Ro was in the penalty box. He was on his feet, his palms pressed flat against the glass, his mouth moving. I couldn't hear what he was saying. Everything had gone thick and slow, my heartbeat loud in my ears, drowning out the rest of it.
The trainers were coming, running across the ice, their feet slipping, towels in their hands. Someone was kneeling beside me, asking questions I couldn't focus on long enough to answer.
I looked back at Ro.
He was trapped behind that glass, thirty feet away and completely helpless. He'd fought for me and now he couldn't get to me, couldn't do anything but watch as the blood spread across the white ice in a pattern that kept growing.
Then Bouchard was there.
He dropped to his knees beside me, still in full gear, his face tight in a way I'd never seen before. He put his hand on my shoulder and said something, words that took too long to reach me, and when they finally arrived, they were simple.
"Stay with me, Piper. Eyes on me."
I tried to focus on his face. The lines around his eyes. The gray at his temples. He was kneeling on the ice holding me together while the trainers worked on my hand.
"JL." My voice sounded strange, like it was coming from somewhere else.
"I'm here." His grip on my shoulder tightened. "You're gonna be fine. Just keep looking at me."
Behind him, through the glass, Ro was still standing with his palms pressed flat against the barrier. His mouth had stopped moving. He was just watching now, his face stripped of everything except something raw and open that he wasn't bothering to hide.
I thought about Joel. About the beach house and the fire burning down to embers and his hand in mine while the tide came in. About the way he'd saidI want more than this.
I wouldn’t get to tell him this had happened. He'd find out from a notification on his phone, some sports alert with my name in it, and he wouldn't be able to call because we didn't do that, we texted, we stayed careful, we kept ourselves small enough to hide.
"Red." Bouchard's voice cut through. "Stay with me."
I tried. I really tried.
The trainers were wrapping something around my hand. The pressure was enormous, a tightness that radiated up through my wrist and into my forearm, but the pain had started to drift, replaced by a cold that crept from my fingers toward my elbow. Someone was calling for a stretcher. Someone else was clearing people back, making space.
Bouchard stayed where he was, his hand on my shoulder.
"You're okay," he said. "You hear me? You're okay."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to nod, to say something, to be the guy who got up and kept skating. That was what I did. That was who I was.
But the cold kept spreading, and the edges of my vision were going soft, and Bouchard's face above me was starting to blur at the edges no matter how hard I tried to hold on to it.
Then I was looking at the ceiling of the arena, the lights too bright, the noise fading into something that sounded almost like silence.
Then there was nothing left to hold on to.
Kevin was the fourth one who'd pulled a knife.
I'd stopped being surprised by this somewhere around the second, a guy named Travis who'd waved a switchblade like he'd learned knife fighting from movies. They always went for knives, my mother's boyfriends. Guns required permits and background checks, and men like Kevin couldn't pass either. But knives were easy. Knives made them feel dangerous.
Kevin was not dangerous.
He was six-one, maybe two-twenty, with the soft middle of someone who'd been strong once and let it go. He had a temper and a gambling problem and a tendency to use my mother as a credit line, and when I'd shown up at her apartment to find a bruise blooming across her cheekbone, he'd grabbed the kitchen knife like it meant something.
It didn't.
"You should leave," he said. The knife shook in his hand. "This is between me and Diane."
I closed the door behind me. "No, it isn't."
My mother was on the couch, crying in that theatrical way she had, the one designed to make everyone feel sorry for her. She'd called me forty minutes ago, sobbing about how Kevin had changed, how she was scared, how she didn't know what to do. The same call she'd made about Danny. About Travis. About the one before Travis, whose name I'd already forgotten.
