His eyes were very blue in the locker room light. Nathan Cross in a Toronto locker room at midnight with a tablet that saidwrong calland the person he'd made the wrong call for sitting in front of him.
"You said it was Dylan," he said. "You said your parents were watching. You said you owed him one more shift." His jaw moved. "I know what that means. I've been watching you for two years and I know what that means and I—" He stopped. Started again. "It wasn't a medical decision. It was—I looked at you in that tunnel and I made a decision about you. Not about the numbers. About you."
"Nathan," I said.
"It was wrong," he said. "It has to go on the record. The assessment, what I found, what I cleared you with." He looked at his tablet. "The call I made."
"Nathan—"
"I'm sorry," he said.
I reached out and put my hand over his.
He looked at it.
He didn't move away.
We sat there for a moment in the particular quiet of something that had been decided and couldn't be undecided. Nathan Cross had been unable to be anyone other than who hewas when the person he'd been in a hotel room with the night before was looking at him from the ice, and the record was going to reflect that, and neither of us could do anything about it now.
"We need to get you to a hospital," Nathan said eventually.
"Okay," I said. "Let me just—my parents. I need to go find—"
"It's handled," Nathan said.
I looked at him. "What do you mean it's handled?"
"Coach spoke to them," he said. "They know where to go."
I opened my mouth. Something about that—the efficiency of it, the fact that it had been arranged before he'd even said the wordshospital—was doing something in my head that I didn't have the processing power for right now.
Nathan stood and helped me up.
I looked at him properly for the first time since the locker room had emptied.
Something was different.
It took me a second to find it, my brain running slightly slower than usual, and then I found it and I didn't know what to do with it. His coat was the same. His shirt was the same.
But his lanyard—the Wardens medical staff lanyard he wore to every game, every practice, every facility interaction, the one with his name and his credentials and the institutional weight of Nathan Cross's professional identity—was gone.
He wasn't wearing it.
The space where it should have been was just his shirt.
I stood there.
The lanyard had a clip. A specific clip, the kind that attached to a collar or a pocket, and Nathan Cross had been wearing it every day for two years in every professional context I had ever seen him in.
It wasn't there.
He'd already done it. Before he came into the locker room. Before the assessment. BeforeI'm sorryin a Toronto locker room.
He'd already done it.
He reached down and took my hand.
There. In the corridor. Walking out of the locker room with Coach twenty feet ahead of us and the facility staff moving around us and whatever was left of the team somewhere behind us, Nathan Cross took my hand like it was a thing he did, like it was a thing either of us did, like this was just what was happening now.
