Chapter five
Blue line – The line that divides the neutral zone from the offensive and defensive zones.
Dante
The doctor came back in with a clipboard and a look that said she’d delivered this exact speech before and had stopped apologizing for it.
“Good news is the MRI is clean,” she said, directing it at me the way doctors directed things at the patient when they knew the patient wasn’t going to be the one making the decision. “Bad news is a mild concussion that still requires observation. You can’t be released to an empty hotel room.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to sound chill—like I’d grown up dodging worse back on the lakefront in Chi-town.
“You’ll be fine until you’re not,” she said, with the flat patience of someone who had watched people be wrong about that exact statement all the time.
“Someone needs to be with you through the night. Checking responsiveness every two hours, watching for changes in pupil response, nausea, disorientation.” She looked up from the clipboard. “Is there someone who can do that?”
Renaud shifted in the doorway. I could see him doing the calculation—him in my room, which meant leaving Cole and Keegan unsupervised in a city where three drunk men in Grizzlies jerseys had already decided I was a reasonable target. He was the captain. He needed to be with his team.
“I can—” he started.
“I’ll do it.”
Kincaid’s voice came from the window.
Silence cracked like thin ice. He’d been facing the loading dock till then; by the time I looked over, he’d already turned, his face that same unhurried mask. Gray eyes that missed nothing.
“I’m his coach,” he said. “I’ll stay with him.”
The doctor blinked, then looked from him to me and back, maintaining that ER-shift neutrality. “You know the protocol? Every two hours—”
“I know,” he said. “And if there’s any doubt, we’ve got team medics on site.”
She jotted a note. “Good. Nurse will bring discharge instructions. He needs rest—no screens, no booze, minimal stimulation. If he vomits or can’t be roused, bring him back immediately.”
She left for the paperwork.
Nobody moved. Renaud studied Kincaid like a calculator stuck on an unsolvable equation. Keegan stared at the floor like it owed him money. And I sat on the exam table, jaw dried with blood, ribs screaming, my heart doing its own two-step.
“Coach,” Renaud finally said.
“Get them back to their rooms, Max,” Coach replied, his voice calm, final. “Game in two days.”
Not dismissive—just the tone you used when something was settled. Renaud got it at once. He looked at me with that steady, cataloging stare, then nodded.
“Get some sleep,” Max said.
“Yeah,” I muttered as they left.
I stared at my hands—the knuckles on my right scraped raw, dried blood caked in my palm lines, like a broken CTA train up on the rails. I flipped my hand over and back, just to have somewhere to look.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said quietly.
“I know.”
“Renaud could have—”
“Renaud has seven other players to manage, and at least three of them are going to want to do something about tonight that would create significantly more paperwork than I’m prepared to file.
” He moved away from the window, pulling a chair from the corner and setting it a few feet from the examination table with the calm efficiency of a man arranging things to his liking. “So I’ll do it.”
I looked at him then. I couldn’t not.
He’d come from the hotel in a hurry—I could tell from the jacket, the same one he’d been wearing after the game, the one with the lineup card pocket, now slightly rumpled at the collar in a way his clothes never were when he’d had time to prepare himself for being seen.
His hair was the same. His face was the same.
But there was something in the way he’d moved just now, pulling that chair, that was different from the controlled economy of the locker room and the corridor and every other space I’d watched him occupy for two months.
He sat down and put his forearms on his knees and looked at me. “Want me to call your mom? Brothers?”
I winced which he took as an answer, but Marco and Nicky had been to all my home games when I played for Chicago, and tonight I’d said not to bother because it wasn’t likely I was playing. Marco had plenty to say about that, and I’d promised to visit with Mom tomorrow.
“How’s your head?” he said.
“Hurts.”
“On a scale.”
“Four. Maybe five when I move too fast.”
He nodded. Absorbed it the way he absorbed everything—without visible reaction, filed somewhere I couldn’t see. “The ribs?”
“Sore. Nothing cracked.” I paused. “Doctor said.”
“I heard what the doctor said.”
The nurse came in with a printed sheet and a small bag—ibuprofen, an ice pack, the standard collection of objects that said you’re being sent home to deal with this yourself.
She went through the instructions with the practiced speed of someone who’d given them a hundred times, made Coach confirm he understood the protocol, and left with a nod that managed to be both professional and faintly sympathetic.
The door clicked shut again after Coach confirmed he’d organized a ride.
Kincaid looked at the instruction sheet, then set it on the edge of the exam table within reach.
He didn’t read it aloud. He didn’t go through it item by item the way someone would if they were uncertain.
He just read it, retained it, and put it down, and I had the sense that he’d already committed every line to memory in the time it took the nurse to finish her sentence.
“Cinder would be here,” he said, without looking up, “but he’s out with Taz tonight. Friends in the city.” A pause.
The nurse had dimmed the overhead light on her way out, leaving the room in the softer glow of the single panel above the sink, and the shadows it cast made everything feel quieter than it was. Somewhere down the corridor, wheels on linoleum. A voice, brief and muffled, through a closed door.
I became aware, in the way I’d been becoming aware of things I didn’t want to be aware of all night, that I was sitting shirtless on an examination table and my ribs aching on a slow exhale, and Theron Kincaid was four feet away watching me with those gray eyes, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with any of it.
