Silver didn't know what was worse: Dr. Carter's quiet certainty that her knee might never fully recover, delivered with the kind of professional compassion that felt like a death sentence wrapped in medical terminology, or Americus's hopeful eyes watching for reassurance that Silver couldn't provide without lying through her teeth.
She'd chosen the easier route—the familiar comfort of deception.
I'm fine.
The words had tasted like sawdust in her mouth, hollow and unconvincing even to her own ears.
So she did what she'd always done when reality cracked too close to the surface and threatened to expose the raw nerves underneath: she grabbed her figure skates from the bottom of her closet where they'd been gathering dust like artifacts from a previous life, and headed back to the ice.
Ingalls Rink felt different in the late afternoon than it had during her clandestine evening visit. The whale-back ceiling stretched overhead like the ribcage of some ancient creature, amplifying every sound until the scrape of zamboni blades and the distant hum of refrigeration equipment created a symphony of mechanical precision. The familiar chill wrapped around her like an old friend as she sat on the team bench, tugging her boots tighter and feeling the bite of stiff leather against ankles that had grown soft from months of sneakers and recovery shoes.
The boards carried the scent of scraped ice mixed with the lingering traces of hockey practice—sweat and determination crystallized into something almost sacred. It was a fragrance she knew as intimately as her own pulse.
She pushed through the gate and onto the pristine surface.
At first, she kept it simple—long, controlled glides with her knee carefully bent, arms loose and natural as she reacquainted herself with the sensation of blades carving through ice. The surface was glass-smooth under her feet, the kind of perfect canvas that begged for artistic lines to be etched across its expanse. Every stroke felt like coming home and saying goodbye simultaneously.
But Silver had never been good at keeping things simple.
One crossover became two, then four, her muscles awakening to remember patterns they'd practiced ten thousand times. Her body automatically leaned into the familiar rhythm, edges slicing confident arcs across the ice as her speed gradually increased. Her knee protested with each push-off, sending sharp reminders up her leg, but she'd spent years learning to compartmentalize pain during training. Some habits died harder than others.
Soon she was testing transitions that had once been second nature—turns and steps that required precise edge control and timing. She attempted a slow scratch spin, feeling the world blur into streaks of color before her damaged knee wobbled halfway through the rotation, forcing her to step out awkwardly.
The imperfection stung worse than any physical pain.
She tried a jump. Just a single toe loop—the most basic element in her former repertoire, something she'd been landing since she was nine years old.
Her knee buckled on impact, pain shooting hot and vicious up her leg like electricity through damaged wiring.
She bit back a curse that would have made her mother reach for the nearest bar of soap, pushing herself upright and skating off the lingering ache with tight, angry strokes. She couldn't stop. If she stopped, she'd have to think about Dr. Carter's careful words, the way he'd said might never and realistic expectations like they were reasonable concepts rather than the destruction of everything she'd ever wanted.
"Are you trying to destroy what's left of that knee?"
The voice cut across the rink with enough authority to make her spine straighten involuntarily.
Silver startled, her blade catching slightly as she slowed her pace and turned toward the sound. Of course it was him.
Eli Hayes stood at the players' gate, helmet tucked under one arm and practice jersey clinging to shoulders that suggested he'd just finished his own training session. His hockey bag leaned against the wall like he'd dropped it the moment he'd spotted her reckless solo practice.
Silver's chest tightened with a mixture of embarrassment and defiance. "Are you stalking me now?"
"Wouldn't call it stalking when you're practically broadcasting your location," he said evenly, stepping onto the ice in his sneakers without even flinching at the temperature change. "Hard to miss someone who's clearly in pain every time they land."
Her jaw clenched automatically. "I don't make noise when I skate."
"You wince," he corrected, his tone matter-of-fact rather than accusatory. "Every single landing. That knee isn't ready for what you're asking it to do."
Silver skated past him in a wide arc, using motion to avoid the conversation she didn't want to have. "Thanks for the unsolicited medical opinion, Dr. Hayes. I'll be sure to add it to my file."
"I'm serious." His voice followed her around the rink, sharper now with what sounded like genuine concern. "You keep pushing past your limits like this, you'll cause permanent damage. I've seen guys do it—athletes who couldn't accept that their bodies were telling them to stop."
She executed a hard stop, sending a spray of ice shavings in his direction, though he didn't flinch. "And what exactly do you care what happens to me?"
His eyes locked onto hers with an intensity that made breathing feel complicated. For a moment, something flickered across his features—not the controlled indifference she'd grown accustomed to, but something rawer, more honest.
"Because I've watched teammates push through injuries they should have rested. Seen guys who were convinced they could skate through torn ligaments or fractured bones because they couldn't imagine themselves as anything other than hockey players." His voice carried the weight of personal experience. "They don't come back from that. Not really. And when they try, they end up worse than when they started."
Silver's throat tightened with unwelcome emotion. For a split second, the genuine concern in his voice almost cracked through the defensive armor she'd constructed around her vulnerability. Almost made her consider that maybe someone else understood the terror of losing the only identity you'd ever known.
But vulnerability felt too dangerous, too close to admitting that Dr. Carter might be right about her limitations.
So she shoved the moment of connection down where it couldn't hurt her.
"You don't know me," she snapped, her voice low and sharp as freshly honed blade edges. Then she pushed off again, cutting across the rink with renewed speed, as if she could skate fast enough to outpace his concern, outpace the medical reality she wasn't ready to accept, outpace the truth that her body might never again be capable of the things that had once defined her worth.