Page 52 of The Fall

Lunch is cheap tacos and folding chairs outside a food truck Hayes swears has the best fried avocado in the city.

That holds up. We’re camped under a windblown umbrella, one table between us and three Cokes sweating in plastic cups.

Hayes does most of the talking. A story about Lily’s school play.

A rant about his fantasy football loss being a conspiracy.

Blair’s elbow rests on the table, and he avoids eye contact almost the entire meal, but not in that shutdown way he had from training camp.

This is the intense quiet he gets right before a face-off when he’s reading the other center, predicting the drop.

Right now, I feel like the puck he’s about to obliterate.

He picks up a stray tortilla chip from his basket, examines its jagged edge.

I should say something. Anything. Great tacos. Man, Hayes can talk. Think it’ll rain?

When Hayes steps five feet away to answer a call but talks like no one in North America is out of earshot, Blair and I are left alone.

I dab grease off my palm with a napkin. He breaks the tortilla chip in half.

His sunglasses mask his eyes, and the dark lenses reflect my own image back at me, two tiny versions of myself.

“You’re tracking better in neutral zone reads.”

He lifts his sunglasses to the top of his head, and his eyes—startling blue even in this washed-out afternoon light—search my face.

I swallow. “I’m trying.” My half-eaten taco sits abandoned on wax paper. I grip my paper napkin tighter as it disintegrates against my damp palm. Hayes keeps talking in the background, his voice rising and falling.

“Your anticipation’s improving,” Blair continues. “You’re seeing second layers faster.”

“I’m still late on backdoor looks, though.”

He dips his chin and gives me a half nod. “Fixable.”

My knuckles whiten around the napkin. His eyes stay on me as if he’s watching game tape, breaking down every micro-movement.

Before I unstick the words caught in my throat, Hayes drops back into his chair with a clatter. “Sorry about that.” He reaches for his drink.

Blair’s focus shifts back to Hayes, and I breathe in sharp, oxygen flooding back into me.

“All good?” Blair asks.

Hayes launches into another story about Lily, deftly avoiding answering Blair’s question. I force myself to take a bite of my taco, chew, swallow. I nod at the right moments, laugh when Hayes expects it, but my brain keeps circling back: fixable.

That word stays in me, a grain of sand under the skin, burring deeper with each beat of blood through my veins. My body temperature spikes and drops in waves. The way Blair said it, like he’s been watching. Like he’s been paying attention to details I didn’t think anyone noticed.

Fixable.

Blair plants himself in front of me on the ice in Detroit. “You want a spot on the power play?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s work.”

We fall into a rhythm. Drop, draw, reset, again. He reads every false twitch in my hips like a codebreaker. “You’re looking at the puck. Don’t. Eyes on his elbow. It tells you more than the blade.”

He stays crouched with me, close enough that I catch his scent again: Key lime, sharp and clean, the ghost of a Florida year stirred up through cold sweat. I drop and plant, my eyes on his elbow. This time, I don’t wait for the puck; I wait for his twitch.

The moment stretches: me watching his arm, him watching me watch. His elbow shifts a micro-movement right and I’m already moving left.

Blair’s exhale clouds the air. “Better.” He retrieves another puck and settles back into position. “Again.”

I reset my stance, thighs burning, sweat cold under my practice jersey. This close, I map the micro-expressions crossing his face, then force my attention back to his elbow.

The ice shavings beneath my blades grind as I shift. His elbow stays perfectly still, but I catch the slight flex in his forearm, the way his fingers adjust their grip on his stick.

“Good,” he says. “You’re reading the tells now.” He stays crouched across from me, patient as stone. The rink lights catch the sweat on his temple, trace the line of his jaw.

He drops the puck. This time I’m ready for it, and I sweep left as he goes right, my blade finding rubber before his does. The puck shoots away from us both, skittering toward the boards.

“There it is.” Blair straightens, and I follow, my knees protesting.

We’ve done this drill fifty times, and we’ll do it fifty more.

Two weeks. That’s all it takes to lose track of the line between routine and craving. I dream broken shards of a life I never lived every night. Candlelight. Salt-heavy air. Stars strung across a lanai, captured for the two of us.

I keep hoping for something to slip out. One gesture, one look, one particle of proof that everything inside me is not complete insanity. That the year we shared—a year from now—existed somehow, even if only the echo of a medical mishap.

But there’s no recognition in his eyes, and no hidden message in his instructions on the ice. There’s nothing in him that says he wants more from me than controlled face-offs and clean zone entries.

The locker room empties around me while I take too long with simple tasks.

It’s always at the margins where I feel the agony the sharpest. The almost. The nearly.

The fragments of who we were. The math shouldn’t hurt this much: one person plus one year minus one concussion equals zero-sum game.

I know the equation. I live it every day.

I pull on my compression shirt and lace my skates. I repeat the drills he pulled me through, and during games, I win another puck on the draw. I build, one battle, one shift, one small victory at a time. The next face-off dot waits. The next whistle comes.

And for the team, wins start sticking.

Three straight. Five out of six. The standings shift in our favor, and the energy in the room changes. Hollow starts making his ridiculous shots. Hayes finds his groove on the power play. Even Divot stops overthinking his blue line pinches.

