All Chapters of THE ICE WE BREAK :Fake dating the ice king : Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

Leo POVThe strange thing about achieving a dream was that the closer it came to becoming reality, the less it resembled the version you carried in your imagination for years, because growing up I always pictured the road to professional hockey as a straight line built from excitement and validation and the satisfaction of knowing every sacrifice had been worth it, yet as the final NHL rankings approached and scouts and executives and analysts continued dissecting every aspect of my future, I found myself experiencing something far more complicated than simple anticipation, because success had arrived at the exact moment my personal life felt more unstable than ever before.The rankings were scheduled for release on a Thursday morning, and despite telling myself repeatedly that they were only projections and not guarantees, I spent most of the previous night staring at the ceiling while thoughts refused to settle, replaying every game and every mistake and eve

Maya POVFor a long time my future had felt tied to other people’s stories, first through the documentary project that unexpectedly placed me at the center of Northridge’s most public narrative and later through the controversy that transformed my work into a target for criticism from strangers who seemed more interested in creating villains than understanding reality, and although I never abandoned my own ambitions during that period, there were moments when it became difficult to separate what I wanted from everything happening around me, making it easy to forget that long before Leo and the championship run and the investigations and scandals entered my life, I had dreams that belonged entirely to me.The shift began quietly in the weeks following Cassandra’s report as public conversations moved away from accusations and toward the actual content of the documentary itself, because once the noise surrounding the fake-dating scandal started fading, people fin

Maya POVThe morning my documentary was released did not arrive with the dramatic certainty I had imagined during countless late nights spent editing footage and rewriting narration, because after everything that had happened throughout the past year, including the championship season and the fake-dating scandal and the investigations that revealed truths buried for decades, I had learned that success rarely announced itself with perfect confidence, instead arriving quietly while carrying equal measures of excitement and fear, leaving me standing outside the small independent theater hosting the premiere with my accreditation badge hanging around my neck and my heart beating fast enough to make every passing second feel longer than the last.The audience began arriving almost an hour before the screening, filling the lobby with conversations that blended hockey fans and documentary enthusiasts and members of the university community with journalists and distri

Leo POVThe week leading up to the NHL Draft felt less like the final step toward a lifelong dream and more like walking through a hallway where every door opened into another evaluation, because from the moment I arrived at the league’s draft venue I stopped being viewed simply as a hockey player and instead became a prospect whose future could be analyzed through interviews and personality assessments and medical examinations and psychological evaluations, with every organization searching for reassurance that the version of me they had watched on the ice would remain dependable once millions of dollars and professional expectations entered the equation.The hotel reserved for draft prospects barely resembled a place where young athletes were supposed to rest because every lobby and conference room had been transformed into temporary meeting spaces occupied by scouts and executives and agents whose conversations never truly stopped, creating an atmosphere wh

Maya POVThe morning I packed the last of my belongings from the small apartment that had been my home throughout my years at Northridge arrived with an unexpected sense of calm rather than sadness, because somewhere between the documentary’s success and Leo’s selection in the first round of the NHL Draft I had quietly accepted that growing up often meant allowing places you loved to become memories instead of permanent destinations, and although every room carried echoes of sleepless editing sessions and impossible deadlines and conversations that changed the course of my life, I no longer felt the need to hold on to those walls as proof that those moments had happened.The apartment looked strangely unfamiliar once the shelves had been emptied and the camera equipment packed into carefully labeled cases, leaving behind bare spaces where photographs and notebooks and storyboards had once covered every available surface, and as I walked slowly from one room to