Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
TOLREK
Ifound the corridor outside her office empty at ten minutes to four.
I’d been early to everything since I was old enough to lace skates.
Being early meant control. It gave me time to adjust, read the room if I needed to, and decide how much of myself I’d let show before anyone else arrived to witness it.
I’d stood at her threshold three times today without crossing it.
This time was different. The session was scheduled. She’d prepared footage. I’d agreed to this like all players agreed to film review, the necessary work of getting better.
I’d repeated this to myself for the past two hours.
The door was closed. A thin line of light showed underneath. She was in there, waiting, and I was out here pretending I didn’t know exactly what was about to happen.
She was going to show me myself. This wouldn’t be the version I showed the team or the version the organization had decided was worth trading for. This would be the real me, the one I’d been trying not to look at since the injury.
I knocked twice.
Footsteps approached from inside. The door opened and she stood there, backlit by her desk lamp, smaller than anyone had a right to be in a building full of orcs. She’d pulled her long hair back, and she wore the same hoodie she always did in this room, the one that swallowed her hands.
“Why are you wearing that?” I flicked the tassel-tie dangling from the hood she hadn’t pulled up.
She frowned and glanced down. “Oh. Unprofessional, right? But it gets cold in my office, so I keep it here when my fingers start feeling frozen. It’s that or a blanket.”
“Why is it cold?” I glared at the room in general. “You should be warm. Comfortable.”
She shrugged. “No idea. I’ve notified maintenance a number of times and they make adjustments, but it never gets much above sixty.” A shiver ran through her frame. “The hoodie helps.”
“It’s wrong,” I growled.
“You’re right, but this is how it is.” She glanced toward the clock on the wall. One minute before four. “Thank you for coming.”
“Yes.”
She stepped back, making space. “Come in.”
I crossed the threshold.
The difference registered in my chest. I’d stood outside this door and each time I hadn’t entered. Each time she hadn’t asked me to.
Now she had.
She closed the door behind me, the click of the latch too loud in the small space.
I took in the three monitors on the desk, the chair she’d dragged around from the front, and how little room there was for both of us to exist without overlapping.
The air conditioning worked too well. It was cold enough that I could see why she wore the hoodie. That didn’t make it right, however, and I was going to fix that.
She gestured to the chair she’d pulled up beside hers, and I sat. She scooted behind me to take her own seat, her body brushing my chair.
The arrangement put us closer than any professional setting required.
Her shoulder was maybe a foot from mine.
Less, if either of us leaned. She turned off the desk lamp, dimming the room except for the screens, and that made everything feel contained in a way that had nothing to do with actual walls.
“I pulled footage from the last three practices,” she said, her voice even. “And some sequences from your last season with your previous team. I thought it would be useful to compare.”
“Alright.”
She tapped something on the keyboard. The center monitor filled with footage from Tuesday’s scrimmage.
Me, tracking a forward through the neutral zone, closing the gap.
Then hesitating before the contact I should’ve welcomed.
I had been protecting my left side without meaning to.
The forward got past me and made a pass I should’ve cut off.
“Here,” she said, pointing at the screen. “You read it perfectly. Your positioning was exactly where it needed to be. But you retreated before contact.”
I watched myself make the mistake in real time again. “Yes.”
“It happens in every sequence I pulled from the last three practices. I see the same hesitation. You’re protecting your left side.” She pulled up another clip. “Here. And here.”
More footage played. I confirmed what she was showing me without saying a thing. How could I deny it when it was obviously true? My professionalism held, a thin container around something that felt less professional with every second we sat this close.
She leaned past me to point to the next sequence and her arm brushed across mine, an unavoidable thing in the small space. “This one’s different. You committed to the contact but compensated afterward. You favored your right side through the rest of the shift.”
Her hands were small, and they moved in a precise way. Gesturing, pointing, pulling sequences with the ease of someone who’d done this hundreds of times. I couldn’t stop tracking them.
“You see it,” she said. Not a question.
“I feel it, and from the inside, it’s worse.”
She nodded, her attention on the screen. “Knowing it’s there doesn’t make it easier to stop.”
“No.”
She let that sit for a moment before pulling up the next clip. We moved through the footage. She narrated what she’d tagged, and I confirmed it. The work was good. She’d been thorough.
Then she pulled up footage from three seasons ago. The screen showed me at twenty-nine, before the injury that had kept me out for more than half of last season. Before everything that had made me someone my own team didn’t want anymore.
