Behind the Ice Wall

Chapter 4 — Second Session

SKY’S POV

I walked into her office on Thursday with a plan.

Say nothing today. Sit through it. Go home.

That lasted about six minutes.

Amira didn’t push straight at it. She never did, I was starting to notice, and that was somehow worse than if she had. She asked about my morning. About a paperback she’d seen me look at in the lobby, one I hadn’t even realized I’d stared at long enough for her to catch. Small stuff, easy stuff, until somehow, without me noticing the turn, we were talking about the championship game from three years back. The one everybody still brought up in interviews. The one I never talked about.

“You went to double overtime,” she said, like she was talking about the weather. “Six shots in the last period alone. What’s that like, standing in the crease with that much on the line?”

“It’s the job.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I shifted in the chair. The leather creaked under me. “That’s what standing in a crease is like every night. You get used to it.”

“Do you?” She didn’t blink. “Because I’ve read enough about goaltending to know it’s the loneliest job in team sports. Everybody else out there has somebody next to them. You’ve got a net at your back and forty thousand people deciding, shot by shot, whether you’re a hero or a joke.”

I thought about standing alone in that crease during the third overtime. Ice slick under my skates. My own pulse the loudest thing in the building. Nobody — not my coach, not my teammates, not one person in that whole arena — able to help me in the two seconds before a shot decided the whole season. My hands had found the arms of the chair without me telling them to. I only noticed after, the way you notice a bruise a couple days after you got hit.

“It’s quiet,” I said, before I decided to say it. “In the crease. Everybody thinks it’s loud because of the crowd. But right before a shot, it goes dead quiet. Like being underwater.”

She didn’t write any of it down. Just nodded, slow, giving the words room to land instead of jumping in.

“That sounds lonely.”

“It’s just the job.”

“You keep saying that,” she said, gentle about it, “like the job and the loneliness are the same thing. They’re not, Sky. One’s what you do. The other’s what it’s cost you.”

I didn’t answer right away. My pulse was doing something strange, fast and uneven — not panic exactly, but close enough to its shadow that I had to work at keeping my breathing even, counting the same way I’d counted in that hallway after a bad night.

“Nobody’s ever put it that way,” I said, low, mostly to myself.

“Put what way?”

“Split it apart. The job. And everything else.” I looked past her shoulder, out the window, at nothing in particular. “I always figured they were the same thing. That if I hated being alone in there, it meant I couldn’t handle the job.”

“They’re not the same thing,” she said again. “You can love being a goalie and still hate what it costs you. Both can be true at once.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. It was easier when everything about me came down to one story — disciplined, cold, built for this — because that meant there was nothing underneath worth looking for. What she’d just said cracked that story clean in half, and I didn’t know what to do with the two pieces.

She glanced at the clock on the wall behind me. Not obviously. Just a flick of her eyes, there and gone, but I caught it.

“You’ve got somewhere to be,” I said.

“I always have somewhere to be. That’s not the same as wanting to cut this short.” She held my gaze. “Playoffs are three weeks away. I know the organization is watching closely. I’m telling you that so you know the pressure’s real, not so you’ll perform for me in here. There’s a difference.”

I hadn’t known that. Hearing it sat wrong, low in my stomach, a version of the crease-quiet showing up somewhere it didn’t belong.

“They’re watching this too,” I said. “Not just the games.”

“Everything that touches the brand gets watched. You’re the brand.” She said it plainly, no apology in it. “That’s not fair. It’s just true. I’d rather you hear it from me than find out some other way.”

The rest of the session went differently from the last one. I didn’t say much more, but the quiet between us stopped feeling like a standoff. It felt more like something else. Closer to rest, maybe, the kind I hadn’t let myself have anywhere in longer than I could remember. When the hour ended, she closed her notepad the way she always did, and I stood up, pulling my jacket back on, ready for the same relief I usually felt walking out that door.

It didn’t come the same way this time.

I got to the door. Stopped.

I didn’t turn around. I wasn’t sure I could have without giving away more than I wanted to.

“One more question,” I said.

I heard her set the notepad back down behind me.

“Okay,” she said. No surprise in it. Like she’d been waiting for exactly this.

I sat back down.

Neither of us said anything for a second. I looked at my own hands, turning the question over before I let it out.

“Do you think it ever goes away?” I asked. “The quiet. Or does it just get easier to sit inside it?”

She thought about that the way she thought about everything, like my words carried the same weight as a diagnosis.

“I think you learn to bring something into it with you,” she said. “So it’s not empty anymore. That’s different from it going away.”

“That’s a therapist answer.”

“It is a therapist answer.” Something crossed her face, quick, there and gone. “Doesn’t make it less true.”

Neither of us said anything else for a while.

Then her phone buzzed on the desk, loud in the quiet, and she glanced down at it without picking it up.

“That’s my next appointment,” she said, standing. “Same time next week?”

“Yeah.” I stood too, already halfway to the door before I answered. “Thursday.”

“Sky.”

I stopped, hand on the frame.

“You did good today,” she said. “Just so you know. And for what it’s worth — I don’t answer to Damian on this. I answer to you getting better.”

I didn’t have anything to say back to that. I just nodded and walked out before I tried.