บททั้งหมดของ Behind the Ice Wall : บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 90

SKY’S POV I told Amira everything on a Tuesday night, the two of us on my couch, the surveillance file still open on my laptop across the room, though neither of us had looked at it in hours. I hadn’t planned to tell her all of it that night. But the memories had been surfacing for weeks by then, unbidden, insistent, and sitting beside her, safe for a few hours from everything else threatening us, finally loosened whatever had kept the full story locked away for over a decade. “I need to tell you something,” I said. “About my mother. About the panic attack. The real version, not the one everyone’s always believed.” She turned toward me fully, giving me her complete attention the way she always did, the particular quality of listening that had made those early therapy sessions feel different from anything I’d experienced before. “Take whatever time you need,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.” • I told her about the driveway, about my father’s philosophy, about the specific se

SKY’S POV She continued the story two nights later, unprompted, the two of us sitting on my balcony with the city lights spread out below us, the open air making the conversation feel less confined than it might have inside. “I keep thinking about what you asked me,” she said. “About Daniel’s career, and how it actually ended. I don’t think I gave you the full picture. Just the outline.” “You don’t have to fill in every detail if it’s too much.” “I want to, actually. I think I’ve spent so long summarizing that story to myself that I’ve forgotten how much it actually cost, watching it happen in real time.” • She told me about the year after the tournament that broke him, the slow unraveling that followed rather than any single dramatic ending. “Coaches kept pushing,” she said. “Told him he needed to toughen up, told him other athletes managed pressure without falling apart the way he had. My father agreed with all of it. Reinforced it, actually, every time Daniel came home from

SKY’S POV “There’s one more thing,” Amira said, almost a week later, the two of us back on my balcony, something different in her posture that told me before she spoke that this conversation would cost her more than the previous ones combined. “The case. The one I’ve mentioned before, in passing, without ever actually telling you what happened.” “You don’t have to tell me if it’s still too raw.” “I want to. Especially now, given everything else we’ve already shared.” She wrapped her hands around her mug, steadying herself. “You deserve to understand exactly what shaped my caution, before either of us started this. Why I fought so hard against what was developing between us, even after I knew I’d already lost that particular fight.” • “Several years ago,” she began, “before I joined your organization, I worked with a different athlete. Extremely talented. Football, not hockey, but the pressures translate similarly across most elite sports. He was young, early in a promising caree

SKY’S POV “I need to tell you something else,” Amira said, a few nights after the conversation about her old case, the two of us sitting together on my balcony again, the city quiet below us in a way that felt, briefly, unconnected to everything threatening us. “About why I was so afraid of this. Of us. From the very beginning.” “I thought we’d covered that. The old case, the risk to your career.” “That’s part of it. There’s a piece underneath it I haven’t said out loud yet, not even to myself in quite these words.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, small and unguarded in the posture. “I was afraid of becoming attached to you specifically, Sky. Not because I didn’t care. Because I cared too much, too fast, in a way that terrified me more than any professional risk ever could.” • “What do you mean?” “You reminded me of Daniel,” she said. “Not in obvious ways. In the specific shape of how you carried your pain, how carefully you’d learned to hide it, how much effort went int

SKY’S POV I spent the days after June’s call doing something I hadn’t done in months — actually sitting down and reviewing everything that had happened since my first session with Amira, laying it out chronologically instead of just reacting to each new development as it arrived. I used a notebook instead of my laptop, the physical act of writing it out by hand making the pattern feel more real than it did scattered across digital files. Session one. The therapy mandate. Management’s initial interest in my mental health, framed at the time as simple concern for my wellbeing. I kept writing. Damian’s early questions during those first months, questions that had felt, at the time, like ordinary organizational oversight. Marcus’s occasional check-ins about my contract status, always framed as routine business, never once felt urgent until I actually looked at the dates lined up together now. • The photographs came next in my timeline. The parking lot flash. The cinema sighting. The