The alarm goes off at five forty-five, and Jade Moreau is already awake.
She lies still for a moment, staring at the ceiling of her apartment on Plateau-Mont-Royal, listening to the city come alive outside her window. A bus. A car horn, brief and annoyed. The sound of someone's door closing two floors up. Cortex is curled against her hip like a warm, indifferent stone, his orange fur rising and falling with each breath. He doesn't move when she does.
She sits up, swings her legs over the side of the bed, and reaches for the hair tie on her nightstand.
Five kilometers. Same route. Same pace.
She runs because it works, not because she loves it. It organizes the inside of her head before the day can make it messy. By the time she gets back to her apartment, unlocks the door, and drinks half a glass of water standing over the kitchen sink, she has already sorted through everything she needs to carry into the day and set aside everything she doesn't.
This morning, there isn't much to set aside.
She showers, pulls her curls into a tight bun at the back of her head, and makes coffee in the chipped white mug she's been meaning to replace for two years. The enamel is cracked along the rim on the left side. She always drinks from the right. She pours the coffee black, no sugar, and stands at her kitchen window watching the street below while she drinks it.
Cortex appears on the counter beside her, uninvited, and sits down on top of her open patient files.
"Thank you," she says.
He blinks once, slowly, in a way that communicates absolutely nothing useful.
She finishes her coffee, gathers her files from under him he shifts just enough to make this difficult and leaves for the Wolves Arena.
The complex sits in Verdun, twenty minutes by metro and a short walk through a neighborhood that's been slowly replacing tire shops with coffee houses for the last decade. The Arena was built in 2019. Everything inside it is glass and sharp lines and the kind of lighting that makes everyone look like they're being evaluated. Jade has worked here for two years. She knows every corridor, every shortcut, every door that sticks in winter.
The medical wing is on the ground floor, west side. Her room is number twelve. Blue door. She unlocks it at seven forty-five, hangs her coat, and turns on the overhead light that makes the space look like a very clean place to feel pain.
She likes it here.
She pulls up the day's schedule on her computer. Six appointments. Enzo Ricci again his third visit this week, new complaint, right quadricep this time. She makes a note. Marcus Shaw, post-game maintenance. Two of the junior players on loan from the affiliate program. And Nolan Karev at ten.
She opens Nolan Karev's file.
She's been his primary physiotherapist for two years. She knows his injury history the way she knows her own apartment by feel, in the dark. Right knee: partially torn meniscus, eight months ago, misdiagnosed twice before she caught it. Left shoulder: a chronic compensation pattern stemming from a fracture he sustained at nineteen that was allowed to heal slightly wrong. The scar above his left eyebrow is from a stick to the face during a junior league playoff game. He was seventeen. He didn't come off the ice.
She reads her own notes. They are precise, clinical, exactly what they should be.
She closes the file.
Marcus Shaw arrives at eight and sits on the table without being told to, pulling off his shirt with the efficiency of someone who has been doing this long enough that it no longer requires thought. He's thirty-one, a defender, the kind of built that comes from a decade of professional sport and an off-season that doesn't actually exist. There's a fresh bruise spreading across his left ribs from Friday's game.
"That looks worse than it is," he says.
"I'll decide that," Jade says.
She presses two fingers along the rib line, watching his breathing pattern, checking for the involuntary muscle guarding that means something is actually broken. There's none.
"Bruised," she confirms. "Not fractured. Ice it tonight, don't skip the compression wrap."
"Sandra already made me sleep with a bag of frozen peas."
"Sandra is smarter than you."
He laughs, low and easy. He's been married six years. He has a four-year-old named Mia and a two-year-old named Luca, and he carries photos of them in his wallet like it's 1987. Jade finds this genuinely touching in a way she would never say out loud.
She tapes his ribs, documents it, and sends him on his way.
Enzo arrives at nine fifteen with a very sincere expression and a limp that disappears twice while he's describing his symptoms.
"Right quad," he says. "Really pulling. Started yesterday."
"You played forty minutes on Saturday and your right quad looked fine on the video review."
"It came on suddenly."
She looks at him.
He looks back, committed.
"Table one," she says.
Nolan Karev walks in at ten o'clock on the dot, and the first thing he does before he says hello, before he closes the door, before he does anything that might constitute normal human interaction is pull his practice jersey over his head and drop it on the chair beside the door.
