Page 67 of The Fall

My knees buckle and I slam into the concrete wall. Red starbursts bloom across my vision. The sketchbook drops from my grip, pages fluttering open on the floor. In the dim emergency lighting, Blair’s face stares up at me from every sheet. My drawings, my obsession, my madness.

I dig my fingers into my temples, but the pressure behind my eyes builds and builds. The pain is nuclear, radiating outward from my brain stem. My stomach heaves. Sweat drips down my neck. My throat burns with bile. The concrete floor warps beneath me, rippling up toward my face.

The hallway tilts and spins as darkness creeps in. I try to push myself up, but my arms won’t support me. My ragged breathing echoes back at me. The pain spikes higher, impossibly higher, until I’m sure my skull will split apart at the seams.

I hear footsteps, and then a voice, a woman’s voice. “Torey? Torey!”

I scream until my voice breaks, until my lungs are empty, until my vision fails, until I’m sliding, falling, collapsing?—

I wake on the floor, my tongue dry and my head salted with static. Dr. Lin’s face swims above me. My eyes are open, but the ceiling won’t stay still.

“Torey?” Her voice is distorted, as if moving through water. “Can you hear me?” She says my name again, firmer this time. One of her hands is on the side of my neck, checking my pulse.

I try to nod, but my head barely moves. “Yes,” I manage to croak. My body feels disconnected, like I’m operating it through a faulty remote control.

Dr. Lin moves her hand from my neck to my shoulder. “Don’t try to sit up yet. Breathe.” She studies me. “What happened?”

The truth is too damning to share. “Headache,” I mumble. “Bad one.”

Dr. Lin’s eyes narrow. She doesn’t believe me, or at least doesn’t think that’s the whole story. She’s right. “You were screaming, Torey.”

I close my eyes and immediately regret it as vertigo swirls within me, then open them again. The fluorescent lights above me burn into my retinas, but they’re better than the whirling darkness. “I don’t…” My tongue is cotton. “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember?” Her voice sharpens. “Do you know where you are?”

“I— We’re at home.”

Dr. Lin sits back on her heels, studying me. I want to crawl out of my skin. “What was the final score of the game?”

“We won, 5–2.”

“Who had assists on the second goal?”

“Blair and Holloway.”

“Do you remember who we played?”

“Dallas.”

“…and where we are now?”

“Tampa.”

“Do you know what day it is?”

“Tuesday. January 1. Or 2. It’s after midnight.” The floor beneath me has stopped shifting, at least. Small mercies.

“Okay.” She nods. “Think you can sit up now?”

I push through the dizziness. “Slowly.” Her grip tightens. “I want you in medical.”

“I’m fine,” I protest, but even I don’t believe it. My head throbs with each heartbeat.

“No, you’re not.”

I want to argue, but instead, I let her help me to my feet, pausing when the world tilts again.

“Easy,” she says, supporting more of my weight than I’d like to admit.

One step. Another. My legs are rubber, my balance shot. The hallway stretches endlessly before us. My stomach lurches.

Dr. Lin’s grip tightens. “Going to be sick?”

I shake my head. Being sick would mean stopping, mean explaining, mean more questions I can’t answer. We shuffle forward.

Dr. Lin shifts, taking on more of my lean. “When did this really start, Torey?”

The lie sits ready on my tongue, but my brain won’t form the words. Everything is static and cotton and the memory of Blair’s face closing like a door.

“On the plane,” I manage. Truth and not-truth tangled together.

“I need to run some tests,” she says.

Tests mean questions. Questions mean answers I don’t have, or worse, answers I do have but can’t share, not without sounding completely unhinged. “I need water and sleep.”

“You need more than that.”

She takes me into her office next to the medical suite and shuts the door behind her. That’s when I know it’s serious, that she’s worried. Even though it’s two in the morning, there are still people here, and she doesn’t want anyone to hear this.

Fuck.

She sits across from me. “Follow my finger.”

I track it, breathing through the throb behind my eyes.

“Good.”

She tests my grip strength, has me touch my finger to my nose. The medical choreography would be reassuring if not for her intensity, and that closed door behind us.

“Any disorientation in the locker room after the game? Any speech issues?”

