Chapter 124 Set It Down
Crew's POV,
Tyler caught me in the parking lot after Friday practice.
Not in the locker room. Not in my office with the door closed the way serious conversations usually happened. The parking lot — which told me he'd been waiting until there was no audience, no witnesses, no way for either of us to perform the conversation for anyone else.
I'd seen him hovering near the exit while I finished up with the assistant coaches. I'd clocked it and said nothing, just wrapped up what needed wrapping up and walked out at my normal pace and let him make the move when he was ready.
He fell into step beside me without preamble.
We walked for a moment in silence, our breath visible in the cold air, the parking lot mostly empty at this hour.
"I owe you an apology," he said finally.
I kept walking. "Okay."
"The petition was out of line. The things I said to the other guys about you — that was out of line too." He was looking straight ahead, jaw tight, the particular posture of someone doing something uncomfortable because it needed doing rather than because it felt natural. "I was angry and I took it out on you and that wasn't fair."
I thought about the version of Tyler I'd met when I first got to Vancouver; twenty-three years old, sharp talent, sharper edges, hiding a pill dependency behind a performance of invincibility that I'd recognized immediately because I'd built the same performance myself at his age.
He'd come a long way from that version.
Not all the way. But a long way.
"What were you actually angry about?" I asked.
He was quiet for a moment.
"I thought if you could walk away then maybe hockey wasn't worth what I was putting into it," he said. "Like if someone who loved it as much as you obviously did could just — stop — then what was the point of everything I was sacrificing."
I stopped walking.
He stopped too, a half step later.
"That's honest," I said.
"I'm trying to be more honest." He said it like it cost him something. "My sponsor keeps telling me that the dishonest version of me is exhausting to maintain."
"Your sponsor's right."
"Don't tell him that. His ego doesn't need it."
I almost smiled.
We stood in the cold parking lot, two hockey people in a conversation that had nothing to do with hockey.
"I didn't walk away," I said. "I want you to understand that. I made a choice about what I was walking toward. There's a difference and it matters."
Tyler nodded slowly.
"I know that now," he said. "I didn't then." He looked at me properly for the first time in the conversation. "Watching you coach — the way you handle the younger guys, the way you handled me even when I was being an ass about it — it changed how I think about what this is all for."
"What do you think it's for?"
He considered it seriously, which was different from how he used to handle questions he didn't immediately have answers to. The old Tyler deflected. This one sat with the discomfort.
"I used to think it was for the career," he said. "The contract, the stats, the legacy. All the external stuff." He paused. "Now I think maybe it's more about who you become while you're doing it. Whether you come out the other side as someone worth being."
I looked at him for a moment.
Twenty-three years old and already further along than I'd been at thirty.
"You're going to be okay, Tyler," I said.
He looked slightly uncomfortable with the directness of it, the way people do when they're not used to being seen clearly. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." I meant it completely. "You're going to be more than okay."
He nodded, looked away, then looked back.
"How do you do it?" he asked. "The sobriety. Every day. How do you just… keep choosing it?"
It was the question I'd been asked in various forms by various people since I'd gone public about my recovery. Journalists, fans, younger players, people in NA meetings. Everyone wanted the secret. The system. The trick that made it manageable.
There wasn't one.
"I don't choose it every day," I said. "I choose it right now. This moment. And then the next moment when it comes. That's the whole system."
Tyler absorbed that.
"That sounds exhausting," he said.
"It gets easier." I started walking again toward my truck. "The moments get further apart. The choice gets lighter. But it never becomes automatic. And honestly–" I stopped at my truck and looked back at him. "I don't want it to become automatic. The moment I stop choosing it consciously is the moment I stop understanding why it matters."
Tyler stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, the cold air moving between us.
"My sponsor said something like that once," he said. "I thought he was being dramatic."
"Sponsors are annoyingly right about most things."
"Yeah." A pause. "I'm sorry, Lawson. For real."
"I know." I opened my truck door. "We good?"
He nodded. Something settled in his expression; the particular relief of a thing that had been heavy finally being set down.
"We're good," he said.
I got in my truck.
In the mirror I watched him walk back toward the arena, his shoulders different than they'd been when he'd first fallen into step beside me. Less braced. More like someone who'd put something down and found that walking was easier without it.
I sat in the parking lot for a moment before starting the engine.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Harper: \[Rose just told the daycare dog to sit and it actually sat. She's been walking around like she owns the place ever since.\]
A photo followed. Rose standing with her arms crossed, chin up, looking at a golden retriever with the absolute authority of a person who had just discovered a new superpower.
I laughed in the empty parking lot.
Then I started the engine and drove home.