“Bill?”
“Peyton.” His voice is steady in the way men sound when steadiness is the only thing between them and collapse. “Susan went down before we got far from home. Ambulance got her to Hill Country. It’s her heart again. They rushed her into the back and nobody will tell me a damn thing yet.”
I am already standing. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. They keep saying pressure, and fluid, and the valve. They’re working on her now. I do not have all of it. The girls are here.”
In the background, one of the twins cries.
My eyes go to the television. Ryan is on the penalty kill, dropping to one knee, taking a shot off the leg, getting up before the camera can find the pain.
He has no idea.
“Bill, he needs to know now.”
“I tried him. Phone is off. Arena said they would pass it through PR.”
Pass it through PR.
The phrase makes something cold and clean move through me.
Ryan is four hours away from the hospital by car. Maybe less by air if someone with money decides his mother’s body is urgent enough to move the machinery. But right now, he is on the ice, sealed inside a building built to turn men into spectacle.
Game time.
Captain isolated.
Everybody watching him.
Nobody reaching him.
“Stay with the girls,” I say. “I will get to him.”
“You don’t have to.”
“You called me.”
Then Bill says, quieter, “I didn’t know who else would make them listen.”
That lands harder than panic.
“I will,” I say.
There is a pause long enough to become a choice.
“Okay. Drive safe.”
I do not remember changing clothes.
Jeans. Sweatshirt. No makeup. Hair shoved under a baseball cap because there is no time to look like anything except a person who needs to move.
The apartment stays exactly as it is.
Wine on the coffee table. Blanket half on the floor. Television still running. A plate in the sink. The twins’ drawings on the counter. Proof that ten minutes ago I was pretending to be a person with an evening.
I leave it all.
My overnight bag is half-packed with whatever my hands touch first: toothbrush, sweater, socks, notebook, laptop, the spare phone battery Gil gave me after the Houston freeze-out because apparently he expresses concern through portable electronics.