The list sat in his chart like a contract he never agreed to sign.

High ankle sprain. Shoulder AC joint separation. ACL rupture.

Three lines. Season over. The trainers had gone quiet in that specific way they go quiet when they don't want to say next year out loud yet.

Allen had taken hits before. Built a career on it. You wore seventy-seven for the Houston Wranglers, you ate contact. You finished checks, cleared the crease when it got ugly, and you paid whatever the ice asked. That was the deal. Always the deal.

But this one sat different. This one felt like getting stapled to the wall and told to clap.

Coach said it like a favor. Nice defense, they kept saying online. Forty thousand likes on the angle that showed his knee. He'd watched it once, lying in the hospital bed waiting on the MRI, then put his phone face-down and didn't pick it up again for sixteen hours.

At least it wasn't Halifax. He kept telling himself that. Game seven, conference finals, broken fibula — watched the whole third period from a folding chair in the press box with ice on his leg and a playoff beard that suddenly meant nothing. This wasn't that. He kept saying it until the words stopped meaning anything, which took about four hours.

He stared at the ceiling.

Stucco. Pale cream. Crown molding doing something elegant at the corners — the kind of detail somebody chooses. The light fixture was brass, warm, centered under a plaster medallion that cost more than his first set of sticks.

Her taste.

Rococo meets midcentury, she used to say, like those two words obviously belonged together. He'd stand in the doorway, nodding the way he nodded at coaches diagramming plays he'd already figured out. He'd just liked the sound of her voice when she got excited. The way she talked faster without noticing.

He exhaled through his nose.

The apartment smelled like cinnamon and clean laundry and nothing that belonged to him. No stick tape. No Biofreeze. Just quiet and her things.

He shifted on the cushion and the knee lit up — electric, straight to his hip — and his shoulder answered with that low throb that hadn't quit in nine days. He pressed his jaw together and breathed through it.

Useless. His brain kept circling back to that word. He'd been trying to outskate it for a week.

The Wranglers were first in the division. First. And he was here with his ankle wrapped to twice its size, a sling holding his shoulder in place, watching the standings update on his phone like a guy who'd never laced up in his life.

He'd thought about staying at the facility. He'd thought about his sisters — Britt out in Edina, Carla up near Duluth. Both would've said yes before he finished asking. Both would've worn that worried-sister look he'd been dodging since he was eight years old and split his chin on a backyard rink.

He'd thought about his mom. That lasted forty-five seconds.

So he'd called her.

He could still hear the pause on the other end. Half a second, maybe. Just long enough for him to feel exactly what he was asking.

She'd said yes before he finished.

He'd been calling it practical ever since, which was how he handled things he didn't want to examine. She knows the schedule. She's not going to make it a thing.

God, though. Paying his ex-wife to take care of him.

He rubbed a hand over his jaw — stubble thick, a little past where he usually kept it, hair curling at the collar now, too long for the season. Eyes that kind of blue that goes gray in bad light, and there'd been a lot of bad light lately.

Still built like a defenseman. Two-ten, broad through the shoulders, hands that knew what to do even when the rest of him forgot.

Lot of good that did him now.

The door opened. No knock. Of course.

He turned his head slow — protecting the shoulder out of habit — and there she was.

She stood in the doorway in a knitted sweater the color of dried wine, sleeves pushed to her elbows two minutes. Hair down

Steady. She looked steady.