I press submit.
Watch the loading wheel spin.
Watch the confirmation page populate with a message thanking me for my application and promising a response within forty-eight hours.
Forty-eight hours.
Two days to find out if the rest of my life begins or if this is just another ending dressed in better stationery.
I close the laptop. Stand up. Strip off my compression gear and pull on the navy suit that Jeffrey, patron saint of my sanity, has laid across my armchair. The fabric is cool against my shower-flushed skin, structured and sharp in a way that makes me feel armored rather than dressed. I check my reflection in the mirror on the back of my door.
Dark navy hair, still damp, pushed back from my face. Green eyes that look tired but awake. Jaw set. Shoulders squared. The kind of posture that makes my mother purse her lips and mutter about femininity and the kind that makes my father nod with quiet pride because he knows it is the same posture I adopt before stepping onto the ice.
Ready for battle.
Even if the battle is a three-course dinner with people whose greatest contribution to society is their wine collection.
I head for the door, tugging my cuffs straight.
And somewhere between the mirror and the hallway, between the closing of my laptop and the click of my dress shoes on the marble stairs, a thought crystallizes in my mind with the hard, bright clarity of ice forming on a still pond.
This could be the season I need.
The place. The team. The chance.
Four weeks at an institution that claims to see what every other program has refused to acknowledge. Surrounded by Alphas and Omegas who might understand what it means to fight for space in a world that was not built for you. Competing on ice that is not pre-salted with bias and tradition and the comfortable assumption that some bodies belong here and others do not.
Or it could be the final confirmation that the dream was always impossible.
That my mother was right. That the coaches were right. That the scouts and the teams and the entire fucking infrastructure of professional hockey was right to look at me and see a liability instead of an athlete.
Either way, I will have my answer.
Either way, the uncertainty ends.
And either way, I will walk off that ice knowing I gave it everything. Every drill. Every shift. Every ounce of the stubborn, furious, unbreakable will that has kept me skating since I was seven years old and too small for her own jersey and too fierce for anyone to stop.
This could be the season she needs to prove she either belongs... or is done with this for good.
CHAPTER 2
Collision Course
~SAGE~
Six forty-two in the morning, and my lungs are on fire.
The good kind. The kind that burns clean, searing through the residue of a restless night and replacing it with the sharp clarity that only cardiovascular punishment can deliver. My feet strike the packed earth of the forest trail in a steady rhythm, the impact traveling up through my shins and into the muscles of my thighs, each footfall a metronome keeping time with the pulse hammering behind my ribs.
I check the stopwatch strapped to my left wrist. Pace holding steady at six minutes, forty-three seconds per mile. Not my best. Not my worst. Somewhere in the frustrating middle ground where my body is performing adequately but my mind refuses to shut up long enough to let me push into a higher gear.
The Holloway estate backs onto three hundred acres of mixed forest that my great-grandfather purchased in the 1940s for reasons no one in the family can agree on. My mother claims it was a strategic land investment. My father insists it was because the old man wanted somewhere to drink whiskyand argue with squirrels in peace. Either way, the property now contains roughly twelve miles of groomed running trails that wind through birch stands and hemlock groves and the occasional clearing where deer gather at dawn to stare at joggers with the polite disinterest of creatures who have never questioned their place in the natural order.
I envy the deer. Truly.
Must be pleasant, existing in a body that the world accepts without commentary.
My outfit this morning is peak function over fashion. Running shorts that hit mid-thigh, black with a reflective stripe along the seam. A t-shirt that once belonged to my father, XXL, faded heather gray with HOLLOWAY HOCKEY CAMP 2009 barely legible across the chest in cracked screen print. The shirt is absurd on my frame, billowing around my torso like a parachute, the sleeves drooping past my elbows and the hem grazing the middle of my thighs so that the shorts beneath are practically invisible.
