Page 93 of The Fall

Forty-Five

I’ve been to the Mutineers’ medical rooms dozens of times for the thousand little injuries that come with playing professional hockey. Stitches and ice packs and wraps; the routine of injury assessment has become second nature.

But this is different.

Blair and I perch on the edge of an examination table, his thigh pressed against mine, and wait for Dr. Lin.

I keep my eyes on the tie of my shorts, fingers fumbling with the knot as if it holds the answers.

I’m not scared of this. I’m not scared of the hit last night or the ache still beating behind my eyes. I’m not.

Except I am, and I don’t know why.

Dr. Lin breezes in, cheeks flushed as if she’s fresh from an early-morning run. “How are you feeling, Torey?” She pulls up the wheeled stool and smiles at me.

I exhale. “Headache’s hanging on.”

She nods, typing on her tablet.

“No dizziness?” She doesn’t look up from the screen.

“Not this morning.”

“Fatigue?”

“A little.”

“Disorientation? Confusion?”

I hesitate. Something inside me stirs, a shadow flickering through an open doorway. “No, nothing like that.”

“That hit you took was solid,” she says. “Shoulder to jawline, lifted your skates clean off the ice.”

“I’m still shook up, I guess.”

“He woke up sick in the middle of the night,” Blair says.

Dr. Lin tilts her head. “Blair, can you give us a moment?”

I feel the moment before it happens: Blair’s hesitation, his eyes on me. He pauses, a fraction of a second.

“I’ll be in the room.” He brushes his hand down my back, and the silence thickens once he’s gone.

Dr. Lin sets aside her tablet and looks at me. “Tell me about what’s really going on.”

My fingers stop fiddling with my drawstring. I’ve sat through concussion protocol dozens of times, fielded the questions about dates, names, and plays, but this, her exact cadence… I’ve been here before, haven’t I?

“Dr. Lin—” My voice cracks.

“When I walked in here a few minutes ago, you had the same look on your face that you had the last time you had an episode.” The room contracts, sound receding, white light sparking at the edges of my eyes. “Like your whole world has collapsed.”

She leans forward. She’s watching me sharply, gauging micro-reactions. “I kept your secret before. When you were overwhelmed, when the pressure was too much. Do you remember that?”

The question hangs in the sterile air, and the answer is yes, I do remember. I remember the real reason I collapsed, too. I remember cracking apart from the inside.

But this is— Her words… I’ve heard them before. The intonation, the compassionate dip in her voice on the word “overwhelmed.” It’s not an echo; it’s exact, hitting the same beats, the same notes. Her words are exactly the same. Every syllable, every pause, every breath between them.

How is that possible?

“I’m going to be direct with you, Torey, because I think you need to hear this. This is important: if you are having ongoing issues after the hits to your head you’ve taken, especially with your history, that could be a sign of something very, very serious.”

Ongoing issues. Hits to the head. Serious.

Am I losing my mind? Have Zolotarev’s hits scrambled me? Is this what losing it feels like?

The questions spiral through me, each one feeding the next. My hands are shaking, and I hold them flat against my thighs to still them. Dr. Lin’s eyes track the movement. She’s cataloging everything.

This is what doctors do. They watch for tells. They wait for cracks to show.

She’s waiting for me, but I can’t speak. My mouth opens, closes.

“I don’t…” I’m flailing. What can I say to get through this?

She lets discomfort fill the space. She knows how to drag the truth to the surface by watching what isn’t said.

“What would it mean, um—” I swallow. “What would it mean if things were… serious?”

What am I asking her for? A medical basis for deja vu? What would I even call this? An itch under my skin that says I’ve been here before? When? That’s impossible?—

But these flickers, these memories, this deja vu; they come from somewhere, right? And before I came to Tampa I dreamed of Tampa, and?—

What am I even thinking? That I… saw the future?

Dreamed the future? Slid through time? That’s insane .

Saying—even thinking—that kind of shit gets you benched permanently, gets you shipped off to specialists who speak in hushed voices about post-concussion syndrome and career-ending brain injuries.

Impossible; people don’t see the future. People don’t slide through time.

I wrestle down another wave of unease and keep trying to follow the thread back to the beginning: Zolotarev in the slot, that cheap shot behind the play, then?—

“Serious how?” Dr. Lin’s voice cuts through my spiraling thoughts. “Are you experiencing something specific, Torey? Something beyond the typical concussion symptoms?”

