جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 60

~~~Declan~~~Practice ran long that day, the kind of session where the coaches kept adding drills until half the guys were bent over their sticks gasping for air by the final whistle. I didn't mind it. Exhaustion had become its own kind of relief lately, the only thing loud enough some days to drown out the noise in my head.We were peeling off our gear in the locker room afterward, sweat-soaked and slow, nobody in much of a hurry to leave the one place that still felt like it made sense to me. Someone had a phone propped up on the bench, scrolling through some hockey recruiting feed, half the guys crowded around casually watching as thet unlaced their skates."Yo, you guys see this," one of the defensemen said, tilting the screen for the others to see. "Some development camp update. Check out this girl they signed a few weeks back."A couple of guys leaned in. I kept unlacing my skates, only half listening, the way you do when a conversation isn't yours yet."Daaamn," someone said,

~~~Declan~~~I booked the flight at two in the morning, sitting on the floor of my apartment with my back against the wall, hands shaking too hard to type my own passport number in correctly the first two times. My father was asleep three floors up. I didn't leave a note. I didn't tell the team, didn't tell my agent, didn't tell a single living soul what I was actually doing except the empty apartment walls that had never once felt like home since the day I arrived in this country.Eighteen months. That had been the plan. Quiet, careful, patient, buying my own way out with my own money so my father never had a reason to touch her life again.But nobody had planned for this. Nobody had told me the cost of staying quiet might be Soraya lying in a hospital bed on the other side of the world with a shattered leg and a headline calling her injury "more complicated than initially reported," and me finding out through a locker room conversation about somebody else's fantasy roster.I didn't

~~~Soraya~~~Declan hadn't let go of my hand since Maya and Caleb left the room, and some stubborn, exhausted part of me hadn't asked him to. We sat there in a silence that wasn't quite comfortable but wasn't quite unbearable either, six weeks of separation still sitting heavy between us even after everything he'd just told me."You should sleep," he said quietly, his thumb brushing slow, absent circles over the back of my hand. "You look exhausted.""I am exhausted." I let my head rest back against the pillow, watching him from under heavy eyelids. "Doesn't mean I want you to leave."Something in his face softened at that, relief and disbelief tangled together, like he hadn't actually expected me to want him to stay after everything.A nurse knocked before either of us could say anything else, pushing a small cart into the room with the same brisk efficiency I'd gotten used to over the past three days. "Ms. Rivera, we need to run a few routine scans before the doctor finalizes your

~~~Declan~~~They made me leave the room. I fought it for exactly as long as it took one of the nurses to say the words."you're in the way, you need to let go." before I finally let go of Soraya's hand and stumbled backward into the hallway, watching through the narrowing gap of the closing door as they wheeled equipment in around her, her face pale and twisted with pain that I couldn't do a single thing to take away.The waiting room down the hall felt like a different planet entirely. Fluorescent lights humming overhead, a television playing something with the volume too low to actually hear, rows of uncomfortable chairs bolted to the floor like someone had designed the entire room specifically to make sure nobody who sat in it ever felt at ease.I sat down and immediately stood back up, unable to stay still, my mind replaying the sound of her voice cracking under the pain over and over until it felt carved into the inside of my skull.I don't know how long I paced before I heard

~~~Soraya~~~I woke up slowly, the world arriving in pieces before it arrived whole. The low hum of the room first, then the dull, distant ache low in my abdomen, then the heavier, more familiar throb in my leg, and finally, underneath all of it, a strange hollowness I couldn't quite place until the memory of the pain came rushing back and settled where it belonged.The pregnancy. The pain. The doctor's face right before everything went dark under anesthesia.I opened my eyes to dim light and Declan's face, closer than I expected, his hand already wrapped around mine like it had never actually left, even though some distant part of me remembered them pulling him out of the room hours ago."Soraya." His voice was rough, exhausted, his eyes red rimmed in a way that told me he hadn't slept at all. "You're awake. How are you feeling?""Empty," I said, before I could think of a gentler word, my voice cracking on the single syllable. "I feel empty."Something in his face crumpled at that,