Chapter 120 You Don't Have To Carry It Alone
Crew's POV,
Noah Carpenter was twenty years old and had been hiding something for three weeks.
I could tell because I'd been hiding the same thing for three years and I knew exactly what it looked like from the outside. The way he favored his left side during drills but tried to disguise it as a stance adjustment. The way he disappeared into the training room before anyone else arrived and came out looking slightly more functional than he had going in. The way he laughed a little too easily when anyone asked how he was feeling.
I waited until everyone else had cleared out after Thursday's practice.
He was retaping his stick at his stall when I sat down across from him. Just the two of us in the quiet of the locker room, the sounds of the building settling around us.
He looked up. Then looked back down at his stick.
"Coach."
"Noah."
"Good practice today."
"It was." I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. "How's your shoulder?"
His hands stilled on the tape.
"Fine," he said.
There was that word.
"Noah." I kept my voice even. "I'm not asking as your coach right now. I'm asking as someone who spent years giving that exact answer to that exact question."
He was quiet for a long moment. The tape sat half finished in his hands.
"It's been bothering me since the Calgary game," he finally said. "Took a hit along the boards in the second period. Nothing crazy. But it hasn't– it hasn't felt right since."
"Have you told the training staff?"
"No."
"Why not?"
He looked up at me then. Twenty years old with the particular fear of someone who'd worked their entire life toward something and could feel it getting fragile.
"Because if I tell them it might be serious," he said. "And if it's serious they might sit me. And if they sit me–" He stopped.
"You lose your spot," I finished.
"I can't lose my spot. Not now. Not when I'm finally–" He pressed his lips together. "I've been waiting my whole life for this. I can't just–"
"Noah." I waited until he looked at me. "I need to tell you something and I need you to actually hear it. Not just let it go in one ear and out the other because you've already decided you know better."
He nodded slowly.
"I played through pain for three years," I said. "Not a sore shoulder. Not a bad hip. Legitimate chronic pain from a vertebrae surgery that didn't heal right. And I managed it the way I thought I had to; pills, more pills, hiding it from everyone, convincing myself that if I could just get through one more game, one more season, eventually it would be okay."
He was listening now. Really listening.
"I overdosed at a charity event in front of several hundred people and my girlfriend and every camera in Seattle," I said. "I almost died. I lost my career anyway — just later and worse and in a way that I had zero control over instead of on my own terms."
The locker room was very quiet.
"Playing through it didn't save my spot," I said. "It just delayed the moment when I lost everything and made sure that when that moment came, I was in the worst possible position to handle it."
Noah's jaw was working. He looked young. He was young — barely older than I'd been when I first started hiding pain, first started telling myself it was temporary, first started believing that enduring something in secret was the same as being strong.
"What if they sit me?" he said. His voice came out smaller than he probably wanted it to.
"Then they sit you. You heal properly. You come back at full capacity instead of sixty percent." I held his gaze. "And your career lasts fifteen years instead of ending at twenty-two because you blew out something that could have been fixed in six weeks if you'd said something when you should have."
He looked down at his hands.
"I'm scared," he said.
"I know." I stood up. "Being scared is reasonable. Letting it make your decisions for you isn't." I picked up my jacket from the bench. "Go see Dr. Reyes in the training room tomorrow morning before practice. Tell him everything. All of it."
Noah was quiet for a moment.
"What if it's bad?" he asked.
"Then we deal with that." I headed for the door. "But Noah, you don't have to deal with it alone. That's the part nobody told me when I was your age. You don't have to carry it by yourself."
I left him sitting there in the quiet locker room.
In the hallway I stopped and leaned against the wall for a moment, the way I had after the conversation with Tyler. These moments had a specific weight to them — not heavy exactly, more like significant. Like something that mattered had just happened and my body needed a second to register it.
My phone buzzed with a text from Harper.
Harper: Running late. Rose is at daycare until five. Can you grab her?
Crew: Already on my way.
Harper: You haven't left yet, have you?
Crew: I'm leaving right now.
Harper: Crew.
Crew: I'm literally walking to my car.
Harper: You're standing in a hallway somewhere, aren't you?
I looked at the empty hallway around me and said nothing for a moment.
Crew: ...I'm walking to my car RIGHT now.
Three dots appeared. Then:
Harper: Lol Grab her the purple snack bag not the blue one. The blue one is tomorrow.
Crew: What's the difference?
Harper: The snacks.
Crew: Can you be more specific?
Harper: Just grab the purple one Crew.
Crew: Fine. On my way.
I actually walked to my car this time.
……
The daycare was twelve minutes from the arena, a route I knew well enough now that I drove it without thinking. Rose had been going there for several months — a small place in Kitsilano run by a woman named Janet who had the particular energy of someone who genuinely liked children and wasn't just performing it for the parents.
Rose was in the front room when I arrived, sitting in a circle with four other kids while Janet read to them. She saw me through the window before I came in and immediately stood up, which was not the protocol, but protocol was a concept Rose engaged with selectively.
"Dada," she announced to the room, as if this required acknowledgement from everyone present.
Janet caught my eye and smiled with the patience of a woman who'd been dealing with Rose for several months.
I signed the pickup sheet and crouched down as Rose barreled toward me with complete confidence that I would catch her, which I did, because she was right.
"Good day?" I asked.
"Juice," she said.
"That's not an answer to my question."
"Juice," she said again, more firmly.
"We have juice at home."
She considered this. Apparently it was acceptable because she didn't argue further, just settled against my shoulder and grabbed the collar of my jacket and we collected the purple snack bag — not the blue one, like Harper instructed — and headed out to the car.
In the parking lot the afternoon had gone gold and cool, the particular Vancouver light that came in autumn when the city looked like someone had turned the contrast up slightly on everything.
I buckled Rose into her car seat. She watched me with the serious attention she gave to things she found interesting, which included car seat buckles, apparently.
"Dada," she said.
"Yeah?"
She pointed at the buckle.
"I know. It has to click."
She watched it click and made a sound of deep satisfaction.
I got in the front seat and pulled out into traffic, Rose in the mirror behind me conducting a quiet monologue about things I couldn't fully decode but that seemed important to her.
I thought about Noah Carpenter sitting alone in the locker room with his half-taped stick and his fear.
I thought about the version of myself that had been him — younger, more certain that endurance was the same as strength, more convinced that the thing I was protecting was worth what I was paying to protect it.
I thought about what it would have meant to have someone sit across from me in that locker room and say: you don't have to carry this alone.
I hadn't had that.
But Noah did.
And that felt like enough for one Thursday.
"Dada," Rose said from the back seat.
"Yeah, baby."
"Home?"
"Home," I confirmed.
She seemed satisfied with this and returned to her monologue.
I drove us home through the gold Vancouver afternoon, the city moving around us, ordinary and alive.