Sometimes Blair meets my eyes across the rink when nobody else is looking. It’s quick—only a flicker—but it steadies me more than any pep talk ever could.

My own numbers climb quietly upward: face-off percentage inching higher, plus-minus smoothing out. The days blur together: ice, sweat, hotel rooms that all smell faintly of bleach and old carpet. But somewhere in that sameness is momentum, rolling forward whether I’m ready or not.

I start to believe.

And then, in Montreal, I miss every pass.

I try. God, I’m trying, but my timing’s off and the ice feels wrong beneath me. It doesn’t matter who I’m aiming for—Hayes streaking wide, Divot at the hashmarks—my stick isn’t steady, my reads are late, and every puck skids out of reach.

Shift after shift, nothing lands. Not the dump-ins, not the cycle, not even the simple outlet Simmer feeds me in the neutral zone, clean and gift-wrapped.

Coach’s voice bellows from the bench. “Kicks! What the hell was that?”

I have no answer. The puck won’t settle, not on my blade and not in my head. I’m fighting the game instead of flowing within it. When the horn sounds ending the second period, we’re down 3–0.

The locker room reeks of frustration. I stare at the floor while Coach rips into us. The words wash over me in waves—intensity, compete level, execution, accountability.

Nothing gets better, and by the time the final horn sounds, I already know what the numbers will say before the sheet hits the room: zeroes across the stat line, two turnovers, three bad zone exits, a minus-3 for the night, and?—

And a look from Blair I can’t read at all.

I beat the sun to the rink the next morning.

The arena is ghost-quiet, and I lace up my skates in the silent locker room. I’ve got drills in mind, hours of them, enough to bring me all the way to the start of skate. I grab my stick and a bucket of pucks and head to the ice.

One by one, I fire them at the empty net, each shot a little harder than the last. I retrieve them all and start again, faster this time. Shoot. Retrieve. Shoot.

The sound of another set of skates coming across the ice registers only after they’re halfway to center.

It’s Blair. He’s here. Why?

He disappears into the corners of the rink, cycling through his own warm-up routine, bouncing a puck on his blade. I remember this rhythm, and I hate knowing every move he makes before he makes it. We used to hum together, two matching gears.

He glides into my zone, circles me twice, then gathers half of my pucks and moves them to the blue line. He places four in a row, evenly apart. We’ve run this drill enough times that I know what he’s setting up.

My heart hammers as I push off, and he shoots the puck exactly where I’ll be in three strides.

We pass once, then again, and then the puck becomes air and instinct.

The unspoken choreography we used to write without words from a life we’ve never lived fills me.

The ice opens up; every release is razor clean.

We loop the sheet in rhythms no coach could script.

I flick a puck his direction, and he corrals it flawlessly.

His edges dig in, that natural left-side lean.

I pivot wide, catch his return, and fire a one-touch release. Again. Again.

When we finally break, sweat rains from me despite the cold. We coast into silence together by the boards. I lean over the gate and grab the water bottle.

Blair pours water over the back of his neck. “You played like shit last night,” he says.

“I was a fucking disaster.” I drink and let the water rise in my throat, then swallow salt back down. I stare at the ice between my skates.

“You want to be great, right?” he asks.

Something curls inside me. “Yeah.”

“Then stop being only good enough.”

The cold burns my lungs as I breathe. Blair stands there, water still dripping from his dark hair, waiting.

“I don’t?—”

I don’t know how to be anything else. I don’t know how to want without apology. I don’t know how to reach for greatness when good enough has been my ceiling for so long.

“What if I’m not—” I stop. Swallow. “This could be all I’ve got. That, last night, could be me.”

Blair’s eyes find mine. “Then you wouldn’t be here at five in the morning.”

He’s right about that too. Nobody who’s given up drags themselves to an empty rink before dawn. Nobody who’s settled shoots pucks until their shoulders scream.

He pushes off the boards, skating backward. He’s drawing a line beneath my self-doubt, my self-castigation, my endless sprint toward some imagined finish line where I’ll finally realize I don’t deserve... what? To be here? To play? To matter?

Him?

The question splits through me. I push it down, bury it beneath layers of sweat and exhaustion. My legs burn as I follow him back toward center ice, the bucket of pucks waiting where we left them.

Blair flips one onto his blade without looking, the motion so smooth it’s almost lazy. “You’re thinking too much.”

“Story of my life.”

“No.” He stops skating, plants his edges. The puck balances on his stick like it belongs there. “You think about the wrong things.”

I coast to a stop across from him. The empty arena holds our breathing, the scrape of steel on ice, the hum of the overhead lights.

“When you missed that pass to Hayes in the second—” He flicks the puck to me, a perfect saucer that lands soft on my blade. “Where were your eyes?”

I send it back. “On the defenseman.”

“Why?”

“Because he was closing the lane.”

“Was he?” Blair receives my pass and holds it. “Or were you so busy worrying about him that you created the problem?”

The puck sits on his blade, patient. I know he’s right. I saw the defender shift and assumed the worst, pulled the pass back a fraction, turned a clean play into a turnover.

“You play scared.” He says it without judgment, just fact.

I swallow. The empty net gapes at the far end of the rink, and suddenly I understand why he set those pucks at the blue line.

“Show me,” he says, and slides the puck back to me. “Show me what you do when you stop being afraid.”