Page 116 of The Fall

Blair’s breathing has gone shallow. Each exhale of his barely disturbs the air between us.

“There’s no rush to decide today,” Dr. Lin says, though her tone suggests otherwise. “But the sooner we address this, the better your outcomes. The lesion has already grown since last year.”

“And if I don’t have the surgery?” The question scrapes out of me as if someone else is asking about someone else’s brain, and someone else’s future is dissolving into medical percentages.

I brace, my whole body tightening against what I feel coming.

Blair’s thumb stops its frantic motion against my knuckles.

We’re both waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“The seizures will continue,” Dr. Khatri says.

“They’ll likely increase in both frequency and severity.

The hallucinations and the false memories may become more elaborate and more difficult to distinguish from reality.

And eventually,” Dr. Khatri continues, and there’s something almost apologetic in his tone now, “the seizures could progress to what most people think of as grand mal seizures. Those carry their own risks. Injury from falling, respiratory complications, and in rare cases...” He doesn’t finish.

Death. He means death.

My father makes a sound, air leaving him too fast.

Dr. Lin shifts forward, her hands folding together.

“Without surgery, Torey, we’d be looking at medication management.

Anti-seizure drugs, regular monitoring.” She meets my eyes directly, and there’s no softness there now, only truth.

“But I need you to understand: the league won’t clear you.

” She spreads her hands, a gesture that encompasses everything and nothing. “The ice would be behind you.”

Hockey has been my world since I was five years old. It’s who I am, it’s how I know my father, it’s what brought me to Blair. Without it, who am I?

Blair’s hand in mine has frozen. The tendons in his neck stand out like rope under tension.

Surgery or retirement, those are my choices. What version of me survives each?

That gray smudge on the screen holds so much power. Two centimeters of damaged tissue owns every dream I’ve ever had.

Blair’s grip shifts, his fingers threading tighter through mine, like he’s trying to fuse us at the molecular level, make it so nothing can separate us.

“With everything going right, and with a full recovery, no complications, you could be back on the ice,” Dr. Khatri says.

“The surgery has a strong success rate for people your age and as healthy as you are. But I won’t lie to you about what we’re discussing here: this is brain surgery. There are no guarantees.”

“I need time.” The words barely make it through my throat. Everything inside me has gone rigid, brittle as old ice.

Dr. Khatri nods. “Take the time you need. The medication we’ve started will keep the seizures controlled for now.

” He reaches for a tablet on the counter and passes it to my father.

“This has information about temporal lobe epilepsy, the resection procedure, recovery timelines. Read through it together, and let me know what questions you have.”

My father takes the tablet. His fingers tremble against the black case.

When the doctors leave, silence fills the room, broken only by the steady broadcast of my cardiac monitor. My father sets the tablet on the bedside table with a soft clack. His face is pale, his jaw set in a hard line as he stares at the wall over my shoulder.

I look at my brain scans still on the monitor. They are two snapshots of my brain, one before I knew Blair existed and one after loving him. It’s only a smudge; I’d think it was lint. Does this explain everything or nothing at all?

I close my eyes and try to feel the truth. If I quiet everything else—the diagnosis, the prognosis, the risks—what remains?

The perfect shine of Blair’s eyes, a deep Pacific blue I knew to love before I’d ever truly seen them. The cascade of his laugh, the curve of his smile, the crinkle of his eyes, the feel of his fingertips on my skin, the taste of his lips?—

A lesion can’t create that depth of knowing. Which means what? That every choice, every moment of recognition, every time I looked at Blair and knew— All of it was broken circuitry?

An ache threads through me, resentment at the reduction, grief for all that science can name but never feel. That smudge—that nothing, that everything—mocks me. How dare something so small contain so much? How dare it reduce what Blair and I have?

My life divides into two irreconcilable truths: the world of lesions and electrical impulses and a world where the most profound year of my life can be traced back to a scar of damaged tissue. They belong to two separate worlds, and I am standing with a foot in each.

I cannot reconcile the man I fought for across time with this Dr. Khatri’s recitation of symptoms.

Does it matter if a scar brought me to him?

Does it change the fact that loving him remade me, and that he lives in parts of me no surgeon could ever reach?

If they opened my skull tomorrow and cut away that damaged tissue, Blair would still be inside me, written into the spaces between synapses.