“No.”

She checks my pulse, my blood pressure. “Elevated,” she says, removing the cuff. Her hand slides to the back of my head, fingers threading through my sweat-matted strands. “Do you remember how you got from the bus to the lower level?”

“Parts are fuzzy. I remember the bus. Then it gets... patchy.”

“Patchy memory or no memory? These are different neurological presentations, and transient amnesia is a serious symptom. Especially with your history.”

“My history?”

“Your concussion in Vancouver.”

I swallow. “My head hurts. I’m exhausted. Things are fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy isn’t the same as absent.” Her words are careful, clinical. “With postconcussive syndrome, we see patterns. Headaches, yes. Fatigue, absolutely. But complete memory gaps followed by collapse? That’s concerning.”

The fluorescent light above us flickers. The sound it makes, that barely-there electrical hum, drills into my skull.

“It wasn’t complete.” The words scrape out. “I remember pieces.”

“Which pieces?”

Blair’s face when I showed him those drawings. The way his expression shuttered, how he couldn’t even look at me. The weight of that sketchbook in my hands, pages full of a year that never existed. My stomach turns.

“The garage.” I focus on the corner of her desk, on a coffee ring stained into the wood. “I was in the garage after everyone left.”

“And then?”

And then Blair drove away. And then my head split open. And then I ran like a coward into the dark because facing what I’d done—what I’d imagined, what I’d created out of nothing—was worse than any physical pain.

“I walked back into the arena.” Each word is a stone I have to push uphill. “My head got worse. The lights were...” I gesture vaguely. “Too bright.”

“So you went to the lower level? In the dark?”

When she puts it like that, it sounds insane. Maybe it is. Maybe I am.

“I needed quiet.” My voice cracks on the last word.

Dr. Lin’s expression softens, but her concern sharpens. She rolls her chair closer. “I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize when I’m not getting the whole story. Players hide injuries; it’s what you do. But I can’t help you if I don’t have the facts.”

I stare at my hands, counting the seconds between heartbeats. Four. Five. Six.

“You were screaming, Torey.”

My face burns. “I lost my temper.”

“At what?”

“At myself!” I shout. My words rip out of me, and my hands curl into fists on my thighs.

The silence that follows is suffocating.

Dr. Lin doesn’t flinch. She waits.

“I took a stupid hit,” I say, the lie forming even as I piece it together.

My eyes drop to the flecked pattern of the linoleum floor.

“Then in the garage… it caught up. The headache. The game.” I drag a hand over my face, the rasp of my stubble loud in the quiet office.

“I needed to blow off some steam. I went down to the lower level to be alone. I didn’t mean to— I was frustrated. I thought I was alone.”

“Look at me, Torey.”

I raise my eyes.

“I need you to be honest with me: have you experienced any memory lapses before tonight?”

Memory lapses. A lapse implies a void, a blank space where something should be. What I have is the opposite, a head crammed full of things that never happened. What would it mean if I told her I made up an entire year with Blair?

“No,” I whisper.

“Have you collapsed before?”

“No. This is the first time.”

“Are you sleeping?”

I stare at the medical posters on her wall: muscle groups, skeletal systems, all the ways a body can break down. The illustrated figure has no face, only clean lines marking insertion points and ligament attachments, nothing like the mess inside me.

“Some nights better than others.”

“When did you last get eight hours?”

“I don’t know. Weeks. Maybe longer.”

“The headaches. Are they always this severe?”

“No. Usually they’re manageable. Tonight was different.”

“Different how?”

His eyes, how he couldn’t look at me. Blair’s taillights disappearing. The way my skull felt like it was splitting along invisible fault lines.

“Sudden onset.” I focus on breathing, on the rhythm of air in and out. “Zero to nuclear in seconds.”

“Any triggers you can identify?”

Blair’s face when he saw my drawings. The way he couldn’t even ? —

“Stress.” The half-truth tastes like copper. “The game. The travel. Everything.” I try to pull on my big boy pants. I have to get out of here. “Can I say something that won’t leave this room?”

“Of course.”

“I’m not saying the hit today didn’t mess me up some, but… there’s other stuff, too.” I dig my thumb into my palm. “I’ve been trying so hard.” My voice breaks and I hate it. “I can’t mess this up.”

