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I don’t look away, and I don’t look at the floor, and I don’t check whether it’s okay.

“If they ask about the fight—” he says.

“They’re going to ask about the fight.”

“And what are you going to say?”

“The truth.”

He almost says something. I watch him almost say it. His mouth opens and closes. Then he nods. Once. Stiff.

“I’ll be at the bar,” he says. “If you want to talk after.”

And he goes across the lobby to the bar.

The rooms are hotel suites with the beds taken out. You walk down a long hallway on the fourteenth floor with your advisor, past door after door with a sheet of printer paper taped to it with a team name on it, you knock, somebody opens it, and you go in. And there’s a table. A long one, a conference table somebody dragged up the service elevator. And behind it, eight guys. Twelve. Fifteen, once. Men in polos with logos on the chest with notebooks and laptops and coffee, sitting in a row, looking at you.

And you sit in the one chair on the other side.

The first one is the Sentinels.

Mark Morley is in the middle. I recognize him. He was at the dinner my dad pulled me out of a game for at the head of the table, cutting his steak into very small pieces. He doesn’t say anything about that. He just says my name and shakes my hand and says sit, and I sit.

They start easy. Where I grew up. What I like about Woodbury. Who my favorite player was when I was a kid. I can feel them watching how I sit. Where I put my hands. Whether I look at them when I talk.

Then a younger guy, at the end of the table, with a laptop open, looks up.

“Why Woodbury?” he says. “You had offers. Bigger programs. Programs that put more guys in the league. Your numbers in juniors, you could have gone anywhere. Why there?”

I know the answer they want. I’ve heard my father give it on the phone to people. Academic fit. Development opportunity. Playing time as a freshman. All true. None of it why.

“My dad picked it,” I say.

The room goes quiet. Sato, next to me, doesn’t move.

“He picked it, and I went,” I say. “I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think about much, then. I thought if I did what he said, I’d get here.” I look at the table. “And I did. I got here. I’m sitting here. But I wouldn’t pick it the same way now.”

“But you would still pick it?”

I think about it. My line. Corvin. The third floor. A girl three doors down.

“Yeah,” I say. “Just for different reasons.”

The guy with the laptop types something.

Morley watches me for a second. Then he leans forward and opens a folder.

“Let’s talk about March,” he says.

They have the video. They don’t play it. Morley just reads it off the page in front of him. Roughing. Ten-minute misconduct. Second period. And then he reads the others. October. December. February. A slash in juniors I forgot about. A game misconduct when I was seventeen that I didn’t forget about.

“Walk us through it,” he says.

I could say my teammate got hit and I was protecting him. That’s the answer. That’s the one Sato and I talked about.

It’s true. It’s just not all of it.

“Barnes got hit,” I say. “Kennebeck went in to get a guy off him. Then a guy went over the top of Kennebeck. And I went in.”