“Maybe not consciously,” I admitted. “But effective.”
“Doesn’t have to be conscious to work,” he said.
I looked at him: sleeves rolled, jacket collar rumpled, gray eyes level. He looked like a man who’d run through every possible cause before settling on one.
“Right,” I said. “It doesn’t.” But we both knew Antione had been deliberate.
The ice pack was lukewarm. I set it down, tracing my cheekbone—mapping the damage, real versus imagined. The swelling would purple by morning, ache for a week, then vanish. Couldn’t say the same for everything else.
“The thing is,” I said, then paused—hesitated. Kincaid’s silence was heavy, a prompt to keep going until I understood myself. “I knew something was wrong with my game before anyone saw it. I ran drills, told myself I’d fix it.”
“And it calcified,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“That’s what happens when you try to work through something that isn’t a technical problem. You can skate harder, shoot until your hands bleed, but none of it touches the broken part—because it isn’t your hands.”
“So what is it?” I asked, genuinely.
He waited. The clock ticked. Distant corridor sounds. My ribs on each breath.
“Trust,” he said. “In your own read of the ice—that gut sense before you think. Someone spent months teaching you that gut was wrong. That’s not a tech fix; it’s deeper.”
The room felt different—walls closer, more present.
“You would have been warned,” I said flatly. “What did they tell you?”
He held my gaze. “Things that needed verifying.”
“And?”
“I spent two months verifying them. They don’t hold up.”
I looked at my hands—rusty knuckles, tacky palm blood. I flipped my hand over, then back.
“Someone told you I was predatory,” I said. Because I’d finally worked out he’d done to me what he complained another player had done. Antoine had told me himself what he was going to do in the weeks before he even started it, and I’d been too love-sick, as Mom would say, to listen.
He didn’t deny it, just held the silence.
“With teammates,” I said. “That I targeted people. When it didn’t go my way, I went after their—”
“Yes,” he said, final.
The clock. My ribs. Twenty-thousand miles between who I was and the version of me that showed up in Denver bruised and accused.
“Antoine,” I said.
Silence.
“He was protected by me,” I said, voice tight. “By the promise I made because I thought—” My voice cracked. I clamped my mouth shut and ignored the jagged pain in my jaw.
He said nothing, and I was glad he didn’t ask me to finish.
“You could’ve cut me week one,” I muttered.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
