Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 51 - Chapitre 60

Days moved quickly after that.Kai’s hand improved steadily I could see it in the way he carried himself, the gradual return of ease to his movements. The plaster came off. The careful, guarded way he’d been holding his arm began to loosen. I still felt the guilt sitting somewhere low in my chest when I thought about how it had happened, but I’d become skilled at not thinking about it. I helped him when it was necessary and pretended, at all other times, that he existed in a separate dimension entirely.It worked well enough.And then one morning he walked into practice like nothing had ever happened, strong, present, unhurried and his friends descended on him immediately. Hands on his shoulders, voices overlapping, everyone wanting to know if he was back properly, if the hand had healed, if he was ready.He nodded, calm and easy in the attention the way he always was.I exhaled quietly.Here we go.Coach called the session to order, glanced at Kai, and said: “Oh before we begin. I

I brought him back to the dorm room.He was Noah’s best friend. He had come all this way, showed up without being asked, and caught me before I hit the ice. The least I could do was give him somewhere to sit. I opened the door and he settled on the edge of the bed and looked at me with the particular expression of someone who has decided to say something carefully.“Noah.” His voice was quiet. “Can you actually manage with him? Because what I just watched wasn't just a training disagreement. He pushed you.”I sat down and exhaled. “We’re co-captains. I didn’t agree with the way he was running things the way he was treating the weaker players so I pulled some of them aside to work with them properly. He took it as a challenge. Called it a match.” I shook my head. “We’re supposed to be one team.”Liam stared at the floor for a moment. Then: “God, that guy. I wish he’d come here so I could finish what I started.”“Liam. No.” I looked at him firmly. “You helped me and I’m grateful, ge

By seven o’clock I was already on the ice.Liam had promised to help had said it with the easy certainty he always had and then sent a message an hour before to say he’d been caught up with something at the Eagles. I’d read it, put my phone away, and decided not to feel anything about it. I had enough to manage without adding disappointment to the list.I sat in the quiet of the arena and looked at the empty rink and thought, maybe they won’t come. Maybe the locker room had settled it for them the cleaning, the silence, the one voice that had said what the rest were thinking. Maybe trust, once doubted, was too much work to rebuild on a freezingThe doors opened.They filed in one by one, then in pairs, then all at once helmets in hand, expressions carefully neutral, the way people look when they’ve made a decision they’re not yet ready to fully commit to out loud. I felt something loosen in my chest. I put on a smile and kept it there.“You came,” I said.One of them nodded. Then:

Kai didn’t come back to the room that night.I didn’t spend long thinking about why. I stretched out on my bed in the quiet and let the silence settle around me like something earned no tension in the air, no waiting for the next thing to go wrong, just the particular peace of a room that belongs entirely to you. My team had beaten his. The coach had seen it. And now I had the whole night to rest without anyone disturbing a single second of it.I was almost asleep when my phone lit up.Good luck darling on your upcoming game Maya, with three small hearts trailing after it.I smiled before I could help it. She was so effortlessly kind and warm in a way that required no occasion, no reason. I lay there for a moment wondering, not for the first time, how two people raised in the same orbit could land so far apart. Maya and Kai have the same blood, the same mother, and yet the distance between who they were felt like something that couldn’t be explained by circumstance alone.I sent bac

“Kai.” I kept my voice low and firm. “I need to go back to my own bed. I’m just as cold as you are.”He made a sound something between a sigh and a murmur and his grip on my hand tightened instead of loosening.“I feel like I’m with my mother,” he said. Quiet. Undefended. The words coming from somewhere too deep to be manufactured. “It’s been so long since she treated me like her son.”I went still.The words landed somewhere I hadn’t prepared for. I looked at his face eyes closed, expression open in the way sleep and alcohol strip everything back to what’s actually there and felt something shift in my chest that I didn’t have a clean name for. Not pity exactly. Something closer to recognition.I also didn’t have a mother. Not in the way that counted. Not in the way that leaves you whole.I understood, without wanting to, exactly what he meant.“Kai.” Softer this time. “Let go of my hand. Just for a minute. I’m going to get you a dry shirt and I’ll come straight back.”He opened his e