I watched myself skating across the ice with a certainty I’d forgotten I used to have. I didn’t hesitate or protect my left side. This showed the easy confidence of a male who knew exactly what he was doing.
She didn’t narrate it, explain, or add context. She just let it run. But this time, she didn’t look at the screen while it played. She watched me.
Awareness prickled across the back of my neck. She was watching me watch myself, and I couldn’t turn my head to meet her gaze. If I did, something would change between us that I wouldn’t be able to take back.
The footage ended, and she leaned back in her chair.
“This is what I was measuring the current footage against,” she said. “I don’t use league average or positional benchmarks. Just the player.”
The words landed somewhere my last organization had never thought to look.
She’d been building a case, though it wasn’t against me. She’d done this for me. She’d pulled tape from years ago and studied it. She’d wanted to show me who I used to be. Who I should be now.
“Your positioning was perfect,” she said, pulling up another sequence from the old footage. “But that’s not what made you extraordinary.”
The word hung between us. Extraordinary. Me? Nobody had ever called me that. Not even the analysts who’d measured me in units that didn’t account for what I actually did.
She ran the sequence again, a game where my stats were unremarkable.
I hadn’t scored goals. I only had one assist, nothing that would show up on a highlight reel.
But she’d tagged every moment where my positioning had created the condition for someone else to succeed.
Multiple teammates who’d made plays they wouldn’t have without me.
“Here.” She pointed at the screen. “You read the developing play and adjusted your gap. That created space for your winger to enter the zone cleanly. He scored because you gave him the opening.”
She pulled up another clip. “Here, you absorbed contact from their center, which freed your forward to receive the pass without pressure. The assist went to someone else, but the play happened because of you.”
Another sequence. “Here you communicated with your goalie and changed your position to cut off the passing lane. Their forward had to take a low-percentage shot instead of setting up in the slot. This wasn’t logged as a stat, but you prevented a goal.”
She’d tagged every instance, building the sequence.
“Your gift was never in your numbers,” she said. “It’s how you organize the people around you. You make everyone better by being where you need to be. Your old organization measured you in the wrong way.”
I sat with what she'd shown me. She'd taken care to prove something I'd stopped believing about myself.
She’d been treating me with the same attention she’d given the sketch. Looking long enough to know the subject. Seeing something true and rendering it back so I could see it too.
She wasn’t showing me this to fix me. She was showing me this so I could see myself the way she did.
“Questions?” she asked.
“No.”
She shut down her computer. The room went dark before she reached for the desk lamp, and the small glow pushed back enough shadow to see her face.
Neither of us moved to stand.
This silence was different from the quiet at the beginning of the session. It felt full of things neither of us dared say.
“Haley.” Her name came out of me the same way it had the first time. “Have you eaten?”
She blinked.
I hadn’t planned to ask that.
“I… Not since lunch,” she said.
“There’s a place near my apartment. It’s small and quiet. They have good food. It’s near the park.”
Recognition crossed her face. “Do you mean the place on the corner of First and Clarendon?”
“I live on First Street. I’m two blocks from the park.”
Her head tilted. “What number?”
I named it.
She sucked in a breath. “My building is across the street from yours.”
We’d been living across the street from each other since I’d moved to this city a few months ago?
Every time I’d taken Beau to the park, I’d passed her building. She’d passed mine every time she’d gone to the bakery.
We’d been two blocks apart the whole time and neither of us knew it.
“That’s convenient,” I said.
Her mouth twitched. “Very.”
We stood at the same time. She took off her hoodie and draped it over the back of the chair, then took her purse out of her right desk drawer. I got up and waited while she finished locking everything up for the day.
She grabbed her jacket off the peg on the back of the door, and we left her office, her locking the door behind us.
We started down the hall. The building was quieter now. Most of the staff and players would’ve left. The corridor felt too narrow yet too wide open.
This was the first time we’d walked out of the building in the same direction, at the same time, and with the same destination.
We reached the exit.
Evening light spilled across the parking lot. City noise filtered in from the street beyond.
“I can park in my spot in the garage at the end of First Street and meet you in front of your building if you’d like,” she said.
“That sounds good.” I’d take Beau to the park after dinner. He didn’t mind late-night walks.
I was hyperaware of Haley’s vehicle following mine. I wanted her in front where I could better watch out for her. No, behind me where I could shelter her. Her vehicle, that is.
Or maybe sitting inside my truck with me.
Yes, that. Then I could make sure nothing bad happened to her.
This wasn’t a date.
Or was it?