31. Callahan
Callahan
Twenty thousand fans are vibrating through the boards, the glass, and the ice itself. The noise isn’t sound so much as it is pressure, a constant, physical force pushing in on my chest, rattling my teeth, and humming through my bones.
We are deep into the Eastern Conference Finals, game four, and the air in the arena is thick enough to choke on.
I move on pure instinct. Pass. Pivot. Read. React. There is no room for conscious thought here. No space for doubt. The game strips everything down to muscle memory and reflex, to angles and momentum and trust. The noise fades into something distant and irrelevant.
I am a machine built for this ice, for this moment, up until the world suddenly decides to break.
The hit comes from my blind side.
It’s a freight train impact that knocks the world sideways and steals the air from my lungs before I even know it is gone.
My shoulder slams into the boards with a crack that feels too loud to be real—wood splitting, glass shuddering, and something inside me snapping in protest.
Pain detonates in white, blinding waves, tearing down my arm and lighting up every nerve like a struck match. My skates shoot out from under me.
Gravity wins. The ice rushes up fast and unforgiving.
For a split second, there is a vacuum of silence. Then the entire arena gasps—a single, collective inhale from twenty thousand people frozen in the same moment. Then the whistle blows.
My ears are ringing. My vision blurs at the edges. The world tilts in jagged, sickening frames—white ice, dark jerseys, the black curve of the boards looming too close, and the overhead lights spinning like a broken carousel.
I try to breathe, but my chest won’t expand.
My shoulder feels wrong.
It feels as if it has been shifted, pulled, and ripped from where it is supposed to live.
I’ve been hit before. I’ve been broken before.
But this feels like something tearing loose inside me. Something deeper than bone.
Boots appear in my peripheral vision—teammates circling, sticks tapping the ice, voices shouting my name—but it all sounds underwater. The voices are warped and distant, as if I’m sinking fast and they’re already far above the surface.
Then, through the fog of the trainers descending on me, I hear a voice that doesn’t belong on the ice. Sharp, melodic, and currently vibrating with a frequency I have never heard from her.
I look toward the bench, my head spinning.
Ivy has lost every ounce of the icy, professional composure that earned her the nickname Ice Queen. She is leaning so far over the boards she’s nearly falling, her face inches from the referee’s. Her eyes are wide, manic with a protective fury that makes the veteran official flinch.
She isn’t arguing the logistics of the hit; she is demanding blood. She’s yelling, her voice cracking as she demands a five-minute major, a game misconduct, an expulsion.
And then, the Finnish starts. It’s a rapid-fire torrent of vowels and consonants that sound like a curse, her face flushed, her teeth bared.
The cameras are already on her.
I can see the overhead jumbotron from the corner of my eye. Her image is plastered across the screen—the “Ice Queen” melting down in front of a national audience. The other coaches are trying to pull her back, trying to get her to settle, but she shakes them off.
The trainers are gripping my jersey now, talking to me, but I can’t stop looking at her.
Then, as they start to help me up, I see her do something even worse for her career.
She doesn’t wait for the whistle to resume play. She doesn’t wait for the period to end. She turns her back on the game, on the bench, and on Rick who is screaming her name. She storms toward the tunnel entrance, her heels clicking a frantic rhythm on the rubber mats.
She is abandoning the game in the middle of a tie-score conference final.
The crowd’s murmur turns into a roar of confusion. The broadcasters will be losing their minds. Where is she going? Why did Talvi leave the bench?
I know why.
The walk down the tunnel is a slow-motion nightmare.
Every jolt of the trainers’ shoulders as they support me sends a fresh spike of agony through my collarbone. The biting cold of the rink shifts to the stale warmth of the back hallways. The roar of twenty thousand people dissolves into a dull, muffled hum trapped behind concrete walls.
We reach the medical room—the real one, tucked away from the prying eyes of the press. They guide me toward the padded exam table, and as I sink onto it, the door slams open.
Iveline’s breathing like she just finished a marathon. Her hair has fallen loose from its bun, dark strands sticking to her forehead, damp with the sweat of her exertion. Her eyes scan me with a desperate, frantic intensity.
“Callahan,” she says, her voice raw and stripped of all armor.
“Ivy, you left,” I rasp, my teeth gritted against the pain. “The game… you can’t just walk away.”
“Shut up,” she says, moving toward me.
She pushes past the head trainer, ignoring his confused look. She’s in my space, her hands trembling as they hover over my shoulder, afraid to touch but unable to pull away.
The room is a hive of activity. Trainers are cutting away my jersey, the fabric falling to the floor in heavy, sweat-soaked strips.
