_Theo’s POV_
By the time the locker room emptied out, Nathan was already gone into the post-game fog of messages and tension he carried around like extra gear.
I didn’t follow him.
That was becoming its own discipline. Help when it mattered. Don’t become another body in the same fire every single night. Kane had said something like that after the last reception, and I hated that it had stuck.
I found him outside the visitors’ tunnel exit, hands in the pockets of a dark jacket, watching the last equipment carts roll toward the loading bay.
“Your captain looked ready to put the scoreboard through a wall,” I said.
Kane glanced over. “Yours looked ready to disappear into one.”
“That tracks.”
We stood there a second in the thinning noise of a finished game night. Staff voices. A distant
