Chapter 71: Hospital

Georgia

The doctor uses the phrase "career-ending" the way someone might describe an overcast sky - flat, detached, entirely unaware of the weight it carries for the person hearing it.

I surface slowly, like I’m being pulled up through layers of water that don’t want to let me go.

First comes the smell.

Antiseptic. Sharp and chemical, burning the back of my throat and settling somewhere behind my eyes.

Then the machines.

A steady electronic beep beside me, insistent and rhythmic. Another quieter hum somewhere behind my head, like the building itself is breathing.

Then the pain.

It’s dull now, distant and heavy, radiating from my knee and traveling up my leg in slow, deliberate pulses. Medication, probably. Thank God for medication, because I have a feeling that without it, I wouldn’t be able to think at all.

Voices drift in and out around me, fragmented, as though I’m listening through water.

"Ligament damage," a man says. I don’t recognize his voice. It’s calm and practiced, which somehow makes it worse, like he’s said this same sentence to a hundred other broken athletes before me. "ACL, MCL, and partial meniscus involvement."

Paper rustles.

"We won’t have the full picture until the swelling comes down enough for a clearer scan. But based on what we’re seeing, this is significant."

A pause. It stretches longer than it should, and I understand, even in my haze, that pauses like that always mean something worse is coming.

"At the competitive level she’s been performing at, recovery will be challenging."

I open my eyes.

The ceiling comes into focus first.

Fluorescent lights. White tiles. Too bright, too clinical, too far from the ice I know.

I blink several times, hoping the room will turn into somewhere else. Anywhere else.

It doesn’t.

I look down.

My leg is elevated and wrapped in so much bandaging that it barely looks like mine anymore, like some stranger’s limb has been attached to my body while I wasn’t paying attention.

I try to move my toes.

Nothing.

Panic hits before I can stop it, sharp and immediate, cutting through the fog of medication.

I try again.

Still nothing.

My fingers twitch against the blanket, small and useless, the only proof that I can still command my own body at all.

"Can you feel your foot?" the doctor asks.

I swallow, and my throat feels like sandpaper.

"I don’t know."

My voice sounds awful.

Weak. Scratchy. Nothing like my own.

Then I hear my mother’s voice, and something in my chest tightens before she’s even said a full sentence.

"We’ll need a full rehabilitation timeline, obviously."

I turn my head, slow and heavy, like my skull weighs twice what it should.

Mollie is standing at the foot of my bed with her phone in her hand.

Of course she is.

She looks completely composed. Her hair is perfect. Her clothes are perfect. She looks as though she’s waiting for a meeting to start instead of standing in a hospital room after her daughter has just been told she might never compete again. There’s not a crease out of place, not a hair loose - as if she pressed herself into order on the drive over, refusing to let the chaos of this moment touch her.

"We need to be proactive about how we present this to the federation," she continues, her voice brisk and focused, already several steps ahead of the room. "This doesn’t have to be the end of her story. It can be about resilience. About coming back stronger."

Her thumb moves across her phone, tapping out some message to someone who isn’t me.

"I have contacts who can help shape that conversation before anyone starts writing her off."

I stare at her, waiting for something - anything - that resembles a mother looking at her injured child.

She hasn’t even looked at me.

"Mom."

The word comes out as barely a whisper, swallowed by the hum of machines.

She keeps talking.

"We’ll want to control the messaging carefully. Injury narratives can actually be quite powerful when they’re handled correctly, especially if we have a realistic comeback timeline."

"Mom."

Louder this time, though it costs me something to push the volume out.

She finally stops.

Her eyes find mine.

For one second, her face changes.

She looks scared.

Actually scared, in a way I haven’t seen since I was small enough to fall off my bike and cry for her instead of pretending I was fine.

Then the expression disappears behind the familiar mask, smoothed over so quickly I almost doubt I saw it at all.

"Sweetheart," she says, her voice softening immediately. "You’re awake."

I don’t know what to do with the tenderness in her voice. It comes too late and disappears too quickly, like a door opened and shut before I could step through it.

"How are you feeling?"

I almost laugh, though nothing about this is funny.

Instead, I look toward the doctor, searching his face for something my mother can’t give me.

My heart starts beating faster.

The monitor notices before anyone else does.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

"Will I skate again?"

