I carry her down the hall to her bedroom, careful not to bump the walls. She doesn’t wake.
I set her on the mattress, draw the covers up, stand there for a second like an idiot, expecting her to open her eyes, grab my wrist, say stay.
She doesn’t.
I go back to the living room, pour myself a glass of water, drink half, and dump the rest in the sink.
I wipe the rim with a towel, the way her mom always does, and put it back upside down in the rack.
The apartment is silent, except for the hum of the fridge and the endless, low-grade growl of the city outside.
I sit on the floor, back to the couch, phone in hand. I open the sports app out of habit, check the box score. Steelhawks: 2, Thunderbirds: 4.
Not even close.
I scroll the recap. There’s a photo of a substitute, some sub, face bandaged, blood matting his hair.
The caption says he took a puck to the face and stayed in the game, played through the third period like nothing happened.
I recognize him after a second, Rosen, the sub they slotted in when Janssen went down. He won't last the season.
But the look on his face, eyes glazed, teeth bloody, still in the fight, it sticks with me.
I watch the highlight on loop.
The shot, the deflection, the smack of impact.
The blood, and then the moment the kid just gets up, shakes it off, skates to the bench. Like pain is just something that happens to other people.
I close the app. I open the group chat. There’s a meme war raging, but I can’t make myself care.
I set the phone down, watch the screen go dark, and in the reflection I see myself, sitting there with my knees to my chest, shoulders hunched, a stranger in my own life.
I think about Nia, in the next room, sleeping easy because she thinks we’re still us.
I think about the guy in the highlight reel, bleeding but upright. I wonder what it would take to just stop, stop pretending, stop holding it together, stop performing.
But that’s not who I am. I get up, every time.
I stand, stretch, rub the back of my neck until it aches.
Out the window, the city is a smear of light and noise, every street alive with people who probably know exactly who they are.
I catch my reflection again, layered over the skyline like a double exposure.
Everyone says I have it all figured out.
They have no idea.
SIRENS
Steelhawk Center in SoDo has the worst lighting of any rink I’ve ever played in.
It’s not even the usual institutional blue-white that makes the ice look clean and all the faces ghostly.
This shit is green, sickly, and every time you look up it’s like someone flashed a dentist’s lamp straight into your corneas.
Maybe that’s why we always play like we’re hungover, even on the nights when half the team’s actually clean.