“The three guys,” I said, because I needed to say something that wasn’t any of the things I was actually thinking. “Did Renaud—”
“The police have footage because the door to the bathroom was open. Hotel security cooperated.” He leaned back slightly in the chair. “It’s handled.”
There was a quality to the way he said it—not possessive, not territorial, nothing that announced itself as anything other than a factual statement about the state of a situation. But underneath it something that felt like certainty that didn’t ask for your opinion about whether it was warranted.
I pressed the ice pack the nurse had left against my cheekbone and looked at the ceiling.
“I was going to take the shot,” I said.
He didn’t respond immediately. I could feel him waiting—that trademark patience of his, the kind that fills the silence with something you’re supposed to keep going toward.
“Fifth shift. Second one where I got hit. I’d decided. I was loading up, and then the check came and I—” I stopped. Moved the ice pack. Put it back. “I had it. Before any of this. I want you to know I had it.”
“I know you had it,” he said.
“You couldn’t see it from the bench,” I said.
“I could see everything I needed,” he replied, flat and sure. “Your weight shifted three strides out—different from the first time. You’d committed.”
From thirty feet away, in the second period of a playoff game, he’d read my weight shift before the hit landed. I had nothing to say.
The ice pack was numb and cold. I focused on the sensation—the heat of my cheek, the biting cold counterpoint. Ribs burned on the exhale; my head throbbed behind my eye. Simple, manageable injuries.
“Antoine played forty-two points in four months,” I said. “He always told me I needed more experience to be better. Said it like encouragement.” I took a breath. “It wasn’t.”
Kincaid said nothing.
“It started before the trade,” I continued.
“I was passing when I should’ve shot. Before any of this.
I kept telling myself I’d work through it.
” I pressed the pack harder. “He’d call me on the car ride home: You had the angle, but Briggs was open.
The smart play was the pass. A debrief after every instinct shot. ”
I hadn’t told anyone—agent, family, no one. Kept it locked away like a secret.
“By February,” I said, voice low, “I was passing up shots I should’ve taken. Not every time, just enough. By then, when a real chance came, I’d hesitate. The numbers still looked fine—Antoine was scoring on my setups. Which I think—” I stopped.
“Which you think was the point,” he said.
That tone again—no surprise, no outrage, no sugarcoating. Just flat, direct.
“Maybe not consciously,” I admitted. “But effective.”
“Doesn’t have to be conscious to work,” he said.
I looked at him: sleeves rolled, jacket collar rumpled, gray eyes level. He looked like a man who’d run through every possible cause before settling on one.
“Right,” I said. “It doesn’t.” But we both knew Antione had been deliberate.
The ice pack was lukewarm. I set it down, tracing my cheekbone—mapping the damage, real versus imagined. The swelling would purple by morning, ache for a week, then vanish. Couldn’t say the same for everything else.
“The thing is,” I said, then paused—hesitated. Kincaid’s silence was heavy, a prompt to keep going until I understood myself. “I knew something was wrong with my game before anyone saw it. I ran drills, told myself I’d fix it.”
“And it calcified,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s what happens when you try to work through something that isn’t a technical problem. You can skate harder, shoot until your hands bleed, but none of it touches the broken part—because it isn’t your hands.”
“So what is it?” I asked, genuinely.
He waited. The clock ticked. Distant corridor sounds. My ribs on each breath.
“Trust,” he said. “In your own read of the ice—that gut sense before you think. Someone spent months teaching you that gut was wrong. That’s not a tech fix; it’s deeper.”
The room felt different—walls closer, more present.
“You would have been warned,” I said flatly. “What did they tell you?”
He held my gaze. “Things that needed verifying.”
“And?”
“I spent two months verifying them. They don’t hold up.”
I looked at my hands—rusty knuckles, tacky palm blood. I flipped my hand over, then back.
“Someone told you I was predatory,” I said. Because I’d finally worked out he’d done to me what he complained another player had done. Antoine had told me himself what he was going to do in the weeks before he even started it, and I’d been too love-sick, as Mom would say, to listen.
He didn’t deny it, just held the silence.
“With teammates,” I said. “That I targeted people. When it didn’t go my way, I went after their—”
“Yes,” he said, final.
The clock. My ribs. Twenty-thousand miles between who I was and the version of me that showed up in Denver bruised and accused.
“Antoine,” I said.
Silence.
“He was protected by me,” I said, voice tight. “By the promise I made because I thought—” My voice cracked. I clamped my mouth shut and ignored the jagged pain in my jaw.
He said nothing, and I was glad he didn’t ask me to finish.
“You could’ve cut me week one,” I muttered.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He met my eyes with that unhurried focus. “Because I’ve been wrong about people before. And paid for it. I decided long ago that I’d rather be slow to conclude than fast and wrong.”
The ice bag lay useless now. I picked it up, set it aside—anything to keep my hands busy.
“Sixty-three days,” I said.
“Sixty-three,” he agreed.
“You watched me for sixty-three days.”
“I did.” Then he gave me that quiet, slight smile—like a secret handshake. “And I’ll add one more.” He stood. “Ride’s here.”
I hauled myself off the table, accepted a shirt from the nurse, but refused Theron’s jacket.
Outside, Denver felt cold—but I’d grown up cheering a hockey game in subzero wind off Lake Michigan.
If I could handle that, I could handle tonight.
I followed him out, ready for one more day under his watch.