Lahat ng Kabanata ng Behind the Ice Wall : Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

SKY’S POV Recovery day meant a light skate, twenty minutes of drills, and an hour in the training room getting worked on by guys whose job was to keep our bodies from falling apart before the ones that mattered. I usually liked recovery days. Less pressure, more silence, nothing riding on any particular rep. That morning Petrov kept it simple — angle work, a few reads off the boards, nothing that tested anything I hadn’t already proven a hundred times. Guys drifted off the ice one by one until it was just me and an empty net and the low hum of the building settling into itself. My legs felt loose for the first time in days. The crease felt ordinary again, the way it was supposed to on a morning like this. I sat with Amira that afternoon, same chairs, same window, and she didn’t open with practice or the file request or any of it. She just watched me for a second, the way she always did, reading something before she said a word. “I want to try something different today,” she sai

SKY’S POV By Thursday, three different outlets had run some version of the same story. None of them said her name outright — legal probably wouldn’t let them without more to go on — but each one got a little closer than the last. Sources close to the organization. A member of the medical staff. Someone familiar with the goaltender’s recovery. Everyone in the building knew who they meant. You didn’t need to spell it out when there was only one person it could be. Practice got interrupted twice that week by photographers trying to shoot through the glass from the concourse level. Security escorted them out both times, but the second time, one of them got a shot of me mid-drill before anyone caught him, and it ran online within the hour with a caption asking whether I was “distracted” heading into the stretch run. I wasn’t distracted. I stopped every shot in that drill clean. Didn’t matter. The photo existed now, and the caption existed under it, and that was the version of the tr

SKY’S POV I almost didn’t go back the following Thursday. I sat in the parking lot ten minutes before the session, engine off, telling myself there wasn’t anything left to say after what I’d already said the week before. That the wall had cracked exactly as much as it needed to, and pushing further just handed Damian more material for whatever file he was building. Then I went in anyway, because some part of me had stopped thinking of that hour as a hazard and started thinking of it as the one place all week where I didn’t have to manage anything. “You almost didn’t come,” Amira said, before I’d even sat down. “How’d you know?” “You’re four minutes late. You’ve never been late.” She said it plainly, no judgment in it. “That’s not a criticism. Just an observation.” “I sat outside for a while.” “Deciding whether to walk in.” “Something like that.” She didn’t push past that. She just let it sit there, the way she let most things sit, and eventually I told her about the report

SKY’S POV Somewhere in the last few weeks, therapy had stopped feeling like something scheduled and started feeling like something I looked forward to, which was a sentence I never thought I’d be able to say about anything involving the word therapy. I noticed it Thursday, walking in without the usual weight I used to carry through that door. No bracing. No rehearsed short answers. Just a chair I’d sat in enough times that my body relaxed into it before my head caught up. “You seem lighter today,” Amira said. “Good week. Relatively.” “Relatively.” “Nobody’s asked me about you in three days. That’s a personal record lately.” Her mouth twitched, there and gone. “I’ll take the win where I can get it.” We talked about the standings, about the eight games left, about a rookie defenseman who’d started leaning on me for advice I didn’t feel qualified to give but gave anyway because nobody else was giving it. Somewhere in the middle of a story about that same rookie tripping over

SKY’S POV The team charity event happened every year around this time, some hotel ballroom full of sponsors and season-ticket holders paying too much money for a chance to shake hands with players who’d rather be anywhere else. I usually treated it like another shift — show up, perform, get through it. This year I noticed Amira across the room within about four minutes of walking in. She wasn’t there for me, technically. Staff got invited too, and she stood near the edge of the room in a dress that made her look like someone I didn’t fully recognize, talking to a sponsor with the same calm, professional attention she gave everyone. I watched her longer than I should have before I caught myself doing it and turned back to the conversation I was supposed to be having with a man asking me about my glove hand. I made it through an hour of handshakes and photographs before Marcus found me near the bar, drink in hand, smile fixed in the way that meant business was coming whether I want