At the gate, I stay. Watching her walk across the ice I've skated since I was seven years old. She moves the way she moves everywhere, with one hand ready for the boards and her eyes taking the ice in sections. Her breath fogs in the cold air. The Frozen Four banner hangs from the rafters, the one from last year, the one we're playing to replace next weekend. She looks at it, then at the ice beneath her feet, the surface where it will be won or lost.
She reaches center ice, stops, and turns in a slow circle. The red line under her feet. The faceoff dots. The Briarcliff crest at center, the titan's head that I've skated over ten thousand times.
"This is where you stand," she says.
"That's where I stand."
Her gaze lifts to the press box. Third row, left side. Her seat. The seat she's watched from for four years. From down here, it's a dark window high in the stands, small and distant, the view inverted.
"It's far," she says.
"Sixty feet."
"I've written about every game from up there. Every line change. Every power play. I thought I knew this ice."
"You knew the patterns. The geometry. The numbers."
"I didn't know it was this cold."
The building breathes with compressors, ventilation, and the sound of a rink holding its temperature in the middle of the night.
Her eyes come back to mine. The cold sits between us, the same cold that lives in every rink I've ever played in, the cold that holds everything and preserves everything and keeps the surface hard enough to skate on.
"You could see me from here?" she asks.
"Every game. Every practice. Third row left. Laptop open."
"I thought I was invisible up there."
"You were never invisible."
At center ice, she stands with her arms wrapped around herself and her breath fogging and the empty building pressing in from all sides.
I step onto the ice in my shoes, not skates, and the walk to center takes longer without blades. She waits. I stop in front of her, the faceoff dot between us.
"The hearing is in two days," she says.
"I know."
"I'm going to say his name. My old name. Everything I buried."
"I know."
"Before that, I wanted to stand somewhere solid."
The ice stays solid under her boots. The lights hum overhead, the same sound I stopped hearing years ago, the sound that means the surface is ready and the game is about to begin.
I stand on center ice with her in an empty rink at ten o'clock on a Monday night, the cold coming up through my shoes while she keeps both feet planted on the red line.
We walk home at eleven, campus quiet, the cold biting through our jackets. She walks close enough that her shoulder brushes mine on every other stride.
At Elm House, Cole is on the couch with film on his laptop, the Frozen Four semifinal opponent's power play, the same footage he's been breaking down all week. He looks up when we come in.
"How was the ice?" he asks.
"Solid," she says.
She sits between us. Cole's arm behind her shoulders. My hand on her knee. His laptop keeps playing, muted, the power play looping in the corner of my eye.
