Chapter 6 — The First Text

SKY’S POV

Two weeks after my first session with Amira, the team headed out for our first road trip since the meltdown.

Six sessions by then. Somehow she’d gotten me talking without ever making it feel like an interrogation.

The bus ride to the airport sat quieter than road trips usually did. One of the rookies laughed at something on his phone, too loud, then glanced around and turned the volume down.

The silence settled back in after that, heavier than before. Marchetti didn’t crack jokes. Petrov kept checking his phone instead of talking hockey.

I knew why. Nobody had forgotten what happened. They were watching to see if it happened again, out here, away from home ice, away from anything familiar.

Reyes sat two rows up, talking quietly with an assistant coach. I caught pieces of it. Something about lineup decisions. Something about “if he’s not ready.” I didn’t ask him to repeat it. I just stared out the window at the dark streets sliding past and kept my mouth shut.

We landed, checked into the hotel, and I spent an hour lining up my gear the way I always did before a road game. Skates on the left. Mask on the shelf. Pads folded the same way every time.

If everything else stayed where it belonged, maybe I would too. It used to settle something in me. Tonight it barely touched the surface. My hands moved through the routine on autopilot while my mind stayed somewhere else entirely.

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

Amira had given me something at the end of our last session. She hadn’t made a thing of it and just mentioned it on her way to open the door, like an afterthought.

“When it gets bad on the road, text me a number. One to ten. Nothing else. I won’t call you back asking twenty questions.”

“I’m not going to need that.”

“Fine. Then you won’t use it.”

She’d said it without any edge to her voice, and that was worse somehow than if she’d pushed. I told myself I wouldn’t use it either. That kind of thing was for guys who couldn’t handle pressure on their own, and I’d built a career on handling pressure on my own.

I sat there anyway with the room too quiet and the game less than a day away. The air conditioner hummed. Somewhere down the hall a door slammed. My thumb hovered over the screen longer than it should have. Before I decided anything, it had already typed the number.

7

I sent it and set the phone face-down like that would take it back.

It buzzed two minutes later.

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

I read it twice, then once more before putting the phone down. No follow-up questions. No are you okay. Just an answer, flat and plain, the same way she talked in her office. I turned off the lamp and lay back against the pillows.

I slept better than I had in a week.

Morning skate went fine. Body did what it always did — crease positioning, push-and-recover, the drills I could run half-asleep. My head wandered a bit, but nothing like the week before.

I hated admitting it, but her message had followed me onto the ice. The breathing exercise hadn’t changed my hands. It hadn’t changed the drills. It had just quieted enough of the noise for me to do what I’d always known how to do. For the first time in a while, the crease felt like mine again instead of something I was fighting to stay inside of.

Petrov skated by after and just said, “Better,” which from him counted as a speech.

I was pulling my gear off after when Damian showed up rinkside, hands in his coat pockets, looking like he’d wandered in by accident even though nobody accidentally ended up at a visiting team’s morning skate.

“Wilson.” He said my name like he was trying it out. “You seem different today.”

“Different how?”

“Lighter.” He tilted his head, watching the ice instead of me, which somehow felt worse. “Last week you looked like a man carrying something. Today you don’t.”

“Slept well.”

“Must’ve been some sleep.” He paused. “The board likes progress.”

“It’s therapy. Not a headline.”

“Of course.” He kept his hands in his pockets and didn’t move.

I waited for him to leave. He didn’t. He just stood there another few seconds, watching me unlace my skates, and then walked off toward the tunnel without saying anything else.

I didn’t like that he’d noticed anything at all. I liked it less that I couldn’t say for sure what he’d noticed. Progress, to him, meant something different than it did to me.

Media availability came after, same room they always used on the road, folding chairs and a banner with the wrong team’s logo stapled crooked to the wall. Questions started normal. Back-to-back schedule. The opponent’s power play. Whether the D-corps could hold up on the road.

Then somebody in the back leaned toward the mic. “Can fans trust you’re mentally ready for playoff hockey?”

The room didn’t go quiet. It just felt that way to me for a second, the way it always did right before I answered something I didn’t want to answer. Cameras pointed.

Pens waited. I kept my face neutral and gave them what they came for.

“I’m ready to play,” I said. Old wound, short answer.

Marchetti caught up to me in the hallway after.

“You good?”

“Yeah.”

“You keep saying that.” He shrugged, not pushing. “Just checking.”

We walked back toward the bus together, and he didn’t bring it up again, which was its own kind of decent. I didn’t thank him. He wouldn’t have wanted me to.

That night, back at the hotel, my phone buzzed with something that wasn’t Amira.

Front office would like you to attend a meeting when we return from the trip. Nothing urgent — just a check-in on your progress.

Reyes had sent it, but the wording wasn’t his. I could tell. Reyes didn’t say things like “check-in on your progress.” Reyes said things like “how you holding up” or nothing at all.

I read the message twice, the way I’d read Amira’s the night before, except this one didn’t settle anything in me. It sat there instead, cold, waiting. Progress again. Same word Damian had used. Different mouth. Same weight behind it.

I typed back one word — Okay — and set the phone down.

I lay in the dark a long time, listening to the ice machine hum somewhere down the hall, thinking about the word “check-in,” and who actually wanted to check. Tomorrow I’d be expected to stop pucks. Next week, I’d be expected to prove I could still carry a franchise.

I didn’t fall asleep as easily as I had the night before.