He exists in me beyond anatomy, beyond what any scan could capture. He is the other half of me.

No, I am not a bystander to this scar, and I will not reduce the hardest, most brutal work of my life to this shadowy smudge. This love is not a symptom. Whatever brought me to him, whatever made it possible for us across time and space and impossibility, I claimed it.

Blair’s fingers rub over the pulse point at my wrist. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know,” I whisper.

“Torey.” My father’s voice cracks. “Whatever you decide, whatever happens, we’re here.”

“I need—” Need what? Time? Answers? Some guarantee that I’ll still be myself on the other side of whatever comes next? This isn’t a power play strategy I can work on, or a shattered stick I can replace. I have to cross this chasm alone. It’s my brain, my memories.

I turn, burrowing into Blair. The scent of him—salt and coconut and Key lime and the unbreakable strength that is his own—surrounds me. I turn my face into his, hiding against his throat. “I’m fucking scared.”

“I know. Me too.”

What does brave look like when the map is your skull and the path cuts through memory? If courage is a choice, where do you aim it? At the knife, at the waiting, or at the life that might be different after?

Dad is a steady silhouette by the window, holding himself together with stubbornness for me.

The room holds us all suspended, Blair’s heartbeat against my cheek, my father’s control, the monitors tracking proof of life in digital green.

There’s no version of this where I win everything.

“Whatever you need,” Blair whispers into my hair. “Whatever it takes. We’ll get through it.”

We. As if my brain is our brain, my future our future, as if there’s no version of this story where he walks away.

A soft knock lands against the door, and Blair lifts his head. The door opens, and Hayes is there, a small shadow clinging to his leg: Lily.

“Hey, guys.” Hayes’s voice is soft. “Brought you a visitor.”

“Hi, Lily-pad,” I manage.

Lily peeks out from behind his jeans. She’s holding the pink teddy bear I gave to her when she was in the ER, and she pads toward the bed with Hayes’s hand on her back, guiding her.

Hayes lifts her and settles Lily on the edge of my bed.

She reaches for my hand but doesn’t say anything.

“I made these for you.” Her voice is small as she holds up a sheaf of papers.

On the top page, a green tyrannosaurus in a Mutineers jersey wields a hockey stick, a frantic scribble of a puck sailing toward a net.

I flip through the rest: a stegosaurus in goalie pads, a pterodactyl mid-flight, dropping a puck onto Blair’s stick, and a tiny, triumphant allosaurus lifting a crudely drawn silver cup.

“They’re for you to feel better,” she whispers.

I trace a finger over the waxy lines. These dinosaurs have played out a future I might not have: the playoffs, the cup, the team celebrating together. “These are amazing. Did you draw all these yourself?”

She nods. “Daddy helped color the jerseys. I did all the dinosaurs.”

“I like this stegosaurus goalie the best.”

“That’s Stella,” she says. “The plates on her back help her block the goal.”

“Thank you, Lily-bean.” She clings to me when I lean forward, her small arms wrapping around my neck.

Hayes settles his hand on her hair and looks me in the eyes. “You absolute madman.” His voice is rough, and shaking. “You insane bastard.”

“Takes one to know one.”

Hayes laughs, but it sounds gruff and torn from somewhere deep, the sort of laugh that’s really grief with a different mask. His eyes flick to Blair, then to Lily curled close beside me.

Then he crosses to Blair and hauls him into an embrace. Hayes’s hand finds the space between Blair’s shoulder blades and stays there, holding him upright through whatever’s crumbling inside. “We’re all here for you,” Hayes says into Blair’s ear.

When they break apart, Blair’s eyes are glassy, and Hayes keeps one hand on his shoulder. “We fly out in the morning,” Hayes says. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll make sure the guys are dialed in.”

Hayes’s words set off warning bells. He’s talking to Blair like Blair isn’t going, like he isn’t playing.

Blair catches my eye, his expression too carefully blank. His chin tilts up the way it does when he’s preparing for a confrontation he doesn’t want but won’t back down from.

The playoffs start tomorrow. The first round of everything we’ve worked for, everything we’ve bled for all season. Blair should be on that plane. He should be focused on video review and line combinations, not standing in this sterile room watching monitors track the broken rhythms of my brain.

But Blair has already chosen.