COLE
The water bottle was on the wrong side.
That was the thing about injuries you hid for long enough. You built an entire secondary operating system around them. You learned which movements to avoid, which compensations looked natural, which angles disguised the weakness. You rewired your instincts so thoroughly that the injury became invisible, even to yourself, most of the time.
And then a water bottle ended up on your left side instead of your right, and you reached for it without thinking, and the whole architecture collapsed in front of the one person in the building who had been watching you since day one.
It happened after the morning meeting. The coaching staff had gathered the full roster in the film room for a forty-minute breakdown of our next opponent’s neutral zone trap.
