Chapter 58: The Hit

- Georgia

The sound of the check is wrong before I even understand why.

I’m in the stands with Mandi and Alexa, three rows up from the glass, half watching the game and half still turning my father’s five words over in my head. *Tell her no. You’re allowed to tell her no.* I haven’t called Mollie back since Wednesday. I don’t know yet if that counts as telling her no or just delaying the moment I’ll eventually have to. Every time my phone buzzes I flinch, half-hoping it’s her, half-dreading it.

"Watch, watch, watch," Mandi says, grabbing my arm, her voice pitched high with excitement.

I look up just in time to see Puck take the puck up the boards, fast, controlled, the kind of skating that makes the rest of the team look like they’re standing still. Even now, even with everything unresolved and raw between us, some traitorous part of me still catches on the sight of him.

A Westbridge defenseman comes at him from the blind side.

It happens too fast to process in real time, the way real hits always do. The defenseman’s shoulder drives into Puck’s chest, the full weight of both bodies converging at speed, and then the sound.

It isn’t the sound hockey checks are supposed to make. I’ve been to enough games this year to know the normal register of it, the dull thud of pads meeting pads, sometimes sharper if a shoulder catches a jaw wrong. This is different. This is a crack, low and wet and final, the kind of sound that belongs to something snapping, not colliding, and it carries all the way up into the stands over the noise of the crowd.

My stomach drops straight through the bleachers.

Puck goes into the boards hard enough that the glass shudders in its frame, his body folding at an angle no body should fold at. For one horrible second, I’m certain I just watched something break inside him.

Then he’s up.

Not slowly. Not carefully, the way you’d expect someone to rise after a hit like that, testing each limb before trusting it with weight. He’s up in under two seconds, skates finding the ice again like his body never left it, already pushing off the boards to rejoin the play like nothing at all just happened.

I sit frozen, my hands gripping the cold metal rail in front of me so hard my knuckles ache. My pulse is still racing, refusing to believe the danger has already passed.

"Did you see that?" I ask, my voice rising, urgent, to nobody in particular, to anyone who’ll confirm I’m not losing my mind.

"Sick hit," Mandi says, distracted, already looking back toward center ice where the play has continued without pause. "Ref’s letting a lot go tonight."

"No, I mean, did you hear that sound?" My voice comes out thinner than I mean it to. "That should have ended his night."

Alexa, beside me, goes very still for just a moment, longer than it takes to just be watching hockey. It’s a small thing, barely a beat, but I’ve learned by now to notice the small things, and this one snags.

"He’s fine," she says, too smoothly, the calm in her voice stretched thin over something else. "Look, he’s already back on the ice."

He is. He’s skating like he wasn’t just checked into the boards hard enough to make a sound like breaking bone, no limp, no favoring one side, nothing at all in his posture to suggest he’s carrying any injury whatsoever. On the Westbridge bench, though, the player who hit him is sitting with his shoulder hunched, a trainer already crouched in front of him, prodding at the joint while he winces.

The player who delivered the hit is the one who came out worse.

I look around the stands, half expecting to see the same disbelief on every face that I know is sitting on mine right now, and I find nothing. Parents are cheering. A group of students two rows down are chanting something about the score. Mandi’s already moved on to complaining about the concession line. Nobody, not one single person in this entire arena, seems to register that anything at all just happened that shouldn’t be physically possible.

I turn to the man standing next to me, a stranger in a Rosethorne booster sweatshirt, and ask before I can stop myself, "Did you hear that? That sound?"

He glances at me, confused. "Hear what, the hit? Good open ice check." Then he turns back to the game, as though I’ve asked him something faintly odd.

I don’t ask again. The wrongness of it settles over me heavier than the cold air blowing in from the rink.

My hands have gone ice cold on the rail. I don’t let go of it for the rest of the period.

The game finishes with Rosethorne up by two, and the crowd files out slow and satisfied, breath fogging in the cold night air outside the rink doors. I find Liam near the locker room hallway, leaning against the wall in his letterman jacket, grinning at something one of his teammates said before the guy peels off toward the parking lot.

"Liam," I say, and something in my voice must carry more than I mean it to, because his grin drops before he even turns to face me fully.

"Georgia. Good game, right?" he says, his tone breezy, already skating past the moment.

"That hit," I say, my tone flat, refusing any kind of lead in. "In the second period. The one that sounded like something broke."

"Yeah, that was a big one," he says, light and dismissive, already half turning like he’s about to make his exit.

I step closer, my voice dropping low enough that nobody passing by would catch it. "Liam. That should have ended his night. I’ve seen hockey injuries. I’ve seen concussions, torn ligaments, guys who get helped off the ice by two people. That sound was not a sound a body just walks away from in two seconds."

For one half of one second, something shifts in his face. His easy grin drops entirely, just for a heartbeat, and underneath it I catch something that looks almost like alarm, quickly smothered but not quickly enough that I miss it. It’s the first real crack I’ve ever seen in Liam’s carefully maintained charm, and it unsettles me more than the hit itself did, because Liam has never once, in all the months I’ve known him, let anything show he didn’t mean to show.

"Rosethorne kids heal fast," he says, rushed, nervous, the words tumbling out before the grin slides back into place like a mask being resettled.

"What does that mean?" I ask, my voice sharp now, demanding.

But he’s already stepping back, already lifting a hand in a wave that isn’t really an answer.

"Gotta go help load the equipment bags," he says, over-cheerful, already moving.

He turns and walks off fast, almost too fast, footsteps quickening into something closer to escape than exit, his shoes striking the concrete in a rhythm too hurried for someone with nowhere urgent to be. He doesn’t look back once, not even at the door, before I can ask him anything else. I’m left standing there alone with the cold still clinging to my hands and a sentence rattling around in my head that makes less sense the longer I sit with it.

*Rosethorne kids heal fast.*

*That’s not an answer,* I think, my jaw tightening. *That’s barely even a lie.* That isn’t an explanation. That’s a door being shut politely in my face, and somewhere underneath the frustration, a smaller, colder feeling takes root: the sense that everyone around me has agreed, without ever saying so out loud, on exactly which questions I’m not allowed to ask.