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"If they want the gay hockey player," Pruitt says, "they get the whole gay hockey player." He almost smiles. "His agent quoted it to me. Word for word. He said it was the best thing any of his clients ever said to him."

I don't say anything. I can't. I sit there with my leg out straight in front of me and my hands gripping the arms of the chair.

He did it without me. He didn't wait for me to be ready. He didn't wait for after the Final. He just did it.

Moretti comes out of the corner. He crosses the office and stops beside my chair, and he doesn't say anything for a moment. He just stands there, looking down at the brace.

"You did it once," he says finally. "In Nashville, in January. Then again last week, in the suite. I told you not to do it twice."

"I know."

"You're not doing it a third time." It isn't a question.

"No, Coach."

He puts his hand on my shoulder. Heavy. The way my father used to, at the end of a day on the dock.

"Good," Moretti says. "Then I've got nothing else to say about it. Except I should have said something fifteen years ago, too, and I didn't. So." He squeezes, once. "Good."

Anand's next. His office is on the second floor, and he's there on a Sunday, because of course he is.

"You want me to move the surgery," he says, before I can open my mouth.

"Tuesday. Just one day."

"So you can go to the game."

"So I can be in the building."

He looks at my leg. He looks at the crutches. He looks at me.

"If you put one ounce of weight on that leg," he says, "one, in the arena, in the parking lot, in the bathroom⁠—"

"I won't."

"You've said that before."

"I know," I say. "I'm not lying this time."

He sighs. He pulls up his calendar on his computer, and moves something, and types something, and then looks at me over the top of his glasses.

"Tuesday. Seven a.m. Don't eat after midnight." He points his pen at me. "Also, Owen. Go watch your boy win."

I stare at him.

"I have three daughters," Anand says. "I've got eyes. Go."

Webb comes to get me at four. I can't drive. It's my right leg.

He pulls up outside my building in his minivan, the big silver one with the three car seats in the back and the stick-figure family on the rear window. He helps me into the passenger seat. He puts my crutches in the back, between a booster seat and a bag of soccer balls.

"Where to?" he asks.

"I don't know yet."

He pulls away from the curb anyway. He drives. He doesn't ask anything else. It's what he's always done.

We're on Lake Shore Drive, with the lake going by on the right, blue and huge and full of sailboats, before I say anything.