He knows before she says anything that this is going to be the fight.
He can read rooms. It's something that developed early growing up in a house where the temperature could change without warning, learning to track the small signals that preceded the change so you had time to adjust. He carried that skill out of the house and onto the ice, where it became something more useful: the ability to read play before it happened, to anticipate rather than react.
The room right now is Jade's examination room, and the signal is the way she closed the door behind him not hard, not angry, just deliberate. The way she turned toward him with his file already open before he'd sat down.
"Your left shoulder," she says.
"It's fine."
"Your range-of-motion data from Thursday's assessment shows a four-degree regression in external rotation under load."
"Four degrees."
"Four degrees that followed two games where you were favoring the right side to compensate. I've reviewed the footage." She sets the tablet on the desk and turns it toward him. "Here. Watch the second period of Saturday's game. Every time you take a wrist shot from the left circle, you're loading the right shoulder at the point of follow-through."
He looks at the footage. He's seen his own game tape hundreds of times. He knows what his mechanics look like. But she is not wrong there it is, the small shift, the fraction-of-a-degree adjustment he has made without consciously choosing to because his body found the path of least resistance and took it.
"I felt fine," he says.
"I know you felt fine. That's the problem." She takes the tablet back. "Compensation patterns feel fine until they don't. And when they stop feeling fine, we're usually looking at a secondary injury rather than the original one."
"I've been playing through this for four years."
"You've been compensating for four years. There's a difference." She pulls on her gloves. "I want to scale back your ice time this week. Four practices instead of six, no optional skates, no additional film sessions that run past nine."
He looks at her.
"Dumas won't agree to that," he says. "We're two weeks from the tournament."
"I'm not asking Dumas. I'm asking you."
"It's the same thing."
"It's not the same thing and you know it. Dumas manages the team's schedule. I manage your body. Those are different jurisdictions." She gestures to the table. "Lie down."
He doesn't move for a moment. He is, in his own assessment, being completely reasonable. He has played through worse. He has played through a torn meniscus for three weeks before she caught it and told him in terms he couldn't misread that this was not a sustainable plan. He has played through a separated AC joint at nineteen, an ankle sprain at twenty-two, any number of soft tissue complaints that he treated with ice and anti-inflammatories and the particular stubbornness of someone who has built his entire life around the ability to continue.
He knows she is right about the compensation pattern. He's known for two weeks. He's been hoping it would resolve on its own, which is not a medical strategy, it is a wish.
He does not want to say this.
"We're two weeks from the tournament," he says again.
"Correct. Which is exactly why I'm flagging this now rather than after your first game, when there will be substantially less we can do about it." Her voice is even, clinical, the precise temperature it gets when she has made a decision and is delivering it as information rather than negotiation. "Four practices this week. Then we reassess. If the regression has reversed, we build back gradually. If it hasn't..."
"If it hasn't, I'll deal with it then."
"Nolan."
"I'll deal with it."
She puts the tablet down on the desk. She takes off one glove. Then the other. She sets them both down with careful precision and turns to look at him, and the clinical temperature in her voice is gone.
"I diagnosed your meniscus eight months ago," she says. "You had been playing on it for six weeks before you let me properly assess it, and when I told you what it was, you told me three other sports medicine professionals had cleared you." She holds his gaze. "I was right. They were wrong. You know I was right because you're still playing."
He is silent.
"I'm not asking you to sit out the tournament. I'm asking you to scale back this week so that you can play the tournament." She picks up his file. "Four practices. No optional skates. You can do your film sessions. You can do upper-body conditioning that doesn't load the shoulder. You can do everything that isn't putting that specific joint under repetitive stress for seven days." She sets the file down. "This is not a negotiation."
He looks at her for a long moment.
She looks back. She does not waver. She never wavers. It is one of the most infuriating things about her and also one of the things he trusts most.
"Four practices," he says.
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me."
"I'm going to thank you anyway."
He gets on the table.
She works his shoulder in silence for a while the deep tissue work she's been doing for three months, the specific pressure on the posterior capsule that hurts in the productive way rather than the warning way. He lies on his stomach and breathes through it.
"Enzo was in again today," she says, after a while.
"What was it this time?"
"Right quad. New incident, completely separate from last week's right quad."
He almost smiles into the table. "How long have you been treating him?"
"Since October. He started coming in weekly." A pause, and he can hear the small change in her voice that means she's making an effort not to smile. "He told me today about a carbonara his sister made. In considerable detail."
"She visited from Milan."
"He mentioned that too." Her thumbs find a knot and press, and his breath comes out. "Does he actually have friends?"
He thinks about this. "Baptiste. They play video games sometimes. He's close with his family, he goes back to Milan in the off-season." He pauses. "He doesn't really know how to be here. He's been here two years and it still feels temporary to him."
"Ah," she says, in a tone that means she's filing this information somewhere useful. The brief silence that follows has a different quality to it.
"What?" he says.
"Nothing. I'll find him something real to treat."
"You don't have to"
"I know I don't have to. Table two is available on Thursdays."
He says nothing else. He lets her work.
After the session, he's at his stall when his phone buzzes. Baptiste.
Game tonight right? We still on?
Yeah, he types. I'll be late, I have extra film.
Dumas gave you extra film?
Jade did.
A long pause.
The physio?
Yes.
She's scaling you back?
She's managing the shoulder.
Another pause. He can almost hear Baptiste doing the calculation on the other end.
That's a real answer. She told you something's wrong.
He doesn't reply to that.
You're actually going to do what she says, aren't you, Baptiste sends.
He puts his phone in his bag.
From across the locker room, Marcus Shaw is lacing his skates without looking up. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to. Marcus has a quality that Nolan has noted for years the ability to communicate entire sentences without speaking, through nothing more than the angle of his attention.
The sentence Marcus is currently communicating, without speaking, is: You're going to do what she says.
"Mind your business," Nolan says.
Marcus ties the second skate.
"I always do," he says.
He does four practices that week. He skips both optional sessions. He leaves the film room at eight-fifty-nine on Wednesday and eight-fifty-eight on Thursday. He does his upper-body conditioning with the specific modifications she built into his program, the ones that load the stable joints and take pressure off the shoulder capsule.
His shoulder feels better by Friday.
He does not text her to tell her she was right. He doesn't need to. She will see it in the session data.
He shows up for his Thursday appointment and lies down on table two and lets her work, and when she says four-degree improvement in external rotation, we're back to baseline, he says nothing, because that is the correct response.
She documents it.
She hands him the updated protocol.
"Tournament prep starts Monday," she says. "Full schedule. Tell me immediately if anything changes."
He takes the protocol. He reads it. He puts it in his bag.
"Jade," he says.
She's already turning back to her desk.
"Thank you," he says.
She stops with her back to him.
"Don't thank me," she says.
He hears the small thing in her voice when she says it the exact same small thing that was in his voice when he said it to her three days ago.
He picks up his bag and leaves.
He stands in the corridor outside the blue door for a moment before walking away.
He is not entirely sure what he's standing there for. He walks away.