Page 11 of Slashed Bonds

I don’t need the pros. I don’t need my name.

I need edges and a stick and eight feet of ice.

Without the legs…I’m nothing.

There’s no version of me still standing after this that isn’t standing on skates.

Please.

My eyes go to the four of them, one after another, the way you’d check every door in a house you already know is locked.

Rhys, who warmed my hands.

Silas, who left me oranges.

Dorian, who taught me how to get up.

Theo, who wrote my dream down in a notebook when he was thirteen.

Not one of them moves.

These are the men I loved.

These are the men I was going to raise a child with.

And none of them knows.

There’s a plastic stick sitting behind a tin of ice melt in a washroom cupboard forty feet from this room, and it says so, and not one person in this building will ever go looking for it.

The floor leaves. My hip clears the sill.

I look at Theo, and I ask him the last question of my old life, and I ask it quietly, because it’s only for him.

“You’re going to let her kill our baby?”

His face changes.

For one second — one — the boy on the dock is in the room with us.

His mouth opens. His hand starts to lift. Something moves behind his eyes that I’ll spend five years failing to name and failing to stop looking for.

“Let this be a lesson,” he says. “Never come at us again. On the ice or off it.” A breath. “If you ever get back on it.”

Hands at my ribs. Hands at my thighs.

The window frame passes over me.

Their faces are the last thing in that room, and as the cold takes me I watch all four of them arrive at the same understanding in the same instant.

Their eyes widen.

Every one of them.

It’s finally real, now that it can’t be called back, and I want them to keep that expression for the rest of their lives. I want it waking them at three in the morning when they’re forty and comfortable and certain they’ve gotten away with it.

I hate them.

I hate them.