Her eyes are steady on mine, patient but probing. She’s giving me an opening, a chance to tell her everything.

The words pile up behind my teeth— I think I’ve lived this before, I know what you’re going to say before you say it, everything feels like an echo —but I can’t let them out. Can’t risk it.

“So...” I clear my throat, try again. “Hypothetically. If someone had... recurring issues. After multiple hits...”

She shifts on her stool, and the wheels squeak against the linoleum.

“That would depend on the nature of the issues.” Her tone remains carefully neutral, but something sharpens in her gaze.

“Memory problems, mood changes, difficulty concentrating can all be part of post-concussion syndrome. But there are other possibilities we’d need to rule out. ”

Other possibilities. Breathe. In through my nose, out through my mouth. “Everything feels...”

Wrong. Shifted. Like stepping into a photograph I’ve already taken. Like repeating a word until it loses its shape.

How do I explain something I don’t understand?

How do I admit that reality feels upside down, that I’m remembering things that haven’t happened, that I’m pretty sure I’m losing my mind, but that I’m more afraid of losing Blair?

Every nerve ending screams at me to run, to get out, to escape this conversation.

But where would I go? And what would I be running from?

Well… the truth. Because if I lose my mind, I lose Blair. I lose this life we’ve built together. I lose everything .

I can’t be crazy. I can’t.

...hazy.”

Telling her what’s really happening, or about the sound of shattering glass in my skull, about the sensation of living these minutes and moments twice, is a risk I cannot take.

The cost is too high. It’s the end of everything.

“That’s probably the best way to describe it.

The hit, and last night. It’s all hazy.” I force my gaze to meet hers, holding it steady when all I want to do is look away, to hide.

I can’t let her see the fault lines spreading inside my head.

“Can you be more specific?” Dr. Lin’s voice is soft. She doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink.

“I’m a little slow on the uptake.” I shrug. “Like my brain’s trying to get out of first gear. Pretty standard, right? After a hit like that?”

She sets her tablet aside and wheels her stool closer. Her fingers are cool against my temples as she checks my pupils with a penlight. Left eye. Right eye. The beam cuts through my vision, leaves afterimages dancing.

“Follow my finger.” Side to side. Up and down.

My eyes track the movement while my mind races ahead, calculating what normal looks like, what answers keep me on the ice and in Blair’s arms. Focus on the finger.

Don’t let her see the way the room tilts.

Normal players have normal reactions. Normal players don’t feel like they’re watching themselves from outside their own bodies.

“Any episodes of confusion? Lost time?”

If she only knew. “No.”

Something shifts between us. She knows. Of course she knows. She’s seen hundreds of players try to minimize symptoms, to play through damage that compounds with every shift.

“Torey, your health is more important than?—”

“I’m fine.” The edge in my voice surprises us both. “Really. I know the protocol.”

Silence unspools between us. She’s waiting for me to crack and spill whatever I’m hiding, but I’ve gotten good at holding things close. Only Blair knows how to read me.

I can’t lose him. I can’t risk them pulling me from the lineup and sending me for scans that might show... what? That my brain’s manufacturing memories? That time bends around me like light through water?

Or worse.

“Alright.” Dr. Lin picks up her tablet again. “Let’s run through the cognitive tests.”

Numbers backward from 100 by sevens. The months in reverse order. Word associations. I nail them all. She has me balance on one foot, touch my nose with my eyes closed. My body obeys even as my mind fractures along hairline cracks.

“Your motor function looks good,” she says.

Then come the questions.

“Now, can you tell me the date?”

I answer correctly.

“The current president?”

No problem.

“Can you tell me the name of the team you play for?”

“The Mutineers.”

She continues with questions about the team, teammates, set plays, line combinations, penalty kill units.

“Okay, last one: who is the captain of the team?”

“Blair Callahan.”

“That’s right. And does Blair do a good job?”

I blink. “Of course.”

“He does. In fact, I’d say he does such a good job that if, for some reason, someone didn’t feel comfortable speaking to a member of staff, then taking their situation to Blair would be a very smart choice. I’d trust him to make the right call in that situation.” Dr. Lin holds my gaze meaningfully.

Oh. She thinks this might be something I can’t tell her, that it’s something I should take to Blair.

There’s no fucking way I can unload this mess onto Blair.

He’d look at me with those steady blues and try to fix it, try to carry it for me, and I can’t let him shoulder this burden, not when I don’t even know what “this” is.