“?l? liiku,” she whispers.
(Don’t move)
She grabs an ice pack from a nearby tray, her movements sharp and unsteady.
She is rattled.
And the fact that I rattled her—not a blown call, not a losing streak, but the sight of my body hitting the boards—makes my chest ache worse than my shoulder ever could.
She presses the ice pack to the joint. The cold burns, bright and vicious, and my vision blurs again.
“I shouldn’t care this much,” she whispers, so low the trainers can’t hear.
“Iveline—”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracks. She steadies it with a sharp inhale, forcing the professional mask back on, but it’s slipping at the corners. “You scared me. When you didn’t get up… I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t care about the game. I didn’t care about the score. I just needed to be where you were.”
“You’re going to have to explain this,” I say, gesturing vaguely toward the door, toward the arena where the world is watching her empty seat. “The league is going to fine you for that outburst at the refs.”
“Let them,” she says, her jaw tightening. “I will pay every cent if it means I don’t have to watch you break from a distance.”
The lead doctor, Dr. Aris, enters the room. He’s carrying a tablet and has a grim set to his mouth that makes my stomach do a slow, sick roll.
Aris nods at Ivy and turns to the imaging screen.
“Initial X-ray is clear of fractures,” he says. “But the MRI shows a grade-two AC joint sprain. There is serious inflammation and some minor bruising to the bone. No surgery, but we’re looking at significant time.”
Ivy’s head snaps up. “How long?”
The doctor sighs, leaning back against the counter.
“For a normal regular season? Three to four weeks. Maybe five depending on the range of motion. For the playoffs?” He looks at me with a mix of pity and respect.
“We can try to get him back in about ten to twelve days if the swelling goes down and he responds to the injections. But he is out for the rest of this series. If the boys can close this out and get you to the Finals, you might have a shot at the opening puck drop.”
The words hit me like a physical weight. Out for the series.
I won’t be on the ice for the most important games of my life—not unless the team can carry the weight of my absence through the mud of the Conference Finals.
I am being benched by my own body at the exact moment the finish line is in sight.
I glance at the old scars on my knee, then at the shoulder that’s been protesting more loudly every year. I’m a patchwork quilt of hockey history, and I’m running out of clean fabric.
“Ten days,” I mutter. “I can do ten days.”
“You can barely lift your arm to your chest, Callahan,” the doctor says gently. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
I look at Ivy.
Relief flashes across her face first—knowing I’m not permanently broken—but then it is replaced by something much heavier.
Her phone, resting on the medical cart, begins to vibrate. The screen lights up, buzzing against the metal with a harsh, rhythmic sound that cuts through the sterile quiet of the room.
She doesn’t pick it up. She doesn’t even move to silence it. She just watches it dance across the stainless steel, the light reflecting in her eyes. It stops for a second, then immediately starts again.
She helps me into the sling. Her movements are clinical again, but her touch lingers. As she secures the strap behind my neck, she leans in.
“You’re stubborn,” she murmurs.
“And you care,” I reply.
That one lands hard.
“I have seventeen missed calls,” she says, her voice a ghost of its usual strength. “The clips of me yelling at the referee are already trending on social media. They’re calling it a ‘lack of professional restraint.’ They’re asking if I’m fit to lead.”
The phone rings again. I reach out with my good hand, taking her wrist. “I’m sorry, Ivy. I didn’t mean to cause this.”
“You didn’t cause it,” she says. “I did. I chose to leave. I chose to show them exactly where my priorities lie.”
She finally picks up the phone. She doesn’t answer it. She just stares at the glowing screen before sliding it into her pocket.
“Ice it and stay still,” she whispers to me and walks out, her head held high even as she walks into the firing squad of her own making.
I sit on the table, the cold of the ice pack finally numbing the pain in my shoulder, but doing nothing for the ache in my chest.
I’m going to heal. My bones will knit, the ligaments will tighten, and I’ll be back on the ice in a matter of weeks. But as I watch the door swing shut behind her, I realize that for Iveline, the damage might be permanent.
She walked away from the bench for me, and in the world of professional hockey, that’s a sin they don’t easily forgive.
I sit in the silence of the medical room, the smell of antiseptic heavy in the air, and realize that for the first time in my career, I’m not the one fighting the hardest battle.
Somewhere down the hallway, the crowd erupts—not in triumph, but in that low, gutted groan that only comes when twenty thousand people watch hope slip through their fingers.
The series isn’t over, but tonight we fell without me, and the weight of that settles over my chest like another injury I can’t tape up.