Page 27 of The Goalie in Room 1

The notes, at least the ones at the beginning, were boring as hell. Nothing to indicate he wouldn’t make it back to the ice. But then it changed.

Persistent swelling. Pain with loaded flexion. He’d hit a plateau that he couldn’t overcome. Unable to progress as anticipated.

Looking at the imagery, I saw what I’d seen every time I looked at the scans.

Nothing catastrophic. Just one torn structure, and one failed repair.

Then flipping through the images, I found it. One small but very obvious problem no one seemed to have addressed.

“Alright. There we go, Cash. I can do something with that.”

Not Cash. A patient.

A patient I’d met before I knew he would be my patient, but a patient nonetheless.

Which meant the fact that I’d spent entirely too much time looking at his mouth Saturday night had precisely fuck-all to do with the knee displayed across my high-definition touchscreen monitor.

Instead of making the call myself, even though I wanted to, I opened the office messaging app and sent the information to the schedulers, asking them to bring Cash in to go over next steps.

“So, Doc, what’s the verdict?”

A deep inhale expanded my ribcage as I contemplated how to answer him. I hated this part of the job. Loathed it. There was never a good way to tell someone the life they’d built everything around was gone. No combination of words made it hurt less.

“Thad… Dr. Vale, I mean…”

“There is a surgery,” I said.

Hope lit up his face like Christmas and Independence Day had just had a baby.

Two babies.

Twins.

One named I’m happy as hell, and another named I’m scared as fuck.

He leaned forward, his elbows braced on his knees. The right one was wrapped in the brace I told him to put on as soon as he got home from the Halloween event. He promised he would, and sure enough, it had been strapped around his leg when I’d stopped by Halo House to get the records he had on a thumb drive. “The cartilage surgery, right?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Awesome. So when can we do it?”

“Cash…”

His expression fell. Hope died in his eyes as they turned glassy. “No.” He shook his head. “Don’t say it. Please, Doc. Please don’t say it.”

“Cash, I recommend you have the surgery, but only if you hear me when I say this: I will be doing this surgery to preserve your knee, reduce your pain, and improve your function and mobility.” I stressed the goals I considered realistic. “What I would not be doing is operating with the express purpose of returning you to the ice. Goal-tending as a professional wouldn’t be the expected outcome.”

He stared at me. “Expected.”

Of course that’s what he heard. I hadn’t really counted on him hearing anything else, even if I had stressed several other outcomes.

“Cash—”

“You said expected.”

“Yes.” I stroked my beard with a sigh. “I did.”

“That’s not the same as impossible or never or not at all or any other way of saying there’s no fucking chance.”