Behind the Ice Wall

Chapter 2 — First Session

SKY’S POV

The office wasn’t what I expected.

No couch. No posters about believing in yourself. Just two chairs by a window and a woman standing up when I walked in, holding her hand out like she was meeting a coworker, not a problem the team had handed her.

“Sky. I’m Amira Frank.” Her handshake was quick and steady. “Sit wherever you want.”

I picked the chair farthest from her desk. I’d already decided how this was going to go on the drive over. Say as little as possible. Let the hour run out. Go home.

My phone buzzed once against my thigh before I sat. I checked it without meaning to — a habit I couldn’t turn off, not after the week I’d had.

Reyes: Need a read on tomorrow. Lineup’s due to the front office by 6.

I put the phone face-down on my knee. Six hours. That’s how long I had before this session either fixed something or cost me a spot in net.

For the first ten minutes, that’s exactly what I’d planned happened — the saying-nothing part, at least.

I knew this game. I’d played it before, as a kid, in a room that smelled like my mother’s worry and money we didn’t have. The therapist waits you out. Asks question after question until staying quiet gets harder than just talking.

Amira didn’t do that.

She sat across from me with a notepad in her lap that she never wrote on. She just watched me, the same way you’d watch weather coming in. Not like she felt sorry for me. Not like she was studying a broken machine. Just watching.

“You don’t have to talk,” she said, after the quiet had gone on longer than most people could stand. “I have to see you three times a week. I don’t have to make you perform for me.”

“That’s new.”

“Most people find honest quiet more useful than answers they already rehearsed.” She tilted her head a little. “I’m guessing you’ve had plenty of practice with those.”

I didn’t answer that either. In my head, I was back on the ice, watching the winger load his stick, watching my own glove hand stay still half a second too long. I could break that shot down piece by piece — the angle, the timing, the exact moment my body stopped listening to me. What I couldn’t figure out was the second before all that. The second my lungs just quit.

My phone buzzed again on my knee. I didn’t look this time. I felt Amira notice that I didn’t look.

“You’re doing it right now,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Replaying it. Your eyes go somewhere else for a few seconds, then come back.” She glanced, briefly, at the phone. “That’s Reyes, isn’t it?

Checking if you’re playable.”

I went still. “How would you know that?”

“I don’t. I’m guessing.” A small, unbothered shrug. “But you’ve checked your phone twice in ten minutes and both times your jaw did something. That’s not a guess about the content. That’s a guess about the pressure.”

I set the notepad down beside her chair. Except it wasn’t my notepad — she’d set hers down, and I’d been gripping the arm of my own chair hard enough to leave a mark on my palm. I hadn’t noticed that either.

“It’s one game,” I said. “It happens.”

“Does it happen to you? Six years in this league. Last week was the first time anybody’s seen it. And somewhere behind that door right now, the front office is deciding whether you start tomorrow.” Her voice didn’t change register, didn’t get gentler or harder. “That’s nothing, Sky. That’s a clock running while we sit here.”

I didn’t say anything. I crossed my arms, the same way I did against forwards who tried to screen me in front of the net. It had never worked on an actual person before, and it didn’t seem to be working now either. She just waited, easy about it, like she had all day and nowhere better to be — even with the six-hour clock I’d just told her was real.

She let the quiet sit there a while longer. When she finally spoke, there was no triumph in her voice.

“You built the Wall to survive,” she said. “But you’re still the one trapped inside it. And right now the Wall’s the only thing standing between you and tomorrow’s lineup card. That’s a lot of weight for one thing to carry.”

I opened my mouth to argue back. Nothing came out.

It was such a short sentence. Maybe a dozen words, plus the part after it that landed even harder because it was true and I hadn’t said it out loud to anyone — that Reyes’s text on my knee was really just a countdown to whether the last six years still counted for something.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I said, and even I could hear how thin it sounded.

“You’re right. I don’t.” She held my eyes, steady, no pity in it. “That’s usually where a session starts. We’ve got fifty more minutes before your six hours turn into five.”

I almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because it was the first thing anyone had said to me in a week that didn’t sound like a verdict — and because she’d just made the clock mine to spend instead of something running out on me.

“I’ve got a game in two days,” I said, standing up.

“I know. I’ll be there.” She said it plain, no weight to it that I could find, like she was telling me the weather. “Same time Thursday, Sky.”

I nodded once and left before I said something I’d regret.

I didn’t go straight home. I drove to the rink instead, let myself into the empty practice arena, and sat up in the stands in the dark. I used to do this before big games. Just sit and look at the ice until it steadied me. Tonight it didn’t get me all the way there.

I texted Reyes back before I let myself think too hard about it.

I’m good for tomorrow.

Three words. I stared at them a long time before I hit send, the way I used to stare at a shot before I moved.

I pulled up last week’s tape out of habit, hunting for the mechanics of my own mistake the way I always did. I watched the winger load his stick. I watched my glove hand freeze half a second too long, the same half-second I’d rewound a hundred times since it happened.

But under the footage, quieter than my own thoughts, I kept hearing her voice instead.

You built the Wall to survive. But you’re still the one trapped inside it.

I’d walked in braced for a lecture. I walked out feeling something closer to caught out — not embarrassed, not diagnosed, just seen, in a way that bothered me more than any lecture ever could have. I didn’t know what to do with that. I’d spent my whole life making sure nobody got close enough to see anything, and one hour in a chair by a window had undone more of that than I wanted to admit.

I paused the tape. Looked at my own frozen face on the screen — mask off, kneeling in the crease, looking like somebody I didn’t recognize.

I should have been thinking about the shot. Instead, I was thinking about a woman who never once raised her voice, a sentence I couldn’t shake no matter how many times I ran the game back instead, and a lineup card sitting on someone’s desk with my name still, for now, on it.