“You’re not messing up, Torey.”

“I thought I could outwork… everything. The stress. The noise. The pressure. I thought I could prove…” My voice drops. “That I’m not broken.”

Her silence is full of listening. She understands this dance better than anyone in the league.

“But everything hit all at once and I didn’t know what to do with it. That’s what this was.”

“Tell me about this ‘other stuff,’” she says.

“It’s... complicated.”

Dr. Lin waits, giving me space to continue or stop.

“I need to focus on hockey and stop overthinking.”

“Sometimes overthinking is our mind’s way of telling us we need to address an issue.” Her gaze stays on me for a long moment. “Stress can manifest physically. Extreme stress can even trigger neurological symptoms. But screaming until you collapse goes beyond typical stress responses.”

I swallow hard.

“You’ve been under enormous pressure to perform. Transitioning to a new team is hard, especially coming off your situation in Vancouver. But if there’s more?—”

“I’m okay,” I cut in. “Really.” My voice breaks. I clear my throat.

“Have you eaten?”

I shake my head.

“That’s not helping.” She reaches into her desk drawer and pulls out a protein bar, sliding it across to me. “It’s not a meal, but it’s better than nothing.”

I take it, fingers fumbling with the wrapper.

“Your body isn’t a machine you can run on willpower alone.

” Her voice is gentle but firm. “Skipping meals, pushing through exhaustion. These aren’t signs of dedication.

They’re self-sabotage. And emotional strain exacerbates what the body is going through.

You’re pushing yourself too hard. This isn’t only exhaustion,” she says carefully. “This is an emotional collapse.”

Her office feels too small, too close. The walls trap my thoughts, bounce them back at me until they echo: collapse, collapse, collapse.

She sees right through me, through the brave face and the excuses and the mental walls I’ve built. Hockey isn’t the real problem. Neither is the concussion or the pressure or even what happened in Vancouver.

The real problem sits in her office, pretending everything’s fine while falling apart inside.

The real problem is me.

“You need to take care of yourself for you . The person under the jersey matters.”

The person under the jersey is lost and scared and alone, but I nod anyway.

She leans forward, her elbows on her knees. “What you’re describing sounds like a stress response compounded by physical exhaustion and possibly a minor concussion from that hit. Your body shut down because you pushed it past its limits.”

I want to believe her, but what she’s saying doesn’t account for my sketchbooks full of imaginary moments or why I believe Blair and I loved each other when we haven’t. Or he hasn’t.

“I need to know if I can play tomorrow,” I say, redirecting.

“No.” Her answer comes without hesitation. “Absolutely not.”

“Doc—”

“This isn’t negotiable. You collapsed. You were disoriented.

At minimum, you need twenty-four hours of rest.” She sits back, crossing her arms. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” she says, her tone softening.

“I’m going to give you something for the pain.

You need to hydrate, sleep, and limit your screen time, like with a concussion.

I’ll take a look at you again Thursday, and if you’re doing better, we’ll discuss Friday’s game. ”

Three days alone with my thoughts. Three days of staring at my apartment walls. Three days of trying not to picture Blair’s face when he looked at my drawings.

I want to argue, again, but the throbbing in my head proves her point. I nod, and when I lift my gaze again, hers hasn’t moved off of me.

“Torey, if anything like this happens again, or if you start feeling worse instead of better, I need you to come to me. Day or night.” She writes her cell number on a prescription pad and tears off the sheet. “This is my personal number. Use it.”

I take the paper, fold it twice, and tuck it into my pocket. “I’ll be fine,” I say.

“You’re not fine now,” she counters. “And that’s okay. You don’t have to be fine all the time.”

No one’s ever given me permission to not be fine before. In hockey, weakness isn’t an option. You play through pain. You shut up and skate.

“I can help, but only if you let me. I’ll keep tonight between us, and I’ll write this up as post-concussion observation, but you have to meet me halfway. You’re not alone.”

But I am alone. I’ve burned the one bridge I was desperate to cross. Blair saw everything, and then he walked away without a word.

I nod.

“Good.” She squeezes my shoulder before guiding me toward the door. “Let’s get you home.”