"I need to call someone." The words came out before the decision was fully formed. "Can I—can I have a moment?"
Hamilton nodded, ushering her staff out of the room with practiced discretion. The door clicked shut behind them, leaving Camille alone with her pain and her fear and the phone someone had retrieved from her locker.
Her thumb hovered over Lou's name in her contacts.
Three days of silence. Three days of Lou treating her like a stranger. Three days of pretending that what they'd built meant nothing, that the woman she loved hadn't walked away from her in a parking lot.
But Camille needed her. Needed Lou's steady presence, her calm certainty, her ability to make chaos feel manageable. The thought of going to the hospital alone, of waiting for scan results in a sterile room without anyone to hold her hand, was unbearable.
She almost pressed call.
But then she imagined what would happen if Lou came. The questions. The looks. The inevitable speculation from teammates and staff about why Lou Calder had dropped everything to accompany Camille Laurent-Dubois to a medical appointment. The rumor mill would spin into overdrive, and Mara's warning would prove prescient.
Distraction. That's what Lou had called them. A liability.
Camille set the phone down.
She would do this alone. Had done everything alone for years, really—the loneliness of public life, the isolation of constantly performing a version of herself that wasn't quite real. She'd survived that. She could survive this.
Even if it felt like another piece of her heart breaking.
The door opened, and Dr. Hamilton returned with a wheelchair and a sympathetic expression.
"MRI suite is ready for you. Astoria’s people arranged transport—you'll be at Phoenix Ridge Hospital in twenty minutes."
"Thank you." Camille's voice came out steadier than she expected. "Any word from the game?"
“We are up by one with eight minutes left." Hamilton helped her into the wheelchair, careful with her injured leg. "Your teammates are playing hard. Playing for you."
The words should have been comforting. Instead, they twisted in Camille's gut like a knife. Her teammates were out there fighting, and she was being wheeled away like damaged goods. Lou was still on the ice right now, defending leads and sacrificing her body, while Camille sat useless in a wheelchair waiting to find out if her season was over.
The transport to the hospital was a blur of fluorescent lights and the particular smell of medical facilities everywhere. The ambulance driver tried to make conversation, something about the game and how well she'd been playing, but the words bounced off Camille like stones off ice. Her knee throbbed with every heartbeat, a relentless drumming that made it impossible to think about anything else.
Phoenix Ridge Hospital’s emergency entrance was all glass and chrome, painfully bright. The wheelchair felt clinical, impersonal, a vehicle for someone who couldn'tfunction on her own. Staff in scrubs moved past with practiced efficiency, barely glancing at her face. To them, she was just another injury, another chart, another body to process through the system.
They wheeled her into the MRI suite, explained the procedure, loaded her into the machine that would tell her fate.
Forty-five minutes of lying perfectly still while magnets hummed around her, the machine clicking and clanking in patterns that sounded almost like morse code—except no one was sending messages, no one was listening. Forty-five minutes of staring at the curved ceiling of the scanner, the plastic surface inches from her face, close enough to trigger something claustrophobic that Camille had never known she possessed. The headphones they'd given her piped in classical music, something bland and orchestral that did nothing to mask the industrial sounds of the machine examining her from the inside out.
She tried counting her breaths. Tried thinking about technique, about skating drills, about anything other than the question pounding through her skull in time with her heartbeat: how bad is it, how bad is it, how bad is it.
Forty-five minutes of trying not to think about everything that hung in the balance.
Her career. Her team. Her relationship with Lou—whatever was left of it.
By the time they pulled her out of the machine, Camille was exhausted in ways that went beyond physical. The adrenaline had faded, leaving behind a dull ache that encompassed her entire body. Her knee throbbed with every heartbeat, a constant reminder of how quickly everything could change.
"Results will take a few hours," the technician said,helping her back into the wheelchair. "Dr. Hamilton will call you as soon as they're ready."
Hours. She had hours of waiting ahead of her, alone in a hospital room with nothing but her thoughts and her fears.
They moved her to a private room to wait—a small kindness arranged by the team, she assumed. The bed was narrow and uncomfortable, the thin mattress doing nothing to cushion her aching body. The lights buzzed overhead with that particular fluorescent hum that seemed designed to make everything feel more clinical, more sterile, more alone. A monitor somewhere down the hall beeped in steady intervals, marking time in a way that made every minute stretch into an hour.
The window looked out onto the parking lot—rows of cars baking in the Phoenix Ridge sun, their metal surfaces throwing back white-hot glare. Not a view, exactly. Just a reminder that the world continued on without her, that people were driving to dinner and picking up groceries and living their normal lives while she lay here waiting to find out if her season was over.
The silence pressed against her ears like physical weight. Camille pulled out her phone and stared at the screen.
No messages from Lou.
