Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Toni Amato
Early morning the tunnel is empty except for an older security guy. “Morning, Ms. Amato.”
“Morning.”
“Stevens already asked if you were here.” I pause.
Security guy sips coffee. “Man’s having a rough month.”
I correct his edge work at ten forty-seven a.m.
At eleven fifty-eight, he cross-checks a man who barely touched him.
The ref’s arm goes up before the echo dies. With serene acceptance of his choice, Max skates toward the sin bin. He sits. He looks at me across the ice.
Not angry.
Communicating.
I write in my notes: 11:58. Cross-checking penalty. Preceded by edge correction at 10:47. Interval: 71 minutes. Correlation: present. Causation: investigating. I know exactly what this is.
He sits for two minutes. His team kills the penalty. He comes back out and plays cleanly for the rest of the practice. When Coach blows the final whistle, Max skates to the boards and stops in front of me with a spray of ice that reaches my boots.
“That was unrelated,” he says.
“It was seventy-one minutes after I corrected your edge work.”
“Coincidence.”
“You have a tell.”
He goes very still. The real stillness, not the performed version. “What tell?”
I close my tablet. “I’ll add it to your file.”
I hand him a printed packet. “Homework.” He takes the packet, fingers brushing mine. Neither of us moves first.
His brows rise. He stares at it. “Conflict triggers journal?”
“Due tomorrow.”
His expression moves through confusion, recognition, and arriving at genuine personal offense in about two seconds.
“There’s a butterfly on it.”
“The content is the same regardless of the cover.”
He holds it at arm’s length, as if it might be contagious. “This is my conflict triggers journal.”
“Correct.”
“With a butterfly.”
“It was the last one.”
“The last—” He looks at me. “You went to a store. Looked at journals. This is the one you chose?”
“I ordered it online. It arrived this morning.”
“You ordered a butterfly on it for a professional hockey enforcer.”
“I ordered a conflict triggers journal for a high-priority conduct case.” I gather my notes. “The picture was not the selection criterion.”
He turns it over. A smaller butterfly is featured on the back cover. And a quote in calligraphy script: Every ending is a new beginning. He reads it. My gaze meets his. Again, he reads it.
From outside the glass, Scott Fusak has pressed his face to the window. He sees the journal. His mouth falls open. He pulls out his phone.
“Stevens,” I say. “The homework is due Thursday.”
“With the butterfly journal.”
“With that journal, yes.”
He holds it up so Fuze can see it through the glass. Fuze takes the photo. I watch it happen and I do not react because I have made a commitment to non-reaction that I intend to honor until I retire. Then he pins me with his gaze, dead serious. “Tell me what the tell is.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Stevens.”
“It’s eleven a.m.”
“Figuratively.”
I walk toward the tunnel. Behind me, I hear him mumble to Trey, I can’t make it out, and Trey’s response, which I also can’t make out, and then the sound of Max’s skates on the ice — a short, sharp stop. Frustrated.
Good.
He spends the next four days trying to figure out what his tell is. Scott tells me, because Fuze tells everyone everything, because Scott Fusak is constitutionally incapable of keeping information in his body.
Max asks Lucas. He asks Dude. He asks the equipment manager. He skates past me three separate times in the next week with the very deliberate nonchalance of a man who is absolutely not thinking about what I said.
I don’t tell him.
The tell is this: his jaw shifts left, barely a millimeter, when things cost him and he won’t admit it. It happened when I corrected the edge work. It happens every time I say something true that he’s not ready for.
He has been doing it since the first day I walked into the locker room.
I am not telling him that.
Ever.
The next morning, Sophie texts me a screenshot of the team group chat.
Max’s contact name has been changed. By unanimous vote. To .
He voted for himself.
I find this out from Piper, who finds everything out. Thankfully, they left me out of that chat. I add it to his file under: Additional context re: subject’s relationship with conflict triggers programming.
He submits the conflict triggers journal on Thursday at exactly nine a.m.
On time. I note this because he has been exactly on time to every session since week one, which I have decided is its own form of psychological warfare.
Today, it’s my turn to ramp up the revenge for the shenanigans Max has put me through recently.
I call a practice video review meeting. The entire team is present.
Big screen running game footage. Max strolls in late, carrying a protein shake, no shame, and his usual chaos energy.
He drops into my chair again. Not his. Mine.
Anthony immediately mutters: “Oh no.”
Fuze says, “He’s dead.”
I don’t react immediately. That’s important. I refrain from sighing, glaring, or reprimanding him. I simply walk to the monitor calmly and say, “Today we’ll be reviewing behavioral patterns.”
The team reacts instantly. Like trained wildlife sensing an incoming natural disaster.
Anthony slowly lowers his protein bar. Fuze actually scoots his rolling chair backward two full feet.
Trey closes his eyes. Opens them. The captain, reconsidering.
Knox mutters, “Oh brother,” into his coffee with genuine reverence.
Across the room, Lucas looks between Max and me like he accidentally bought front-row tickets to a live execution.
Because everyone recognizes my tone immediately. Way too calm. Murder documentary calm. Meanwhile, Max grins, making himself at home in my chair, much like a person settling onto train tracks while the train horn sounds.
