Page 94 of The Fall

“Good,” she says at last. “You passed the neurological exam with flying colors. That’s a good sign.”

Sure. If I tell myself it’s all in my head, why do these moments still line up, dominoes in perfect formation?

She taps something on her tablet. “Your test results are consistent with someone who’s taken a hit but isn’t showing signs of serious cognitive impairment. Which doesn’t mean you aren’t experiencing symptoms you’re not telling me about.”

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… I can’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, I won’t lose 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 is exactly the same.

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

Hawks swings by on a curl, and I know, I know what 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.”

He rips through the defense, executes an impossible dip around Fischer, his wrists so smooth it’s surreal, and lifts the puck over Axel, top shelf.

The whistle blows. The guys scatter, half to shoot the breeze, half to grind out extra sprints, but Blair skates toward me.

This is the part where he grabs a bottle, where his voice will drop and he’ll ask about my head. I know he’ll lean in. I know exactly how the water will taste when he hands it to me.

It happens. Every gesture, every breath, every second. His eyes stay on me while I drink, and the team’s noise fades to white static. My hand trembles as I lower the bottle. The plastic crinkles under my grip.

“Doc clear you to stand around?”

“For now.”

“How’s the head?”

Fucked. Broken. Looping like a scratched record. “Better.” Liar, liar.

His eyes search my face. They are the purest ocean blue, all those shades I could draw from memory. A drowning man could find peace in those eyes.

“You’d tell me if something was wrong.”

Blair doesn’t frame it as a question. He never does when something matters to him.

This lie burns worse than all the others. “I’d tell you.”

He keeps watching me as he unlatches his helmet and rakes a hand through his damp hair. The scruff on his jaw catches the light. He didn’t shave this morning. He rushed me to see Dr. Lin.

Each detail is another lock clicking shut. Why is this happening? Where does this end?

“You sure you’re okay?”

The softness in his voice breaks something inside me. “Yeah. A little disoriented.”

Disoriented. As if that could possibly capture the sensation of time eating its own tail, of living inside an echo of a life already lived, of the sense I could touch another version of this moment.

Cold leaks through my hoodie where the boards meet my forearms. Blair’s still watching me. A single bead of sweat traces down from his temple, catching on the dark sweep of his hair before sliding off his chin, the exact route I’ve seen it follow before, like water tracing its channel in stone.

Coach’s whistle cracks through the rink, and the moment shatters.

“After this, we’ll get you somewhere quiet. Stretch out, decompress.” He tugs his helmet back into place, shoots me a short nod, and then skates backward, his eyes never leaving mine. I watch him go, every glide pulling him further from me.

I’ve felt this punch of longing before.

How many times have I stood here watching Blair skate away?

The rink softens as my vision shifts, like looking through water that won’t settle, like two photographs bleeding into each other.

There’s Blair in his practice jersey, and there’s also Blair a heartbeat out of sync, his ghost moving through the same ice, the same turns.

My breath hangs between me and the practice happening twenty feet away.

The guys weave through orange pylons while I am pinned between one second and the next, between what’s happening and what already happened.

This isn’t my brain misfiring from the concussion. This is—God, what is this? I force another breath down, then another.

Blair completes another drill, his hands so sure with the puck that might as well be tied to his blade with string. It obeys him the way it always does, the way it always will, the way it always has.

Hayes crashes into the boards beside me, and for a second I’m in two places at once: here with Hayes’s wide smile aimed at me, and also somewhere else where Hayes is?—

Gone.

Gone how? Why?

Fuck, I can’t remember .

My nightmare burns behind my eyes: a single scream the length of a whole night, shattered glass, stars falling, the final, terrible stillness of Blair in my arms, falling, falling, free fall?—

I sink to the bench, dropping my head between my knees. Breathe, Torey. Breathe. The rational part of my brain, the part that understands physics, insists this is all bullshit. This is my mind creating a pattern where none exists. Right?

But if someone looked deep inside of me, cast light on my retinas as if they were a projector, would they see how each of my memories are a fractured double helix?

How do you know which moments are real and which are only shadows? Maybe every memory splits—one strand living forward, one looping back—so every time I blink I am slipping between them.

