusing on what matters.
