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Hearing heavy breathing inside, I paused and flattened my back to the wall next to the opening before peeking inside.

Brashe sat on a mat on the floor, doing the hip flexor stretch I’d prescribed. The hardest one, the one that hurt the most. His face was screwed up in concentration, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He held it for the full thirty seconds. I knew because I was counting. Then he released, breathed, and started the next.

I watched him ease into it, exactly like I’d shown him.

He finished the set and stayed on the mat, catching his breath. With a grunt, he pulled out his phone and set a timer and laid an ice bag on the injured area.

I eased away, continuing down the hall, but only made it a few steps before I had to stop and lean against the wall. My hands were shaking again, though not with anger this time. No, this was something messier that I didn’t have a name for.

He was doing the work. Following every instruction. And some petty, vindictive part of me had wanted him to fail at this too, so I could stay righteously angry without all these…complications.

But he wasn’t failing. He was suffering through every stretch, alone in an empty gym, trying to fix what he’d broken.

I still wanted to snarl at him for ignoring my medical advice. And I kept thinking about the picnic and how I’d spent ten months believing I wasn’t enough when really he’d just been too scared to choose me over comfort. I was also angry about all the questions he’d asked Crim about me, when he could’ve just asked me. Talked to me like I was a person worth the risk.

Veskar’s voice echoed from somewhere down the hall, laughing with one of the other players or staff about something.

I pushed off the wall and kept walking, shoving my hands into my pockets.

The image of Brashe on the mat stayed with me through Fedor’s assessment, where I had to ask him to repeat himself twice because I wasn’t listening. Through the team meeting where Coach announced Drachmar would start game one, and I caught myself watching for Brashe’s reaction. Through Mikael’s attempt to flirt with me in the break room later that I shut down so hard Tolrek actually winced.

“Are you alright?” Tolrek asked after Mikael had slunk away.

“I’m fine.”

“You seem intense today.”

“One of my patients is being stupid. It’s frustrating.”

Tolrek’s mouth twitched like he knew exactly which patient I meant, but he was smart enough not to say it.

By the time I got home, I’d convinced myself I had this under control. Brashe was doing the work. I was doing my job. Everything was professional and appropriate and exactly how it should be.

Then my phone buzzed with a photo at 9:51 PM, one showing him icing with the instruction sheet lying on his sofa beside him. I stared at the circled frowny face until my vision blurred. How had a stupid little drawing I’d added without thinking become something worth noticing?

I wanted to throw my phone across the room.

Or text him back and ask what he thought he was doing, making this harder than it needed to be.

I typed: You’re four minutes late.

Noted. It won’t happen again.

My mouth twitched, and I set my phone down.

Marzipan jumped onto the couch and looked up at me, her head tilting one way, then the other.

“Don’t come at me like that,” I said.

Her slow blink said everything.

I looked at the photo again, at his handwriting in the margins. At the circled frowny face again.

Ten months ago, I thought I’d figured out Brashe Kedish. Now I didn’t know who he was, only that he’d folded my instruction sheet so many times the paper had gone soft, and I couldn’t stop looking at the crease marks.

I wasn’t ready to forgive him. I might never be ready.

But I was starting to realize I’d been wrong about why he’d hurt me.