Ryan
Iwatch the Houston clip for the fourth time in the darkened film room and hate it more every loop.
The hit looks worse slowed down.
Everything does.
My first stride. The exact second my stick comes up. The ref’s arm. The bench rising behind me like a wave with no plan except impact.
Coach Sully freezes the frame before I reach the scrum.
“Tell me what you see.”
Nobody answers right away.
The room smells like stale coffee, cold gear, and men trying not to say the thing that would start a fight before ten in the morning. A few guys still have wet hair from the skate. Someone keeps clicking the cap on a marker until Roman reaches back without looking and takes it out of his hand.
I sit in the front row with my elbows on my knees.
“Bad angle,” one of the rookies says finally.
Evan McKinney snorts from the back. “Generous.”
I do not turn. “You have something useful?”
“Yeah. If we’re going to watch you lose your mind in slow motion, can we at least admit why it happened at normal speed?”
The room shifts. Evan can change the air with one sentence and then look bored by the weather.
Coach Sully clicks the remote against his palm. “Go on.”
Evan leans back, arms folded. “They’d been hacking Finn for two periods. We kept trying to look disciplined. They kept hearing polite.”
“So you wanted a bench brawl,” Roman says.
“I wanted them to stop taking runs at our goalie.”
“I wanted that too,” I say.
“Could’ve fooled me before the third.”
Several heads turn. A rookie stares very hard at his own shoes.
I finally look back. Evan’s expression is lazy. His eyes are not.
“You think I let it happen?”
“I think you tried to manage it until there wasn’t anything left to manage.”
The line hits because it is close enough to the truth to bruise. I feel it and give nothing back.
Coach Sully clears his throat. “Good. Now we’re talking hockey instead of therapy. Clip two.”
The screen changes to the game from last night. My blocked shot. Evan’s goal. The late third-period read when Evan wanted the empty net and I sent him back. Coach lets that play twice.
“This,” Sully says, “is what it looks like when we keep our edge and still use our brains.”
Evan tips his chair back. “My edge got us the goal.”
“Your brain got us the win,” I say.
Evan’s chair lands with a soft thud.
For a beat, the room holds still around us.
Then Roman mutters, “Put that on a mug,” and the tension cracks just enough for a few guys to laugh.
I would take the laugh and the win and the small, reluctant nod Evan gives me if my phone were not vibrating against the table.
Dad.
My father knows not to call during team hours unless it matters.
I stand before I consciously decide to move. Coach sees my face and nods toward the door.
The hallway outside the film room is bright enough to hurt.
“Dad?”
Dad’s breath comes rough over the line. “It’s your mom.”
Everything in me narrows.
“What happened?”
“She collapsed getting out of the truck. They’re taking her into surgery. Heart. They said a valve, maybe more. I don’t have the words right.”
I press my hand flat against the painted cinderblock wall. Cold comes through my palm.
“Where?”
“Hill Country Regional. Mrs. Alvarez is with the girls. I’m here. Son, I…”
“I’m coming.”
“You’re in San Antonio.”
“I’m coming.”
I end the call before my father can argue and walk back into the film room. The screen shows my own face in freeze-frame, mouth open mid-command, body angled toward a hit that has already happened.
I hate that image suddenly.
It looks like a man who believes he can get anywhere in time.
Coach Sully reads my face. “Go.”
“My mother is in surgery.”
The room goes still for a different reason.
Roman is on his feet first. “What do you need?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Evan says.
I give him a look. Evan shrugs. “Different from proud. Easy mistake.”
Under other circumstances, I might tell him to shut up. Under these, I come close.
Silas intercepts me by the offices with two phones in one hand and an expression I hate on sight.
“Bob is putting the helicopter up,” Silas says. “Car will take you from the practice facility. You can be there in under two hours if the weather holds.”
“Fine.”
“There’s another issue.”
I stop. “Choose your next sentence carefully.”
Silas does not flinch, which is one of the things that make him valuable and unbearable.
