Updated Apr 10, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 6: Ahead of Schedule
Lucas
Two months in, Diego said: “You come back from physio in a better mood than you left.”
They were in the training ground gym — Diego working through a leg day, Lucas doing the upper-body work that was the only thing his protocol allowed, which he had been doing with a thoroughness that was making his shoulders considerably more impressive, though this was not the point, the point was that he needed to do something physical or he would lose his mind. Diego had been watching him with the expression of a man who has noticed something and is deciding how long to wait before saying it.
Apparently two months was how long Diego waited.
“I come back in a normal mood,” Lucas said.
“You come back in a good mood. You are currently not in a normal mood, you are in a slightly-better-than-normal mood, which I tell you now so you have comparison data.” Diego pressed his bar overhead and settled it back with a clank. “Zoe seems very competent.”
“She is very competent.”
“And very not-dazzled-by-you.”
“She is that as well.”
“Interesting combination.” Diego rested between sets with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be and nothing to do but observe. He was twenty-nine and Brazilian and had been Lucas’s closest friend at the club since his second month in Seattle, when Diego had sat beside him at a team dinner, asked him seven pointed questions, received seven honest answers, and said “good, I was worried you were going to be boring” — and they had been friends since, the kind of friendship that was built on the understanding that neither of them had the energy for people who weren’t worth the effort. “You know what I noticed,” Diego continued.
“I genuinely don’t want to know.”
“The way you describe her has changed. First month, you said things like: she’s very direct. She’s very precise. She has no patience for nonsense. Which are things you say about a professional you respect.” He picked up his water bottle. “Now you say things like: she came up with this approach to the loading protocol that was genuinely interesting, it accounted for the muscle memory in the hamstring in a way I hadn’t thought about. Which is a different kind of noticing.”
Lucas did his next set. He thought about whether Diego was wrong and concluded that he was not wrong, which was Diego’s typical condition. “She’s good at her job,” he said, when he’d finished. “That’s worth noticing.”
“Undoubtedly.” Diego smiled with the benevolent patience of someone who was right and knew it. “I notice she had your daughter at the facility last week.”
“Childcare situation. Mia sat in during the session.”
“And how did that go.”
“Fine.” He put the bar down. He thought about: Zoe handing Mia the resistance band. The small chair at the right height, which had simply appeared and which he was almost certain had not been there before Mia’s visits and which had therefore been acquired in anticipation of a repeat — though whether by deliberate act or incidental placement he had not asked and did not ask now. The way Mia had talked to Zoe with none of the shyness she sometimes showed adults she didn’t know, which meant Zoe had done something in the first five minutes that told Mia she was safe. “Fine,” he said again, less certainly.
Diego made the noise of a man who has received sufficient data. He did not push further. This was why Lucas had told him as much as he had — Diego knew when to push and when to let a silence sit, and the silence that sat now was not uncomfortable, just spacious, the kind that had room for things that hadn’t been said yet.
Lucas dried his face with the towel and thought about the session last Tuesday. About the moment near the end when Zoe had looked at the resistance benchmark and said “good,” the single word she used for things that had gone right, which she rationed so carefully that it landed with the weight of a longer sentence. He’d been thinking about that word — good — with a frequency that was, objectively, evidence of something. He knew what it was evidence of. He was choosing not to examine the evidence until he had more of it.
Two weeks later, on a Thursday, Zoe put him through the two-month assessment and then stood at the whiteboard and compared the benchmark numbers to the projected curve and said: “You’re three weeks ahead.”
He looked at the chart. He understood charts. The line of his actual progress ran above the projected line in a way that was visible and clear. “Because of the protocol,” he said.
“Because you’re following the protocol.” She said it without particular warmth, just as a statement of fact. He had followed the protocol. He had restrained himself, consistently, for two months, every time his body said more and the protocol said stop, and he had stopped, and this was the result. “The progression changes next week,” she continued. “The loading increases, the range of motion work gets more demanding. You’ll feel like you’re working harder because you will be.”
“I’m ready.”
She looked at him. He had the sense she was assessing this claim, running it against what she knew of his injury and his body and his history. “You might be,” she said, which was more agreement than he usually got on the first pass.
He drove home that afternoon and Mia was in the kitchen doing homework — fractions, he could see, her pencil moving with the particular determined speed of someone who finds fractions faintly irritating but is not going to be beaten by them — and Helen had made dinner, and the flat smelled of something warm and the late September light came through the kitchen window at the angle it had been coming at for months now, and he stood in the doorway of his own kitchen feeling something he didn’t have precise language for. Something like gratitude, which he always felt for Mia and for the life he’d built here, but underneath the gratitude something with a different quality. Like a door that was slightly more open than it had been.
He was being careful. He was genuinely being careful. He knew the complications — professional proximity, the delicate physics of his situation, the fact that Zoe had made her position clear in ways both explicit and implicit over two months and he had no standing to push at those edges until the situation changed. He understood all of this. He was not, at this stage, doing anything other than noticing.
The noticing was just — rather intense.
“Dad,” Mia said, without looking up from the fractions. “Is five-eighths bigger or smaller than three-quarters.”
“Smaller,” he said.
“I knew it.” She wrote something with satisfaction. “Is Zoe coming on Saturday? I wanted to show her how I do the corner kicks.”
“Saturday is a training day for me. She’ll be here.”
“But not for fun.”
“Not for fun.”
Mia looked up. She had her serious face. “She should come for fun.”
“That’s — ” He stopped. He thought about the end-of-month team event in two weeks, the one the medical staff was required to attend, the one where he would see her in a context that wasn’t clinical and white-lit and thoroughly professional. He thought about that.
“That’s not how these things work,” he told Mia.
Mia went back to her fractions. She had the expression of someone who was waiting for the other participants in a plan to figure out what she’d already figured out, and who had sufficient patience to wait.
He sometimes thought his daughter was going to be terrifying when she was grown.
He thought this with tremendous pride.
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