Chapter 5 — Road Trip Tension

SKY’S POV

The bus smelled like coffee and cold plastic seats, same as it always did before a road trip. But something about it felt different this time. Heavier. Guys were talking quieter than usual, like they were being careful with the volume around somebody who’d just gotten out of surgery.

I knew what they were thinking because I was thinking it too. Can he still do this on the road? No home crowd to carry him if it happens again.

Reyes hadn’t said it out loud. He didn’t have to. My name was still on the lineup card for tomorrow, but the assistant coaches kept glancing over at me during warm-ups like they were checking a stock price, waiting to see which way it moved.

Marchetti dropped into the seat across from me and tossed a protein bar into my lap without asking. “You good, man? You’ve got your game face on an hour early.”

“I’m fine.”

“Sure.” He didn’t push, which wasn’t like him. Maybe word had traveled further than I wanted to think about. “Just saying. Whatever’s going on, we’ve got your back out there.”

I nodded and looked out the window, watching the city go by in gray blocks of concrete. Six years in this league, and nobody had ever needed to say that to me before. I didn’t know what to do with it now except let it sit there, unfamiliar, heavier than a protein bar had any right to be.

The hotel was the same hotel it always was. Beige carpet. Ice machine humming down the hall. I unpacked on autopilot — skates, extra laces, gear lined up the exact way I always needed it before a road game. Usually that settled me all the way down. Tonight it only got me partway there.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my phone.

Amira had given me something at the end of Thursday’s session, almost like an afterthought, the way she gave me most things. Not a lecture. Just a suggestion, low-key enough I could pretend I hadn’t taken it seriously.

Rate it. One to ten. Just text me the number, nothing else. I’m not going to lecture you about it. I just want to know where you are.

I told myself I wouldn’t use it. That kind of thing was for guys who needed their hand held, and I wasn’t that. But I sat there with the room too quiet and the game less than a day out, and my thumb moved before my pride caught up with it.

7, I typed, and sent it before I could talk myself out of it.

I set the phone face-down on the nightstand, like putting it out of sight could undo what I’d just admitted.

It buzzed a couple minutes later.

Noted. Breathe through it. Four in, hold four, four out. You already know how. You’ve just been ignoring that you do.

I picked the phone back up and read it once. Then again, slower, the way I’d reread a save on tape looking for something I missed. There was nothing dramatic in it. No Are you okay that would’ve made me regret sending the number in the first place. Just an answer. Plain. Like a seven was information instead of a crisis.

I read it a third time, set the phone down, and turned off the lamp. I slept better than I had in days.

Morning skate went fine. My body remembered the drills even when my head wandered off somewhere — crease positioning, rebound control, the push-and-recover I’d done ten thousand times. Petrov didn’t watch me as close as he had earlier in the week, which was about the nicest thing he was going to do for me.

Media availability came after, in a cramped room off the visitors’ locker room that smelled like carpet cleaner. Reporters asked the usual stuff. The other team’s power play. The back-to-back schedule. Whether the defense could hold up this far from home. I gave them the usual amount of nothing.

Then a guy near the back raised his hand, phone already recording.

“Sky — are your panic attacks becoming more frequent than your psychologist expected?”

The room didn’t actually go quiet. It just felt that way to me, the same way sound sometimes drops out right before a shot you already know is coming.

Than your psychologist expected. Not are you seeing someone. Not how’s it going. That’s a phrase that assumes a baseline. It assumes somebody already knows there’s something to track in the first place. That kind of detail only comes out of a room with two chairs and one door — a room where I’d said things out loud I’d never said to anybody else in my life.

Somebody had gotten that information out, and I had no idea who.

“No comment,” I said, and I was on my feet before the PR guy could even reach for the mic.

I walked out through the side hallway, past reporters still calling stuff after me, past teammates who’d gone quiet the same careful way they had on the bus that morning. I didn’t stop until I was alone against a wall, my heart going hard enough that I could feel it in my teeth.

I pulled out my phone to look at Amira’s text again, the one that had actually helped, and a headline was already sitting at the top of my feed instead.

Is the Ice Wall Cracking? Sources Question Sky Wilson’s Mental Fitness Ahead of Playoffs.

I stood there and read it twice.

Somebody inside my own organization had handed that to a reporter.

And I had no idea who.