Silence.

Not a long one.

It doesn’t need to be. Some silences say everything in half a second.

The doctor looks at me, then briefly at Mollie.

There is a whole conversation in that glance that I don’t get to hear, and it makes something cold settle in my stomach.

"It’s too early to say anything definitive," he tells me carefully. "Recovery varies significantly from patient to patient. We’ll know more once we can properly assess the full extent of the damage."

I stare at him.

That’s not an answer.

He knows it.

I know it.

My mother knows it, and yet none of us say so out loud.

My fingers curl around the blanket until the fabric bunches beneath them, my knuckles pale with the effort of holding something, anything, together.

I look at the ceiling.

I refuse to cry.

I absolutely refuse.

Not here.

Not in front of a doctor and a nurse and my mother, who is already figuring out how to explain my life to everyone else before I’ve even had the chance to understand it myself.

My eyes burn anyway.

One tear slips free.

It slides sideways into my hair, warm and humiliating.

I leave it there.

I can’t bring myself to care enough to wipe it away.

Mollie doesn’t seem to notice.

Or maybe she does and chooses not to, filing it away as something inconvenient rather than something that matters.

She’s already talking again.

Rehabilitation specialists.

Physical therapists.

Doctors with experience working with elite athletes.

Timelines.

Qualifying.

Comebacks.

She has names. Numbers. Plans. An entire architecture of my recovery constructed before I’ve even been given the chance to grieve what’s been lost.

Of course she does.

Her voice fills the room while I lie there listening to pieces of sentences that don’t seem to belong to me, like she’s discussing a stranger’s career and not the wreckage of my own body.

It’s strange hearing my future discussed as if I’m not in the bed, as if the girl in the hospital gown and the girl on the ice are two entirely separate people, and only one of them matters to her right now.

A nurse comes in while Mollie is talking, her presence a small, gentle interruption in the storm of my mother’s planning.

Her sneakers squeak softly against the floor as she checks the monitors and adjusts my IV, her movements practiced and unhurried.

"Your skate bag and equipment were collected from the rink for post-incident review," she says casually, glancing down at her clipboard. "Standard protocol after a fall like this. You’ll get everything back once it’s been documented."

My mind is still foggy, thoughts sliding past before I can catch them.

At first, I barely process the words.

Then one catches, snagging on something deep in my memory.

"Post-incident review?"

The nurse looks at me, her expression carefully neutral.

"Of what?"

"Just the equipment," she explains, already checking something on the clipboard, as though this is the most ordinary thing in the world. "Blade condition, boot fit, that sort of thing. They do it after serious injuries during competition to rule out mechanical failure. It’s purely procedural."

"Just protocol," Mollie adds, waving one hand dismissively without glancing up.

She doesn’t even look up from her phone.

"Nothing to worry about, sweetheart."

My stomach drops, a slow, sick lurch that has nothing to do with the medication.

I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s the medication.

Maybe it’s the shock.

Maybe I’m imagining things because I’m lying in a hospital bed with a knee that’s barely attached to the rest of my life anymore, and my mind is grasping for something else to fear.

But I can’t shake the feeling.

My fingers tighten around the blanket, and my pulse quickens again, the monitor faithfully reporting every uneven beat.

I think about the blade beneath my right foot.

The way it felt during the program.

That tiny shift.

That strange looseness, barely perceptible, easy to dismiss in the heat of competition.

I remember noticing it and telling myself to keep going, the way I’ve always told myself to keep going, no matter what.

I landed the loop.

Then the triple axel.

Then everything went wrong, all at once, the world tilting sideways in a single irreversible second.

My throat tightens.

I stare at the ceiling, willing it to offer some kind of answer.

I’ve spent most of my life chasing one feeling.

That perfect second when the blade catches the ice exactly right. When my weight settles where it should. When the rest of the world disappears and everything works, and for one suspended moment, I am nothing but motion and grace and certainty.

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that again.

The thought hurts more than I expect, a grief so sudden and enormous it nearly swallows the pain in my knee.

The machine beside me keeps beeping.

Steady.

Unbothered.

Indifferent to the fact that my entire world has just cracked open.

I close my eyes.

Something isn’t right.

I don’t know what.

Not yet.

But I will.