Dread rises like floodwaters inside me. What if I never left that night? What if some piece of me is still falling with Blair’s blood on my hands?

My questions circle endlessly, eating their own tails.

The ice beneath Blair’s blades sends up a fine spray as he pivots hard. There’s a shape to this dread. It feels like… like approaching some invisible line where everything changes.

Or ends.

We don’t have much time. We’re running out of time, Blair and I, and every moment brings us closer to?—

To what?

Rage floods through me. This isn’t fair.

None of this is fair. Why trap me in this loop of knowing-not-knowing, remembering-forgetting?

Every neuron in my skull should be cooperating, should be giving me what I need, but instead they’re feeding me scraps and shadows and the constant, gnawing certainty that Blair?—

That Blair what?

Fuck. Fuck.

Are my memories even real, or is my damaged brain inventing bullshit?

Am I remembering a future that hasn’t happened or constructing one from fragments of fear?

This doubling could be my brain misfiring.

Head injuries do stranger things than this.

Maybe this slow dissolution of the line between what’s real and what’s imagined is exactly what a failing mind feels like.

But these flashes cut through me like memory, and they always have, like scars I carry from wounds I haven’t received yet. Or have I?

Stop. Stop thinking. Helplessness seeps into me like venom.

Blair glances over at me between drills, making sure I’m still here, still whole. How many times has he looked at me exactly like this? How many times will he?

And underneath it all: What if this is the last time?

What would it mean if all of this has happened before?

It means… it means somewhere ahead lies the end; somewhere ahead lies a darkness that will rip apart everything, and if this deja vu, this looping, is showing me however we got there, to darkness and falling, then?—

The dread in my stomach doubles, triples, fills me up completely.

If I’m sliding along tracks already carved into time, and if this moment has already been lived and I’m following some script, then every choice ahead is already made. Every word is already spoken.

Every ending is already written.

Last time, that ending was me waking up in a Vancouver hospital with a year cut out of my mind. I woke in agony with a hole in my soul, a vacant space where Blair used to be.

I squeeze my eyes shut and count: four seconds in, hold for four, six out. It doesn’t help. I try to peer through the next drill, the next whistle, the next smile from Blair, but the future stays murky.

All I have is this slow unraveling.

Fragments surface and sink: Blair’s voice screaming my name, the taste of copper, cold water rushing in.

The guys run another drill. I know, I know what will happen: Hawks will cut left, Hollow will miss the pass but recover, Blair will correct his stance with that subtle shift that means he’s compensating for someone else’s mistake.

And it happens, because I am…

No, Torey, time doesn’t work like that. Events line up, one after another. Nobody gets to skate backward through a game.

Time feels like water circling a drain, and Blair is the center and the circumference of everything that matters. The way he adjusts his grip, the exact angle of his smile; these details burn themselves into me twice, once as they happen, once as echo. But an echo of what? When?

God, which would be worse? That I’m losing my mind, or that I’m not? A concussion would be so much simpler.

What am I supposed to do? Do I fight against this by doing what feels most out of character, or keep clinging to my instincts?

What if fighting destiny is what creates it?

What if every choice I make is the exact choice that leads me to where I don’t want to go?

Am I already taking all the wrong steps by questioning them?

But would that even matter? Would the world re-route around me, nudge things back onto their predestined track no matter what I do?

How do I save us from an ending I can only glimpse in shattered glass and broken screams?

Blair circles the center line. He’s nodding at Hayes. He’s looking at me. I smile at him, and he smiles back. He’s whole and here and alive , and I love him with the devotion of tides that always return no matter how far they’re dragged into the deep.

Every version of me orbits this same truth: he is the fixed point in my universe.

No matter how many times reality resets, how many times memory betrays me, he is the center of my soul.

There’s no logic to it; all the rules can blur, timelines fracture and fold, but nothing touches the core of what Blair means to me.

If love alone could rewrite fate, I’d already have dragged us clear of every nightmare.

I’d give anything—everything—if it meant protecting him. Even when my mind unspools, even when nothing is certain, loving Blair is the single thread I refuse to let go.

If there’s any choice left in me, I’ll use it for him.