Chapter 19: Supply and Control

The league investigation came through as a memo. Internal distribution, league-wide — which meant it leaked within forty-eight hours because nothing stays internal in professional sports. By the time I read it, three of my teammates already had.

Random testing for controlled substances. Enhanced protocols. Specifically flagged: performance-adjacent compounds associated with physiological suppression.

I read it twice in the bathroom of the practice facility, standing at the sink with the water running, the memo on my phone. Then I turned the water off and looked at myself in the mirror and had a very quiet, very private moment of absolute terror.

What followed was the week I became the most controlled version of myself that I'd ever managed. Every practice, every team meeting, every interaction, I was immaculate. I was the player in the article. I was functioning on the correct level of chemistry and a completely unsustainable level of focus, and I was watching every door in my life for the one that was about to come off its hinges.

On Friday morning, the team had physicals.

It was standard scheduling — mid-season check-in, nothing alarming, the kind of appointment that happened three times a year. I had navigated these before. I knew the protocols. I had the dosage calibrated for exactly this kind of proximity, the chemical equilibrium that turned me into a biological non-event.

What I had not accounted for was Dr. Anand running behind schedule and putting me last.

Twenty minutes in the waiting room. Then another ten outside the examination room while the previous player's results were logged. Thirty minutes total of fluorescent lighting and recycled air and a low background tension that I could feel in the muscles along my spine.

When I finally got into the room, Dr. Anand was tired and thorough in the specific way of a professional who had seen too many afternoons like this one. He ran through the standard tests. Blood pressure, reflexes, the shoulder I'd banged in Detroit. He paused when he got to the third notation.

"Your cortisol's elevated," he said, scanning the tablet. "Not alarming. But notable. Any particular stressors lately?"

"New team," I said. "Normal adjustment."

He looked up at me. He was a quiet man with careful eyes, and he looked at me for a beat longer than the question warranted.

"Of course," he said, and made a note. "Everything else looks standard."

I walked out of that room and down the hallway and outside into the gray October air, and I stood by the wall of the building and breathed.

My phone buzzed. A message from an unsaved number, Jax's backup line, the one he used when something couldn't be on record.

*Report's been filed. I handled the flag. Don't do anything different.*

I stared at the message.

He'd seen the report before I had. He had intercepted something, a notation, a flag, whatever Anand had passed upward, and done something with it before it became a problem. Quietly. Without asking if I wanted him to. Without, apparently, any expectation that I would find out at all.

I texted back: *How long have you been doing this?*

A pause. Then: *Since the beginning.*

I put my phone in my pocket. I went back inside. I changed for the afternoon skate.

I had spent eight weeks being terrified of the power he had over my secret, and had apparently spent that same eight weeks being protected by it without my knowledge or consent. These were not the same thing, and they were not entirely different things, and the space between them was where I lived now, where I'd apparently been living all along.