Page 14 of Offside

"Contact drill."

Declan waited until I met his eyes. "Bishop. That isn't what I asked."

Zoe was two tables over with Mikkola. Vicki stood at the counter entering an order into the supply system. Neither of them looked over. They didn't have to. The training room heard everything said at normal volume.

"I hit Volkov harder than I needed to."

Declan's eyes moved from my shoulder to my face. "Why?"

I didn't answer, and he waited without filling the space for me.

"The season assessment hit the portal this morning."

"You'd already seen the assessment."

I looked past him, sitting on the edge of the corner table with both feet flat on the floor. The shoulder chart hung behind him. I'd looked at it through more hours of treatment than I could count. Every tendon on it was bright, clean, and easy to separate from the next one.

"Marchetti says the August offer is gone. The club can use the shoulder to shorten my offer."

Declan put the tablet down. "Did he say the note was inaccurate?"

"No. He said it gave them language."

He left the tablet where it was. "Do you think it is? Inaccurate?"

"No."

"Then tell me what you're angry about."

The direct answer was the contract. It was the lost offer, the words on the screen, and my own decision to wait because I thought I could make the club pay more by playing a good season.

Under all of that was something simpler. "It scared me."

The room continued around us. Mikkola counted through an exercise. Vicki opened a cabinet. Somewhere near the locker room, a stall door slammed.

Declan didn't give me the quick denial. He could have said the file didn't decide anything. He could have said I'd played ten games and the shoulder had held just fine. That was true enough to get me off the table without making me feel better.

He didn't use them. "I understand," he said.

"That's it? No forecast?"

"Do you want an honest plan or a comfortable forecast?"

I shifted on the table. "Give me the honest one."

"The joint overreacted to a contact load you chose badly. That doesn't erase the progress you've made. It only tells us three mornings aren't enough while the game schedule and practice contact overlap." He picked up the tablet again. "Four mornings for the next two weeks. One is a response check, not another heavy session. Zoe or Vicki joins us for the weekly measurements so we have another set of eyes on the trend. We hold overhead load where you can control it and progress everything else as the shoulder allows."

"And if it keeps doing this?"

"Then Reyes reviews it again and the plan changes. I won't tell you where the shoulder will be in February based on one bad Monday in October."

I looked down at my hands. "Marchetti wants an answer now."

"I don't work for Marchetti."

"The club does."

"No. The club employs me. The contract group is not my patient," he said. "You are. I can tell you what I find and what I recommend. I can document how you respond. I can't make the uncertainty disappear because somebody wants to put a dollar figure beside it."