Shit.
I vaguely knew that locker room went quiet while I was throwing up. Not the crowd quiet, not the hockey quiet, the human quiet, the kind where everyone in the room simultaneously decided to look somewhere else and pretend they hadn't seen.
Nathan was there before I'd finished.
Of course he was. Nathan was already there, next to me, one hand at my back.
He looked up at the room.
"Out," he said. Not loud. Just certain.
They went.
Knox was one of the last to go, giving Nathan a look on the way that had several things in it, none of which Nathan acknowledged. Dylan last after Knox, stopping in the doorway.
He stood there for a second.
I knew that pause. I had been reading Dylan Morrison's pauses since I was a kid and this one said: I have something to say and I am not going to say it and someday we are going to have to talk about this.
I had been filing that particular pause under someday for years.
Dylan looked at Nathan. Something passing between them—brief, weighted, the communication of two people who had just been through something together and were acknowledging it without naming it.
Then the door closed.
Nathan stood in front of me.
His face was doing the thing that wasn't the wall and wasn't the professional nothing. The real thing. The one I'd been collecting in pieces for two years and was now seeing fully, up close, in the worst possible circumstances.
"I know," I said. Before he could say anything.
"Wes—"
"I know what you're going to say."
"Then stop talking and let me do the assessment."
I let him do the assessment.
It confirmed what both of us already knew.
Nathan sat back on his heels. Looked at me. Looked at his tablet. Looked at me again.
The locker room was very still.
"You knew," I said. "In the tunnel. You knew and you sent me back out."
He didn't answer.
"Nathan."
"Yes," he said. Quiet. To his own hands. "I knew."
Something in the room shifted. Not the air exactly. Just the quality of the quiet changed.
"Why?" I asked.
Nathan looked up.
