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The video room smelled like burnt coffee and dry-erase marker, the screen already humming against the far wall when I dragged myself in fifteen minutes early because sitting in my empty apartment for one more hour would have finished the job my father had started last night.

I took the seat in the back corner, the one that put a row of chairs between me and everyone else, and pulled my hood up like that had ever stopped anyone from talking to me before.

It didn’t stop Max.

He came in with Cole and Keegan, still laughing at something, and then his eyes found me across the room the way they always did, some kind of radar I’d never figured out how to jam. The laugh didn’t quite leave his face, but it dimmed, and he changed course mid-stride, dropping into the empty seat beside me like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“You look like hell,” he said, low, just for me.

“Thanks. Very captain-like pep talk.”

“Ash.” Just my name, no last name that time, and something about the way he said it made my chest go tight. “Last night. The bar. Before—” He didn’t finish it, didn’t say her name, and I gave him credit for that much restraint. “You were about to tell me something.”

“Was I?”

“You were.”

I kept my eyes on the blank screen at the front of the room, on Coach Kinkaid shuffling through a folder of printouts, on anything that wasn’t the steady weight of Max’s gaze on the side of my face.

“Must have been the beer talking.”

“You’d had two sips.”

“Strong beer.”

He didn’t laugh. I felt him shift beside me, angling his body slightly toward mine the way he did on the bench when he was about to say something he meant.

“That man last night. Your father. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see your face.”

“Then I guess you saw wrong.”

“Ash—”

“Drop it, Max.” It came out sharper than I meant it to, sharp enough that Keegan glanced back at us from two rows up. I made myself soften my voice even though nothing underneath it had softened at all. “It’s nothing. Family stuff. Everybody’s got some.”

“Not like that.”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

“So tell me.”

For one terrible second, I wanted to.

The words were right there, crowding up the back of my throat. The scream, the sirens, the ambulance, all those years of a man who found me no matter how far or fast I ran, and I thought about how it had felt for those ninety seconds at the bar last night, believing I could hand Max a piece of it and he wouldn’t drop it.

Then I thought about Melanie’s hand on his arm, easy and familiar, the kind of touch that only happened between people who already knew each other’s bodies, and the whole thing curdled in my chest before it ever reached my mouth.

“There’s nothing to tell.” I said it flat and final, the door closing so hard I could almost hear it. “Man showed up at a game. Happens. Forget it.”

Max didn’t take the hint.

Of course he didn’t.

Four years of captaining stubborn men had apparently taught him nothing except how to be one himself.

“Forget it,” I said again, quieter that time, hoping the repetition would land where the first attempt hadn’t.

“I don’t buy it.” His voice dropped lower, meant only for me, and there was something in it I didn’t want to name—concern, maybe, or the particular gentleness he used on rookies who’d just been benched for the first time.