This is not unusual. He does this every time. She has documented this as a behavioral pattern in the notes section of his file under the heading Patient demonstrates poor understanding of professional context, and she has never said this to his face because it would require acknowledging that she noticed, and she has decided not to notice.
She keeps her eyes on her computer screen.
"Morning," he says.
"Table two."
She hears him cross the room. The table shifts slightly under his weight as he sits. She finishes what she's typing, closes the window, and turns around.
He's sitting on the edge of the table, elbows on knees, looking at the wall across from him with the particular blankness of someone who has spent a lot of time in physiotherapy rooms and has made peace with the ceiling. Without the jersey, the architecture of his upper body is just present. The eagle tattoo covers most of his left forearm, black and detailed, the kind of work that takes hours. The Cyrillic text on the right runs from his inner wrist toward his elbow. She's read it a hundred times. She's never asked what it means.
"Left shoulder?" she says.
"Shoulder's fine."
"That's not what your mechanics looked like on Saturday."
"You were watching my mechanics."
"It's my job to watch your mechanics."
He doesn't say anything to this. She pulls on her gloves and moves to stand behind him, pressing her fingers along the posterior deltoid, feeling for the tension that she knows is there because it's always there, because the shoulder healed wrong and compensation has been built into the muscle memory now, and no amount of treatment is going to fully undo ten years of learned movement patterns.
She finds it. The knot is specific, tucked under the inferior angle of the scapula on the left side, about the size of a walnut.
"There," she says.
He exhales through his nose. Not a sound of pain more like acknowledgment. Yes, that's the thing.
She works the tissue methodically, thumbs moving in slow circles, and the room is quiet except for the ventilation system and the distant sound of skates on ice from the rink two corridors over.
His back is warm under her hands.
This is an observation. Clinical. She documents warmth and muscle density as part of standard assessment. She is documenting now, internally, the way she always does posterior deltoid, elevated tone, restricted range of motion in external rotation, responds to.
Her thumbs press deeper and she feels the muscle begin to release.
"Lower," he says.
She moves lower.
The room is very quiet.
She moves her attention to the thoracic spine, running her palms flat down either side of the vertebrae, feeling for the asymmetry she's been tracking since January. It's still there. Less pronounced than three months ago, but present.
"You're still compensating on the right," she says.
"I feel fine."
"I know you feel fine. You've been compensating for so long that fine feels like normal." She steps back, peels off her gloves. "I want you on the foam roller before every practice this week. Ten minutes minimum."
"I do five."
"Then do ten."
He turns to look at her over his shoulder. The corner of his mouth moves slightly not quite a smile. More like the face a person makes when they decide not to argue.
"You make that face at all your patients?" he says.
"What face?"
"That one."
She picks up her tablet. "I don't make a face."
He pulls his jersey back on, unhurried, and stands up from the table. "Ten minutes on the roller," he says, as though he's decided to agree with her of his own free will rather than because she told him to. "Got it."
He leaves.
She stands in the middle of the room for a moment after the door closes.
Then she sits down at her desk, opens his file, and writes: Posterior deltoid tension significant but responding to treatment. Thoracic asymmetry: reduced 15% from baseline. Recommend continued daily mobility protocol.
She stares at what she's written.
She adds: Patient compliance: variable.
She closes the file.
She gets home at seven. Cortex is waiting by the door not because he missed her, she's decided, but because he has an internal clock calibrated to his dinner schedule and she is simply the mechanism through which dinner arrives.
She feeds him. She makes pasta. She eats standing at the kitchen counter because the table is covered in journals she hasn't moved in three weeks.
After dinner she opens her phone, scrolls to the end of her messages, and stops.
There is a conversation there Marc Olivier, eighteen months ago. The last message is hers. Can we talk? Delivered. Never read.
She has scrolled past this conversation approximately two hundred times since the night she sent it. She has never deleted it.
She presses and holds.
Delete conversation?
She presses confirm.
Her phone vibrates in her hand immediately a call, unknown number. She stares at it for one full second before answering.
"Jade Moreau?"
The voice is not one she recognizes. Someone from the team administration, a question about scheduling, nothing.
She hangs up. She sits on her couch. Cortex climbs onto her lap without asking.
She doesn't think about the deleted message.
She thinks about it for forty minutes.