Page 141 of The Off Limits Captain

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“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because if I knew something current about an injured player, Ryan, I would not be standing outside a service entrance asking former staff about league culture. I would be calling you to tell Maren.”

My jaw works around the part of me that believes her too quickly.

“Do not use him,” I say.

Hurt moves across her face before she locks it down. “I would never use Finn.”

“You used my family.”

There. The worst version, finally said plain.

Peyton’s chin lifts, but her eyes do not harden the way I expect. “I wrote what the organization did with your family. That is not the same thing.”

“You wrote it with my mother’s kitchen still on you,” I say.

The words come out lower than I mean. Rougher.

Peyton’s face goes pale in the cold.

Good, some angry part of me thinks. Terrible, the rest of me knows.

“Yes,” she says. “I did. I wrote it with your mother’s kitchen on me and your father’s warning in my head and your sisters’ drawings in my bag. I wrote it knowing exactly what I could steal and choosing not to.”

I have no defense against that because I have read the piece. I know what she left out, know the empty spaces are not omissions. They are protection.

I hate that protection can still feel like exposure.

“It felt the same.”

“I know.”

I look away first.

“You should go,” I say.

“Probably.”

She does not move.

Neither do I.

The service door opens behind me, then closes again quickly when whoever it is sees us. Good. Let the building have one more thing to misunderstand.

“Your project matters,” I say, hating every word for being true. “But if you turn my room into evidence without understanding what it costs them to talk, you become the thing you are reporting on.”

Peyton absorbs that. No flinch this time.

“And if you protect the room so well that the hurt stays inside it, you become the reason they stop asking for help.”

We stand there with the cold between us, both of us wanting to reach across it and neither of us moving.

Peyton’s gaze drops to my hand.

I have not realized I moved it.

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