The Ice Between Us

Proximity

He didn't say anything.

That's the part that's been wrecking me for six days. After the phone call, after I said a friend gave it to me twice with my voice cracking, after Daniel walked me out and said "we" about my debt, and I drove home shaking and didn't sleep, I came in the next morning braced for it. Braced for "you were the woman at the gala". Braced for him to use it, the way everyone uses the things they have on you, because that's what having a thing on someone is for.

He used it by not using it.

I walked in and he was on the table and he looked at me and said, "Internal rotation. Let's get the number." Like nothing. Like a man who's decided the ground between you is mined and the only way across is to never mention there's a war. And somehow that's worse than if he'd cornered me, because a man holding your secret over your head is a man you can hate, and a man holding your secret and choosing every single morning not to use it is a man you start to trust, and trust is the one thing I can't afford to give a billionaire I'm lying to.

So we work. Six days. Forty-five minutes, twice a day, and the treatment room has become its own country with its own weather, and the border of it is the frosted door.

The hip is responding faster than it has any right to.

Day one his left internal rotation was 38 degrees, measured supine, hip and knee at ninety, which for a professional athlete is a disaster, that's a number you see in a sedentary sixty-year-old. This morning he hit 61. Twenty-three degrees in nine sessions. I write it in the notebook I keep in my bag, my own notebook, not the facility's system, because the facility's system has Daniel's name on it and I've stopped being sure who reads what.

The adhesion above the old hernia scar is breaking up. I've been working it with sustained myofascial pressure, slow, ischemic, holding ninety seconds until the tissue gives, and the first few days he white-knuckled the table edge through it and pretended he wasn't. Now it releases easier. The fascia's letting go of the wall it's been glued to since he was nineteen, and as it does, the whole anterior chain is reorganizing, the psoas is firing on time again, his hip flexion's gone from a guarded 95 to a clean 118.

"You're going to skate on this in three weeks," I tell him, marking the number. "Not play. Skate. Edges, no contact. But it'll hold."

"The team doctor says six."

"The team doctor's reading a scan. I'm reading your hip." I cap the pen. "They're different documents."

He's quiet for a second. Then: "You talk about my body like it's a person you're negotiating with."

"It is. It's the only honest one in the building."

He laughs, the real one, and I've started doing a thing I hate, which is collecting them. The real laughs. There've been four this week. I know it's four. That's not a thing a healthy person tracks.

Lena finds me in the corridor at the worst possible time, which is to say right after, when I'm still flushed from a session and not braced for an ambush.

She's waiting by the water station with her arms crossed, and she's got Sasha's face, the same bones, but where his go soft when he's not guarding them, hers are built for this, for the confrontation, for the part where she decides what you are.

"You're good at it," Lena says. "I'll give you that. Sixty-one degrees, he told me at lunch like he scored a hat trick. Whatever you're doing, it's working."

"That's the job."

"Is it?" She uncrosses her arms. "Eleanor Quinn. The Brennan case. Three years ago, you signed a therapeutic-use exemption that let a player run a banned corticosteroid through a playoff run, and when it came apart, you took the fall, and Dr Eli Brennan kept his license and is, last I checked, working the Western Conference Finals on a network broadcast." She lets that sit. "I read everything. I read for two days. And here's what I can't make fit. The signature on that form was yours, but the handwriting analysis his lawyer buried showed it wasn't, and you never used it, the report's sealed but it exists, and instead of fighting you went quiet and let them bury you. Why would a woman who didn't do it not fight?"

I don't say anything.

"My brother trusts you," Lena says, and her voice changes, drops the prosecutor. "He's let you put your hands on the one thing in his life that money didn't buy him and can't get back, and I have spent four years being the only person who notices when someone's about to use him, so I'm going to ask you once, plainly, and I'll know if you lie. Are you here for him, or are you here for something else?"

And I think about the salary that matches my debt to the dollar. And Reyes badging in two minutes ahead of me every morning. And Daniel saying we. And I realize I genuinely don't know the answer to her question anymore, because I came here for the money and I keep staying for the laughs I'm counting, and both of those are true and only one of them is allowed.

"I'm here," I say slowly, "because his hip is the most interesting problem I've touched since they took my license, and because I owe a man named Marcus Reyes forty-one thousand dollars that I'll have when I finish, and because I am trying very hard to leave at the end of every session, and I have failed to do that twice." I look at her straight. "That's the truth. All of it. You wanted plain."

Lena studies me for a long moment.

"You didn't fight the case," she says, "because someone you cared about asked you not to. That's the only thing that makes a person eat a lie that size." Her eyes narrow, not unkind, just seeing. "Who asked you to take the fall, Eleanor?"

And the thing is, she's right, and the answer is a name I haven't said out loud in three years, and before I can decide whether to say it, the door to the medical office opens down the hall and Daniel steps out with a tablet under his arm, and the second I see him, the second my whole body relaxes at the sight of the safe one the way it's relaxed at the sight of him since day one, Lena sees it too.

She sees my face go easy at Daniel Cho.

And something shifts in her expression, a small recalibration, a chess player noticing a piece she'd forgotten was on the board.

"Huh," Lena says, very quietly, watching Daniel walk toward us with his calm doctor's smile and his tablet and his way of always being exactly where I need him to be. "How long have you known Dr. Cho?"

"I just met him. Monday. The first day."

"That's funny," Lena says, still watching him, "because he requested you."

I go cold. "What?"

"The confidential brief, the recruiter, the whole search. I pulled the requisition this morning because I pull everything now." She turns to me and her voice is almost gentle, which is how I know it's bad. "It wasn't a committee. It wasn't medical staff. One name signed the request for a specialist three months ago, before the brief ever went out, with your exact qualifications listed. Soft tissue. Hip and groin. Discretion."

Daniel's six feet away now, smiling, lifting a hand in a small wave, holding two coffees.

"He didn't find you, Eleanor," Lena says under her breath. "He named you. In January. Before there was a job."