Page 45 of Slapshot Baby

A pause. "I know. That's because I already said goodbye."

"That wasn't a goodbye. That was a retreat."

Silence. Then a sharp exhale. "Did you call just to pick a fight?"

"I went to the facility today and watched practice from the observation deck."

Her tone shifts into something warmer. "How was that?"

"I spent twenty minutes yelling at the glass, calling plays and pacing like I was running a bench."

I lean my head against the back of the couch. The ceiling is blank and white. "Nobody could hear me."

She's quiet.

"Then I went to the locker room. They call me Cap. They tell stories I'm supposed to be part of. Wyatt does impressions of things I've apparently said and everyone laughs and I just sit there nodding like I'm in on it."

"Kai, you went to the rink two days after getting discharged," she says finally. "Your doctor said rest."

"My doctor said a lot of things."

"And you ignored all of them. Shocking." A soft laugh comes through the phone. "That's either incredibly dedicated or incredibly stubborn."

"Both."

"Kai, listen to me." Her voice steadies. "You watched practice today and your instinct was to lead. To fix what you saw wrong. You did that without a jersey, without skates, without anyone asking you to. That's not hockey. That's you."

"It's the same thing."

"It's not. Hockey is the place where people see it. But the thing itself, the part that reads a room and knows what's missing and steps in to fix it, that's just who you are. You'd do that on the ice or in a boardroom. You did it in the hospital. I watched you manage your own parents."

"I didn't manage my parents."

"You told your mother to go home and sleep because she looked tired. You told your father to stop interrogating the doctors and let them work. You reorganized the entire visitor schedule so Mira could still go to her job. You did all of that from a hospital bed with a brain injury."

I don't have a response to that.

"Hockey is what you do, Kai. It's not who you are."

I press my phone harder against my ear. Her voice fills the quiet apartment in a way that the silence couldn't.

"When did you get this wise?" I ask.

"I've always been this wise. You just forgot."

"Low blow."

"You can take it."

"Have you eaten today?"

"I had coffee."

"Coffee isn't food, Kai."

"It's a beverage."

"Beverages don’t count. What's in your fridge right now? And don't say condiments."