Ryan
The thing about Finn is that he is good at being fine.
He looks fine in the media scrum. He looks fine in his stall, with a protein shake and his phone, watching film with the dead-eyed focus of someone trying to learn from a season he is still inside.
I know what being fine looks like.
I also know what it covers.
After video review, when most of the room has thinned toward treatment or the player lounge, I walk back toward the equipment hallway for no reason I have named out loud yet.
I find Finn in the corridor near the tape station.
One skate off. Just one.
He is sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his chin down, like he needs to get horizontal and the floor is the fastest option from where he is standing.
I stop.
Finn looks up. “I got dizzy.” Quick. Like he is practiced at saying it before someone can ask.
“When?”
“Coming off. It’s nothing.”
“How long has it been nothing?”
Finn looks at his half-removed skate. “Couple of days.”
“Couple of days.”
“It comes and goes. I’m fine in practice.”
“You grabbed the boards weird on that last rep.”
“Bad angle.”
“Finn.”
“I want to play.” His jaw is tight. “I am not becoming a clipboard.”
“Nobody said—”
“They don’t have to say it.” He looks at me directly.
The kind of direct that means scared and done pretending.
“I know what happens when you’re limited.
I watched Brewer spend six weeks as a healthy scratch and come back different.
Not bad different. Just—” He shakes his head. “I can’t do that right now.”
I put my back against the opposite wall and slide down to the floor. Which is not a captain move but is a human one, and sometimes they require different things.
“Who else knows?” I ask.
“Just me.” Finn picks at the edge of his knee pad. “And now you.”
I look at the ceiling. The fluorescents have that industrial hum.
“Maren needs to know,” I say.
“She’ll pull me.”
“If you take a hit while you’re dizzy—”
“I know what the risk is.” His voice cracks the way young men’s voices crack when they are angry and scared at exactly the same time. “I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t say stupid.”
“You said Maren.”
I think about the kid in front of me. Twenty-three. First year. Finally playing a full playoff run healthy. Finally good enough that his roster spot is not up for debate every morning.
I stand. Hold out a hand.
Finn stares at it like he is reading the fine print.
Then he takes it.
I get him up, get him moving, get him to the training room with one hand on his shoulder. Not a grip. Just presence.
Maren is still there.
She looks at Finn. Then at me.
“How long?” she says.
“A couple of days.”
The look she gives me says we are going to have a separate conversation about how a couple of days has been allowed to become a couple of days. She waves Finn toward the table.
Finn sits. He looks tired all of a sudden. Like deciding to tell someone has used all of everything.
Maren reaches for her light pen.
Once Maren writes it down, it stops being private and becomes a record. “I’m starting from the beginning. And I need you to actually answer me.”
Finn’s shoulders drop half an inch. “Yeah.”
I stay near the door.
Evan is in the hallway behind me. He has been there long enough to understand the shape of what is happening.
Low: “Hayes would care about this.”
I look at the training room. At Finn’s back. At Maren’s careful hands. “Finn isn’t material.”
“Didn’t say he was.”
I walk out because the room needs to be between Maren and Finn and not me.
Evan falls into step beside me.
“What are you going to tell Silas?”
“Medical is handling it.”
“And Peyton?”
I say nothing.
Evan makes a sound. Not judgment. Something closer to patience running out.
I find Peyton twenty minutes later outside the south service entrance.
Not inside, not credentialed, not past the public sidewalk this time.
She stands just beyond the concrete overhang with her coat pulled tight and her notebook tucked under one arm, talking to a man I recognize from equipment.
Another former staffer. Gone before the season started.
The man sees me through the glass doors, says something quick, and leaves without looking back.
Peyton stays.
I push through the door into the cold.
“You are not supposed to be here.”
“I am on public sidewalk.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is becoming our tradition.”
The old rhythm flashes between us and dies just as fast.
Her face is thinner than the last time I saw her up close. Tired. Guarded. Still too steady when I need her to make this easier by being wrong.
“Are you writing about Finn?” I ask.
Her eyes sharpen. “What happened to Finn?”
I stop.
So does she.
“I did not know,” Peyton says.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if I knew something current about an injured player, Ryan, I would not be standing outside a service entrance asking former staff about league culture. I would be calling you to tell Maren.”
My jaw works around the part of me that believes her too quickly.
“Do not use him,” I say.
Hurt moves across her face before she locks it down. “I would never use Finn.”
“You used my family.”
There. The worst version, finally said plain.
Peyton’s chin lifts, but her eyes do not harden the way I expect. “I wrote what the organization did with your family. That is not the same thing.”
“You wrote it with my mother’s kitchen still on you,” I say.
The words come out lower than I mean. Rougher.
Peyton’s face goes pale in the cold.
Good, some angry part of me thinks. Terrible, the rest of me knows.
“Yes,” she says. “I did. I wrote it with your mother’s kitchen on me and your father’s warning in my head and your sisters’ drawings in my bag. I wrote it knowing exactly what I could steal and choosing not to.”
I have no defense against that because I have read the piece. I know what she left out, know the empty spaces are not omissions. They are protection.
