Page 55 of Slashed Bonds

Bellwether came after the tiny house. After the deed with my name on it and the deposit paid by nobody. After the day I stood in the middle of a two-room shed in a forest and understood, fully, at the cellular level, that every single thing I’d spent my life building had been taken, and what I’d been left with wasn’t even crumbs.

Crumbs would have been generous. Crumbs are food.

I guess that’s the day a person loses her marbles.

Or, in my case, the day something in me that had been waiting a long time for permission finally got it.

The version of me that comes out isn’t loud.

That’s what people expect and it’s wrong.

She’s the smartest I’ve ever been. Colder. Faster. She sees every angle in a room the way I see the ice, and she wants everyone in it to suffer for the privilege of her arrival, and she does the whole thing with a grin on her face.

That’s what gives it away.

There’s a room in my head where hockey lives.

Everything else in there is noise. The nightmares. The list. The 2:13 phone calls. But that one room stays silent, and when I’m in it, I can see a play four passes before it happens, and the thinking isn’t thinking.

It’s arithmetic done by the body.

The Switch lives in the same room.

That’s the part the doctors never got. They kept trying to find the place where I went, and I kept trying to tell them: it’s not a new place.

It’s the old one.

It’s the girl who could read a defenseman’s fear off his shoulders at seventeen, except now she reads it off everyone, and she’s stopped caring what it costs them.

I felt her arrive tonight when Nik snarled in my face.

The room went quiet. The building dropped away. And what was left was a man six inches from me with his teeth bared, and a read on him as clean as any I’ve had on the ice.

He’s not going to hit me. He’s waiting to be told where the floor is.

So I told him.

Because apparently I don’t smile enough.

According to the one friend I’ve got, a smile on my face means the crazy is awake and driving.

She’d know.

Maddie clocked it a mile off the first time she saw it, in the common room of that facility with the bad chairs and the worse coffee, and she didn’t flinch, and she didn’t call anyone, and she didn’t ask what happened. She asked if I still got phantom pain in my neck.

I did. I do. She was the first person to ask.

Which is why she’s the only one I’ve let in. The only one after. She’s pink where I’m black and loud where I’m quiet and she treats my Switch like a weather event, something you dress for rather than fear, and I’d kill for her without being asked.

She’s going to have a field day when I catch her up on the last four days.

I can hear it already.

The shriek. The pink phone case hitting a table.

You met your masked man UNMASKED and he KNELT and you didn’t TEXT ME?

Followed, within the hour, by a strawberry sticker on my medication organizer that I’ll pretend not to notice, and a hair tie in Vipers violet appearing on Knox’s leash like it grew there.