Page 30 of Fractured Ice

Abert is talking about something. I write the date at the top of the page and then nothing else because my pen doesn't seem to be getting the instructions it needs. I keep seeing Ethan's face. That stillness. The way he didn't get loud about it, didn't demand I take it back, just held my gaze and said I would never do that to you with his voice perfectly even and his hands at his sides.

I've had a version of Ethan Walker in my head for as long as I can remember. The crayon thief. The kid who always showed up where I was and acted like he belonged there. The college guy with the rotating parade of girls, too charming to take seriously, too easy with the attention to be trusted with anything real.

None of that version of him would've gotten into a fight for me. None of that version of him would've noticed I was in trouble at that party. None of that version of him would've slept on top of the covers and waited to make sure I was okay.

I write Ethan Walker at the top of a fresh page in my notebook and then sit there staring at it.

I've been covering him for weeks. I've sat across from him at a breakfast table and asked him questions and built a framework for who he is based on what he says, and I've been doing it through the filter of who I already decided he was before I started.

That's not good journalism.

That's not good anything.

Abert dismisses us twenty minutes later, and I pack up with notes that amount to a date and a name and nothing else. I walk out into the February cold with the specific feeling like everything I thought I understood is wrong.

I owe him an apology.

I know I owe him an apology.

I just haven't worked out yet how to give one to someone I've spent years being so sure about.

8

Sienna

I tell myself three times on the walk over that this is work.

It's a game. It's coverage. It's an assignment on Professor Bennett's timeline and the fact that I haven't spoken to Ethan since I fled his bedroom at seven this morning is completely irrelevant because this isn't about that. It's about the assignment. I have my camera and my notebook and a very professional attitude, and I'm going to sit in those stands and do my job.

I find a seat in the lower section with a good sightline to the whole ice. I open my notebook and I write the date at the top, plus the game details, and then I'm ready to work.

Ridgehaven wins the opening face-off, the game gets moving, and I make myself pay attention to the full picture for the first ten minutes, the systems, how the team moves as a unit, who communicates with who. I'm taking notes on line changes and defensive positioning and all the things Professor Bennett wants in the game coverage section of the project.

Then Ethan gets the puck.

I stop writing.

He's faster than he looks from a distance. From up close, or close-ish, from the lower section of the stands, I can see how he reads the ice before the play develops, already moving into the space before anyone else has identified it as the space to be in. He pulls a defenseman two feet out of position just by angling his body. The lane opens up, and he doesn't even look at it before he puts the puck exactly where it needs to go.

The arena reacts and I realize my pen hasn't moved in a while.

I write some things down. Useful things. Position, sequence, outcome. Very professional.

Then he does it again and I stop writing again.

This is fine. Watching my subject perform is part of the job. Noticing when he does something well is part of the job. Being genuinely, unexpectedly, inconveniently absorbed by the way he moves on the ice is⁠—

Work. It's work.

Around the midpoint of the second period something shifts. He misses a pass he should've had and the other team converts on the transition, and from the press box above me I hear one of the announcers say something about Walker looking uncharacteristic tonight. He loses a puck battle in the corner he'd won twice in the first period. He takes a penalty that doesn't look like one he’d normally make, a reach, the kind of frustration play you make when your head isn't fully where your body is.

I know why his head isn't where his body is.

The thought sits in my chest in a way I don't enjoy.

I spend the rest of the second period trying to find a seat angle where he's less likely to spot me if he looks toward the stands, which involves some subtle repositioning that I'm sure looks entirely normal to the people around me and not at all like a woman trying to hide from a hockey player. I take more notes. The shoulder. He's rolling it between plays, quietly, when he thinks nobody's watching. Three times in the third period I count it. There's tension in how he's carrying that side and I notice it from forty feet away and I don't know what to do with the fact that I notice it.

Ridgehaven wins by two. The energy in the arena is loud and warm and I should feel good about having good game footage, but instead I'm thinking about bruises.