“Peyton’s follow-up files Tuesday. Right now, her version is built on the article, last night’s game, and whatever she got from the owner’s box.
If she is frozen out during a family emergency, she’ll write from outside again. ”
I stare at him. For a second the hallway has no sound except the muffled clatter of sticks from the equipment area.
“You want me to take a reporter to my mother’s surgery.”
“I want you to decide whether the story gets context from you or assumptions from everybody else.”
“My mother is not context.”
“No. She is your mother. And if Peyton is half the reporter you think she is, she knows the difference.”
I step closer. Silas does not move back. Smart or suicidal. I do not have time to decide.
“Do not use my family for cleanup.”
“Then don’t let Jennifer do it from a distance.
” Silas lowers his voice. “You know what happens if you leave this empty. We fill it. Bob fills it. Fans fill it. Your father answers one call from a local outlet while exhausted and suddenly the whole thing is sentimental garbage with three wrong facts and a sponsor-friendly photo.”
My jaw tightens until it hurts.
I think of Peyton in the hallway after Houston, not soft, not cruel.
I think of her at the rink, watching what other people missed and writing what I wished she had not.
I think of her in the owner’s box last night, visible above the ice, surrounded by people who would have happily turned my life into a corrected headline.
I trust her judgment less than I want.
I trust the organization’s more.
“My terms,” I say.
Silas exhales. “Name them.”
“No hotel. Closest real hotel is two hundred miles away in the nearest city, and I am not putting her in some roadside motel with every local reporter sniffing around. If she comes, she stays at the farm because my father will insist on it. Keep cameras away from my family. My mother is off-limits for quotes, and nobody puts Peyton in the hospital room unless my family says so. No PR copy. No Jennifer.”
“Reasonable.”
“Do not call my boundaries reasonable like you invented them.”
Silas is already texting. “I’ll ask.”
“Ask?”
“Peyton. She still gets to say no.”
I hate that, too. The tiny flare of respect. The worse flare of wanting her to say yes.
I shove my gear into a bag without remembering crossing the hall to my stall.
Roman packs my chargers. Sully gives me the next two games off if I need them, then comes by and bumps my shoulder without saying anything.
Evan lingers near the end of the row, taping and untaping his stick with unnecessary violence.
“You got the room,” I say to Roman.
Roman nods.
Evan looks up. “He can run the meetings. I can keep the rookies from acting like abandoned puppies.”
“Comforting.”
“I’m a nurturing presence.”
I give him a look.
Evan’s smirk fades. “Hope she’s okay.”
The words are plain.
That makes them count.
“Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”
The car to the helipad feels too slow. The helicopter feels too loud. Peyton is already there when I arrive, standing beside the open door with her coat belted tight, hair whipping loose in the rotor wash. She holds a small overnight bag and no notebook in her hands.
That should not matter.
I climb in first. She follows, careful with the headset, her knee brushing mine for one brief, accidental second before she shifts away.
My body notices because my body is an idiot with terrible timing.
The pilot lifts off. San Antonio drops away under us, roads thinning into scrub and fields and late light.
Peyton waits until we level out. “Ryan.”
I keep my eyes forward.
“I am sorry.”
The words are too tidy for the mess inside me. I have no use for them and need them anyway.
“Stay out of my way,” I say.
She absorbs that without a flinch. “Okay.”
The quiet afterward is worse than arguing.
I look at her because I should not. She is watching the darkening land below, hands clasped hard in her lap, mouth pressed like she is holding back seven questions and one curse. For once, she seems smaller than her nerve.
“My mother hates being fussed over,” I say.
Peyton turns her head.
I do not know why I offered that.
“Then I won’t fuss,” she says.
“You will.”
“Probably. I have a face people confess to and nerves with good manners.”
Against all good sense, a breath leaves me that is close to one.
Her eyes warm, then gentle. “I hope she’s okay.”
I look down at my hands. They are steady. I resent them for it.
“So do I.”