Semua Bab Ice & Ivy - A Hockey Romance: Bab 21 - Bab 25

POV: Americus BentleyI have seen my father deliver bad news before.Not often. He protects me from the professional parts of his life the way parents do when they think their kid is still young enough to be protected from things.But I have seen it.There is a specific quality to his voice when the news is not good. Not cold. Never cold. Just very, very precise. Like he is choosing every word for its accuracy rather than its comfort, because he has learned that comfort that is not built on truth does not actually help anyone.He is using that voice now.I sit in the chair across from his desk and watch Silver sit on the examination table and answer his questions.She answers every single one of them with the composure of someone who has been preparing for this conversation without knowing she was preparing for it. Range of motion. Pain levels. Stability. Grinding or catching in the joint.Her voice does not waver once.Her hands are flat on her thighs.Her face is doing that thing it

POV: Eli HayesI should have gone straight back to the house.Practice ran long. Coach Tillman kept the defensemen on the ice an extra forty minutes working transition drills, the kind of repetitive, grinding session that leaves your legs feeling like wet concrete. My shoulder aches the way it always does after heavy contact work, the deep specific ache that lives in the joint where the labrum repair sits.The injury that almost ended everything before Yale.The injury nobody here knows about because I came to Yale to play hockey, not to be someone's cautionary tale.I have my bag over one shoulder and my helmet in my hand and I am heading back toward the athletic complex exit when I see her through the window.Silver Preston, leaving Sterling Memorial Library into the middle of what has gone from a light snowfall to something significantly more serious in the last hour.She has her head down against the wind, hands shoved into her coat pockets, moving across the courtyard with the par

POV: Silver Preston The game's pace is immediate and relentless.Bodies into the boards. The puck moving faster than my eyes want to track, that black disk ricocheting between sticks and off the glass with sounds that carry all the way to the upper sections.Yale dominates possession in the opening minutes but the other team, Cornell, pushes back hard along the boards and through the neutral zone with the defensive discipline of a program that has been doing this for a long time.I watch Eli.I tell myself I am just tracking the game, getting familiar with hockey as a sport I have never paid serious attention to before.This is not entirely true.In figure skating, edge work is everything. The angle of the blade against the ice, the precision of the turn, the distribution of weight through a curve. I have spent my entire life developing the ability to read ice and read bodies on ice, to see what the edge is doing and understand what the skater is asking of it.Watching Eli Hayes play