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Rafe is at his desk with a coffee when I come out of the bathroom.

“Anything?” I ask.

“Nothing.” He scrolls. “Not in the chat. Nothing.”

My back is stiff in a line from shoulder to shoulder, and my hands have locked up overnight into two things that don’t want to close. It’s the same as any morning after a game. You wake up, take inventory, and go on with your life anyway. Every guy in this sport has done it a thousand times.

“Let me see it,” Rafe says.

I turn around and pull my shirt off over my head, and he comes around behind me.

“It’s coming up. It’s about this wide.” He draws a line in the air behind me with two fingers. “Purple in the middle now, yellow at the ends.” He touches it. “Does it hurt?”

I put my shirt back on. “It’s fine.”

The shirt Greeley tore goes in the trash. The one Kylie gave me off her own back has a smear of my blood inside the collar and another at the hem where I wiped my hands without thinking. It smells like her. I put it in my laundry bag.

My phone goes off while I’m finding shoes: a group text with four people in it. Me, Rafe, Koda, and Mathers.

Mathers: Is your back ok?

That’s all. No explanation for why he’s put himself in a thread with the three of us at 9:12 in the morning. Koda answers in about four seconds.

Koda: Why do you care?

Mathers: Just asking.

Koda: You were standing right there.

Mathers: Yeah.

Koda: Did you enjoy the show? Or did it remind you of your breakaway?

Then nothing.

I sit on the edge of my bed and read it twice. Mathers has been Greeley’s guy since he got here. He eats with them and sits with them on the bus, and he was in that kitchen with his phone out while a guy took a stick off a rack. And this morning, he put his own name in a thread with the three people Greeley has decided are the problem, where anybody could screenshot it.

“He’s scared,” Rafe says, reading over my shoulder.

“He’s not scared.”

“He’s covering.”

“Either he’s covering,” I say, “or he’s not sleeping.”

Rafe doesn’t answer that.

Koda comes over an hour later, and he’s already decided what we’re doing about it. “Croft drives a truck,” he says, sitting on my bed without being asked. “It’s parked behind Delancey all day, every day.”

“Nobody’s truck is getting fucked up, Barnes.”

“Fine. Then we go get him. Not at his house. Somewhere with no phones and no audience, which was the whole problem Tuesday. And this time, I’d like to be the one recording it. I want the leverage.”

“You said go,” says Rafe.

“I said go because three of us were going. That’s different from what happened, which is six guys standing in a kitchen watching while one of them put a stick across Nash’s back, and now we’re all supposed to eat breakfast around it.”

“We’re not touching his truck,” I say.