Chapter 6 The Wrong Apology

Tyler did not sleep.

He sat on the edge of the hotel bed in the away city, still wearing the suit from the flight home, jacket folded over the chair like it might get up and leave without him. The room smelled faintly of detergent and recycled air. The curtains were open just enough to let the city glow bleed in, streetlights flickering against the far wall in slow, restless pulses. He stared at that wall until the numbers on the digital clock stopped meaning anything. Time flattened out, lost its edges, and became another thing he could not grip.

The silence refused to stay silent. It carried Diego with it. Not words. Never words. Just the sound of his brother laughing, that upward lift at the end, like everything he said was a question worth asking. Diego had always laughed that way, as if life were something generous that kept surprising him. Diego, who never made it to thirty. Diego, who never got the chance to ask the hard questions that came later, the ones that followed loss and compromise and regret.

Tyler had spent three years trying to figure out how to carry that absence. Somewhere along the way, he had stopped carrying it and started sharpening it. The grief had turned directional. It had weight and velocity. Every hit on the ice had become penance. Every fight had been a confession nobody had asked for, and nobody had absolved. He told himself that if he hurt enough, if he paid often enough, it might balance something. It never did.

At four in the morning, he reached for his phone. The light was too bright. He did not dim it.

Danny Martinez. Statistics, photos, highlight clips he did not let himself watch. Twenty-three years old. Left wing. Quick release. Fast hands. Electric feet. He had been climbing. Three goals in four games. Momentum that showed up even in the numbers, the quiet upward curve that suggested this was only the beginning.

Before Tyler had ended his season. Maybe more than his season.

The team doctor’s voice replayed in his head, calm and cautious and practiced—spinal contusion. Wait and see. No guarantees.

No guarantees lived in Tyler’s bones. He knew the shape of that phrase, the way it hollowed out rooms and stretched nights into something unmanageable. He had lived inside it once, pacing a hospital corridor beside his mother while doctors spoke carefully about Diego’s injuries. They had used the same language then. Hope wrapped in conditionals. Possibility padded with disclaimers. Until they found worse things and stopped needing to be careful.

By six-thirty, he could not sit still anymore. He showered, changed, and drove to the hospital with sentences forming and collapsing in his head. Apologies were constructed and dismantled at red lights. Entire speeches were reduced to nothing the moment he imagined saying them out loud. He told himself that all he had to do was speak. Say the words. Stand there and take their weight properly, like a man who understood what he owed.

The automatic doors opened at seven, and the smell of antiseptic corrected him immediately. The hospital had its own rules, its own gravity. Everything inside it demanded a different posture.

He had not planned for Sofia Martinez.

She stood at the coffee machine down the hall, wearing yesterday’s cardigan. He could tell by the way it sat on her shoulders, slightly rumpled, stretched thin by hours spent leaning forward in uncomfortable chairs. Her hair was pulled back without precision. She looked like someone who had been awake too long and had not allowed herself to stop.

She saw him before he could decide whether to retreat. Her body stiffened, shoulders pulling back, chin lifting. The entire structure of her was rearranged into something defensive and immovable. She was not tall. Five-four at most. It did not matter.

“You do not get to be here,” she said.

Her voice was quiet. That made it worse.

“I know.” Tyler stopped well short of her, hands loose at his sides. Carter had taught him that once, in a video review after a fight. Show them you are not a threat before you open your mouth. “I came to apologize.”

“To me.” It was not a question.

“To Danny. To you. To whoever will hear it.” He forced himself to meet her eyes. It was harder than facing a winger lining up for a hit. Her gaze was dark with exhaustion and fury. He deserved all of it. “I know it does not fix anything.”

“It fixes nothing.” She turned back to the machine and pressed the button harder than necessary. “My brother might not walk right again. Your apology is a word. Words do not rebuild a spine, Mr. Rodriguez.”

“No. They do not.” There was nothing to argue with there.

She pulled the cup free. Her hand shook slightly. He saw it. She saw him see it and turned away, presenting her back, staring out the window at the parking garage. As it had personally failed her.

“Go home,” she said to the glass.

“Is he awake?”

The pause stretched. Long enough that Tyler assumed she would not answer.

“Intermittently,” she said finally. “He is on pain medication.” She turned back, and something in her expression had shifted. Not softer. Fractured. Still holding, but visibly damaged. “He does not know you are here. Do not make me tell him.”

“I will not.” Tyler took a step back, then stopped. “I am going to check in. Not to bother you. Just…” He trailed off. There was no way to finish that sentence without centering himself, and he refused to do that.

“Every day,” she said, already ahead of him.

“Unless you tell me not to.”

“I am telling you not to.”

He nodded once. He did not move.

They stood there, the air between them taut with things unsaid. Sofia studied him the way someone reads a document they do not trust but need to understand anyway. Carefully. Reluctantly. He waited for dismissal. For security. For her anger to crest.

Instead, she looked away first.

“The doctors do rounds at eight,” she said, voice stripped down to information. “After that, the waiting room on the third floor is empty until noon.”

She walked away without another glance, footsteps light and exact, the walk of someone who had learned how to move through the world without taking up space.

Tyler stood alone in the hallway, heart pounding, understanding dawning slowly. She had not forgiven him. She had not welcomed him. But she had told him where to be.

He turned it over twice to be sure he was not imagining it. Then he went upstairs, found the waiting room, and took the corner chair. He sat with his hands clasped, feet planted, breathing steady.

He did not know yet what he was waiting for.

He only knew that leaving would be the wrong thing to do. And for the first time in three years, he intended to stay.