“Look, Mark, I’ll say what everyone is thinking.” The color commentator leans into it, building toward something he’s been told to build toward. “It’s been a noisy few weeks around the young captain — and you hate to see it land right when scouts are deciding who’s got the makeup for the next level.”
“Off-ice distractions become part of the evaluation, fair or not,” the play-by-play says, cautious now. “And there’s certainly noise around the program.”
I put my drink down.
I know that move. They never say your name; they don’t have to. But it’s the same translation I heard inside my own family’s living room, spoken by a lawyer my parents hired, a man who used words likecredibilityandcharacterandwhat kind of girlwhile I sat on the couch in my school uniform.
That was the first time I understood that my pain was being translated into a language designed to make other people comfortable with doing nothing about it. Different room, different pipeline, same product: take a person, reduce them to a risk assessment, and let the machinery grind until there’s nothing left to defend.
It’s what Moreno has been talking about, what I wrote about and what I lived.
And I think I know who’s behind it. Mason told me enough about his father that I can do the math. The calls are being made, conversations are being had, and the people who hold Rowan’s future in their hands are writing him off as too hard.
It’s the same architecture that was used on me.
I keep watching as Rowan takes a hit along the boards and gets up slowly, one hand on the glass, and the camera catches his face for one unguarded second before the helmet shadow covers it. He looks lost and tired and broken.
What he did was wrong, making it about everyone except the person it was supposed to be about — that was real, and it mattered, and I’m not going to say otherwise just because watching him suffer makes the knowing harder to hold.
He took my agency because he was afraid for me, but fear doesn’t equal permission.
But I told him to stop deciding what people could handle, and then I decided what he could handle — how much of what happened in the kitchen he deserved, and what would happen if I gave it to him.
I handed down a verdict and called it a boundary.
I don’t need to fix this. I don’t even know if it can be fixed. But I need to be there, not to manage it or solve it or perform the version of support that makes me feel like a good person, but to be in the room for the ugly time he’s going through.
And whatever happens after that… we’ll see.
“I have to go,” I tell Ivy, putting money on the table.
She looks at me, weighing it — where, why, whether she should talk me out of it — before she settles into the expression she wears when she’s decided to trust someone’s decision despite having opinions about it.
“If he makes you cry again, I’m keying his car,” she says.
“He doesn’t have a car.”
“Then I’ll rent one for him and key that.” She grins. “Go.”
I grab my jacket and go toward whatever is left to say.
twenty-nine
ROWAN
We’re downtwo in the third, the puck is on my stick, and I don’t want it.
I sat out the first period for the swing at Mason, and I’ve been useless since I came back out. It feels like every time the puck arrives, the only thing I want is toget rid of it,so this time I chip it to Theo before he’s looking, and it skips off his skate and dies.
It’s been like that the whole night.
Luca and Seb have stopped looking for me, which effectively makes us one down. But they know what’s happening, because when you skate with guys long enough, they know when you’re off, and tonight they’re routing everything through the far wing as if I’m not on the ice.
I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t pass to me either.
“Settle it down out there,” Franklin calls from the bench, not to anyone in particular.
And the sound of his voice puts me back in his office.
