Page 229 of The Fall

I want to confess it all, spill my guts right here on this exam table. I want someone to help me make sense of this nightmare. But… Ican’t.

“I want to see you again tomorrow. And if anything changes?—”

“I’ll call.”

She doesn’t believe me, but without more symptoms and without me admitting to the impossibility haunting my mind, her hands are tied.

Dr. Lin exhales. “Things have been going well for you, Torey. Really well. This has been the best hockey you’ve ever played. You’ve been very happy here.”

Happy. Such a small word for what I have with Blair. And every time she speaks, all I hear is the threat of everything being taken away. I’m so fucking terrified of losing Blair. I won’t, Iwon’tlose him.

She draws in a breath?—

And another piece of this impossible puzzle clicks into place right where it belongs. I know what she’ll say a breath before she speaks: she’ll tell me to skip practice, to come back tomorrow.

“You’re not practicing today. Come back and see me tomorrow morning. We’ll talk more then.”

I grasp the table’s edge to keep from shouting. What is happening to me? Can a break in time show up as clearly as a fracture on an X-ray?

I need answers. A way through, a map scratched in the margins. Whatever’s happening, it doesn’t care what it cost to fight my way back here. It doesn’t care about the broken years behind me, and it doesn’t see what Blair and I built.

None of this is guaranteed, not the next day or the next shift or the next quiet morning. I have lost him before, and if I can’t figure this out, I’ll lose him. A cold whisper traces the base of my skull, a bleed-through from a dream of black water and broken glass.

I know how to fight for what I love, though. That’s the one thing that saved me before. It has to save me—save us—now.

So let fate circle. Let ghosts prowl the door.

There is no universe in which I will let go of this life.

And I will not let him go.

My maintenance day feels like house arrest.

I lean against the boards between the benches, and the world tilts. A deep wrongness coils at the base of my skull.

I’ve stood here before.

Not yesterday, not last week; here, exactly here, with this exact light slanting through the rafters. The air feels worn, breathed in and out one too many times, and the ice is a sheet of used time. My reflection lives in the scuffed plexiglass, a ghost wearing my face. The guys crash through drills, blades hissing, bodies colliding, and every sound slots into place, pieces of a puzzle finding their fit.

Hawks catches a saucer pass at the blue line as his feet flow into a curl. I know what comes next. The whole play unspools in my head a half-second before it happens on the ice, a film overlaying reality, and when it happens, when Hawks cuts exactly where I knew he would, when Hollow picks up the pass, my knees buckle.

It isexactlythe same.

My words bubble up out of me. “That’s how you do it, Hollow!”

Hawks swings by on a curl, and I know, Iknowwhat he’s about to say. “Maintenance day, Kicks?”

“Yeah, gotta check the head. Last night, you know.”

Hawks snorts. “Shouldn’t take ‘em long. That’s prime empty real estate up there.”

I laugh. The sound echoes, like hearing a recording of yourself.

The drill morphs into a four-on-three, and Hayes floats back exactly as I knew he would. My fingers dig into the boards until my knuckles ache. A wrongness is twisted up in the ticking of my heart: the sense of running along a track already laid, the dizzying sense that I’ve been here before and now I’m coughing up my lines on cue.

Blair slots in on the blue line. Our eyes meet across the ice. The blue of his eyes pulls me in, a coastline surfacing through fog. He sharpens the lines of the rink, draws colors into higher contrast. His stick rests easy in his gloves, but his shoulders carry the weight of watching over all of us. Over me, especially.

The puck drops and he shoots forward; practice pivots around him. He’s the axis, the engine, the reason the ice only half-belongs to the rest of us. My mouth shapes the words “top shelf.”