Behind the Ice Wall

Chapter 7 — Under Evaluation

SKY’S POV

The meeting was set for nine in the morning, which told me something before anyone said a word. Nobody scheduled good news for nine in the morning. Good news could wait until after lunch.

I sat outside the conference room for six minutes before they called me in. Six minutes is a long time to sit in a hallway with nothing to look at but a framed photo of last year’s home opener. I’d made two saves in that photo. I remembered both of them better than I remembered most of my own life outside hockey.

Reyes met me at the door. He didn’t smile, but he didn’t look like a man walking me into an execution either. Somewhere in between.

“Just answer straight,” he said, low enough that only I heard it. “Don’t perform for them.”

Inside, three people sat on the other side of a long table. Reyes took the fourth chair, on my side, which I noticed and was grateful for without saying so.

Marcus Blackwood sat in the middle, reading glasses pushed up on his head like he hadn’t decided yet whether he needed them. Damian sat beside him, hands folded, already watching me the way he’d watched me at the rink two days before.

“Sky. Thanks for coming in.” Marcus’s voice had the practiced warmth of a man who used it in every meeting, good news or bad. “This isn’t a disciplinary conversation. We just want to check in on where things stand.”

“Things stand fine,” I said.

“Define fine,” Damian said it lightly, like he was asking about the weather.

“I’m doing the sessions. I’m playing. We won the last two.”

“You did.” Marcus nodded, slow. “Your numbers are actually up since the incident. Save percentage. Rebound control. On paper, you look better than you did in March.”

I waited for the rest of it, because there was always a rest of it with sentences that started like that.

“But we’re not just looking at paper,” he said. “We’re looking at risk. A goaltender who freezes once in front of forty thousand people and a national broadcast — that’s not something we can treat as a one-time event. Not with the playoffs six weeks out.”

“It was one game.”

“It was one incident we couldn’t ignore,” Damian said.

I looked at him. He didn’t blink, didn’t look away, just let the sentence sit there between us like he’d meant exactly that.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

“It means we don’t know what we don’t know.” He leaned back. “You’ve been guarded about all of this for six years, Sky. That’s not an insult — it’s worked for you.

But it also means none of us actually know how close you were to breaking before that night. Which makes it hard to trust that it won’t happen again.”

My hands wanted to do something under the table. I inhaled slowly. Four in. Hold. Four out. Nobody at the table noticed. I ran the count instead of my pulse, and it worked, mostly. My voice came out level.

“I understand the concern,” I said. “I can’t promise nothing ever happens again. Nobody can promise that. What I can tell you is I’m doing the work.”

“We appreciate that,” Marcus said, in the tone people use when they’ve already decided the meeting is over regardless of what gets said in it. “We’re not making any decisions today. We just wanted eyes on this directly instead of secondhand.”

“Understood.”

“One more thing.” Damian again, unhurried. “The playoffs are a different animal than the regular season. Bigger crowds. Bigger stakes. If something happens in April that happened in March, there won’t be time to manage it quietly. I want you thinking about that.”

“I think about it every night,” I said, before I could decide whether I wanted to say it out loud.

Nobody answered that. Marcus glanced at his folder like there was something in it worth reading, and Damian’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile, and Reyes shifted in his chair beside me without saying anything either.

“That’ll be all for now,” Marcus said. “Thank you for your time, Sky.”

I stood, nodded once, and left before anyone could add anything else to a conversation that already felt heavier than it had going in.

***

Reyes caught up to me in the parking garage. I heard his shoes on the concrete before I heard him say my name.

“They do this every year,” he said. “Check-ins. Reviews. It’s not always about you.”

“Felt like it was about me.”

“It was about you.” He stopped a few feet off, hands in his jacket pockets, looking older in the garage light than he did on the bench. “I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t. Damian’s been building a file since the night it happened. I’ve seen it. It’s thick.”

“A file on what?”

“On whether you’re still an asset or a liability. Cold as that sounds.” He shook his head slightly. “That’s how they think up there. Everything’s a column. You’re either adding to it or subtracting from it.”

“And which one am I right now?”

He didn’t answer that directly, which was its own kind of answer.

“You’re better than you were a month ago,” he said instead. “I can see it even if they can’t. But you know how this league works. Nobody up there cares about better. They care about certain.”

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much to say to that, because he wasn’t wrong, and both of us knew it.

Reyes clapped a hand on my shoulder once, brief, the way he did with guys after a hard loss when there wasn’t anything left worth saying.

“Just prove them wrong,” he said. “That’s all you can do.”

He walked off toward his car before I could answer, which was maybe the point, since I didn’t have an answer that was worth giving him.

I stood there a minute longer in the cold garage air.

Six weeks until the playoffs.

Six weeks to convince them the Ice Wall wasn’t broken.

Six weeks before someone decided I wasn’t worth protecting anymore.