I hate that protection can still feel like exposure.
“It felt the same.”
“I know.”
I look away first.
“You should go,” I say.
“Probably.”
She does not move.
Neither do I.
The service door opens behind me, then closes again quickly when whoever it is sees us. Good. Let the building have one more thing to misunderstand.
“Your project matters,” I say, hating every word for being true. “But if you turn my room into evidence without understanding what it costs them to talk, you become the thing you are reporting on.”
Peyton absorbs that. No flinch this time.
“And if you protect the room so well that the hurt stays inside it, you become the reason they stop asking for help.”
We stand there with the cold between us, both of us wanting to reach across it and neither of us moving.
Peyton’s gaze drops to my hand.
I have not realized I moved it.
Almost touching.
Not enough.
Never enough.
“I miss you,” she says.
The sentence should be small enough to survive the sidewalk.
It is not.
It hits the place in me that has been pretending distance is a strategy instead of punishment.
Peyton stands six feet away with her notebook under her arm and the city behind her, and I want, absurdly, to tell her about Finn.
About the dizziness. About the old Calgary hit.
About everything a captain learns to swallow and then mistakes for wisdom.
I want to tell her because she would understand.
I do not tell her because she would understand.
I close my hand into a fist at my side. “Do not say that here.” It comes out quiet. Not a tactic. Not a request.
“Where should I say it?”
I have no answer that does not break something.
Her mouth trembles once, then steadies. “That’s what I thought.”
She turns and walks toward the lot with her notebook under her arm and her shoulders straight enough to make pride look like damage.
I stay under the overhang until the cold gets through my jacket.
When I go back inside, the locker room is exactly where I left it.
Nothing has changed.
Everything waits.
***
The next morning is maintenance day.
No full contact. Optional skate. I show up at nine because I am incapable of sleeping past optional.
The training room is quiet. Maren has a whiteboard going near the far wall, something about recovery protocol I do not look at because her whiteboard has a way of becoming a conversation.
Finn is already on the treatment table. Sitting still, chin down, letting Maren move a small light tool through careful arcs in front of his eyes.
She sees me. Small shake of her head. Later.
I get my hip worked on in the far bay. Roman comes in and out looking for tape. Zach asks about the power-play adjustment from film. I answer on autopilot and watch Finn in the mirror.
When Maren lets Finn up, he crosses the room without making eye contact with anyone. Roman says something to him. Finn says one word back. Colt appears from the hallway with two coffees, looks at Finn’s back, and makes the face of a man performing active not-noticing.
“Practice schedule change?” Colt says to no one in particular.
“No,” I say.
“Cool. Okay.” Colt drifts back toward the door.
I push off the table and catch Finn in the equipment corridor.
“Hey.”
Finn does not stop. “I know.”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“You were going to say something about being careful. Or ask how I slept. Or tell me day by day.” He pushes through the door to the main corridor.
I follow. “I handled it wrong yesterday.”
“Which part?”
“The part where you snapped at me in front of the room.”
Finn slows but does not stop. “I snapped because you barked at me like I was twelve.”
“Yeah. That.”
“Cool. So just that part.”
“Finn.”
He turns around.
He looks young. Not soft-young. The kind of young that is running on something and starting to notice the tank.
“I don’t want to be the guy you manage,” Finn says. “I’m aware I’m the guy you manage. I just don’t want to be.”
“That’s fair.”
Finn blinks. He has not expected fair.
“I made a bad call,” I say. “Not getting you to Maren sooner. The way I talked to you before that.”
“It’s fine.”
“You just said it wasn’t.”
Finn’s mouth works. “I’m twenty-three and I’m dizzy and I don’t know if it’s permanent, and the playoffs are happening, and you’re looking at me like you already know how this ends.”
“I don’t.”
“You look like you do.”
“I look like I’m trying to figure out how not to make it worse.”
Finn stares at me.
“That is just what my face does,” I say.
A beat.
Something in Finn’s expression loosens.
“It’s a bad face,” he says.
“I know.”
“Zach told me week one.”
“Zach’s not wrong.”
Somewhere past the walls, the ice resurfacer runs its slow circles.
“What are you going to tell media if I’m limited?” Finn asks.
“Medical is handling it.”
“And Peyton Hayes?”
I look at Finn.
“She’s not writing about you.”
“She’s writing about the room. I’m in the room.”
“Not by name.”
“Cap.” Finn says it flat. Not disrespectful. Just real. “You’re with someone who writes about everything we’re not supposed to say out loud. I’m not judging you. I just want to know which direction the information goes.”
I say nothing.
Finn nods. Like that answers it.
He walks away.
Silas is in the next hallway. Not by accident.
“Finn’s status?”
“Medical is handling it.”
“Ryan.”
“I heard you.”
“I need more than that.”
I look at him. “You want more than that.”
Silas’s eyes go flat.
I walk past him to the elevator.
I let the doors close.
I do not call back.
I tell myself I am protecting Finn.
I am also protecting myself from the answer I already have.
Both are true.