I click the remote, and the giant screen fills with every penalty Max has taken this season. One after another. Cross-checking, roughing, instigator, unsportsmanlike behavior. The timestamps, referee audio, freeze frames. The entire room loses it.
I wait silently. Then I go nuclear on his ass.
Professional nuclear. I’m not angry; I'm clinical, and that's worse.
“Notice here Stevens mistakes emotional escalation for leadership.” Click.
“This one is particularly interesting because the play is already over and yet he continues skating toward danger like a raccoon approaching electrical wiring.”
Anthony folds over laughing. Trey physically turns away. Knox chokes on water. Max? Grinning harder every second. I realize, believe me, that he is enjoying my attention more than anything right now.
I pause on a freeze-frame. Max mid-fight. Wild-eyed, ferocious. On the screen, I digitally circle him and say, “And this happens when an adult man has never properly processed a single emotion in his entire life.”
The room explodes. Fuze falls out of his chair. Like a full-body collapse. Max slowly leans back in my chair. Scans the room. Then smiles at me and says, “I’m honestly flattered you made a slideshow.”
I fold my hands behind my back. "At first," I say evenly, "I considered making it educational.
" The room idles immediately. “But after reviewing the footage,” I continue, clicking to another freeze-frame of Max halfway through launching himself at a defenseman twice his size, “I realized we’d crossed into documentary territory.”
Fuze makes a wounded choking sound into his sleeve. Anthony physically bends over his knees.
Even Trey’s mouth twitches. “I captain a professional hockey team. Why am I supervising mating rituals?”
Max presses a hand dramatically to his chest. “Coach,” he says. “You made me the featured presentation?”
“I considered a guest speaker,” I reply, clicking again. Now it’s a slow-motion clip of Max climbing over the boards during a line brawl while three referees try unsuccessfully to contain him. I point at the screen with laser precision. “Observe the complete absence of impulse control.”
Max leans back farther, completely relaxed. “Counterpoint,” he says. “The guy had it coming.”
I turn my head slightly toward him. Just enough to make the point. “And yet somehow, Mr. Stevens, you always look like the ultimate boss in everyone else’s bad decisions.”
The silence afterward lasts half a second. Then the room detonates again. Max stares at me through the laughter, grin gone, gaze warmer. Riskier. I interpret it as confirmation that he’s delighted that I’m finally playing back.
Alone in my office, I take four deep breaths. I open the journal. The butterfly on the cover has been given sunglasses. Hand-drawn, detailed. It is now wearing a small hockey jersey with the number 72.
I turn to page one.
The homework asked for three personal conflict triggers with written reflection on each. He has completed this assignment and added headers, footnotes, and what appears to be an executive summary on the inside front cover. The executive summary is three bullet points:
Conflict trigger one: being corrected by someone who is right.
Conflict trigger two: being told to calm down.
Conflict trigger three: this journal.
I read the actual entries. They are, and I record this nowhere and will take it to my grave, genuinely insightful.
Specific. Honest in a way that costs something.
He has written about his first coach. About the word useful.
About the difference between protecting people and the need to protect people, and why those are not the same thing. I read it twice.
Then I turn to the last page, where the instructions said: Any additional reflections.
He has written one line. The butterfly is growing on me. I close it. Before he arrives, I sit for a moment in the empty training room, journal in hand, along with the executive summary, footnotes, and two pages about his first coach.
I combust slightly.
The door opens. “Journal’s done,” he says, dropping into his own chair this time, the correct one. “Graded on completion or content?”
“Content,” I say.
He glances at me. At the journal. Back at me. His expression isn't the grin. The other one. Gone before I can name it, the performance back in place. “Cool,” he says. “What’s next today?”
I open my notes. “Impulse response patterns,” I say. “We’re going to talk about the seventy-one minute penalty.”
He groans. The groan of a man who was hoping that wasn’t on the record.
“It’s in the file,” I say.
“Obviously.”
“Tell me what triggered it.”
He looks at the ceiling. “You corrected my edge work.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
A pause. He stares at the ceiling a moment longer. Then back at me. The honest version of his face, the one that doesn’t have an audience. “Because you were right,” he says. “And I couldn’t argue it.” I write that down. He watches me. “That’s in there now,” he says.
“Everything’s in here,” I say.
“Great.”
“It’s also conflict trigger number one,” I say. “From your executive summary.”
He stares at me. “You read the executive summary.”
“I read everything.”
“I wrote that as a joke.”
“It was accurate.”
He is silent for a moment. Then: “This is the worst class I’ve ever taken.”
“You’re getting an A,” I say. The silence that follows is different. He wasn't expecting that.
He picks up his water bottle. Takes a drink. Sets it down. “An A,” he says.
“Provisionally.”
“What drops it?”
“Another seventy-one minute penalty.”
“Understood.” he nods. Serious. “The butterfly stays.”
“I assumed.”
“I named her.” My gaze lifts from the screen. “Toni,” he says. “I named the butterfly Toni.”
I note in the file: Subject has named the journal butterfly after the compliance officer. Recommend psychological evaluation. He reads it upside down and grins so wide it reaches his eyes. That grin. The real one.
I focus on my tablet before it costs me anything visible. Too late. He sees it anyway. He always sees it.