Chapter 59: The Article

- Georgia

I search his name at 1 a.m. because sleep won’t come and neither will the quiet in my head.

Mandi sleeps across the room, her breathing slow and even, the kind of untroubled rhythm I haven’t managed in days. I’ve been lying awake for what feels like an hour, staring at that comma shaped water stain on the ceiling, running through the last two days on a loop that won’t shut off. The sound of the hit. The crack that shouldn’t have been survivable. Puck up in under two seconds, skating like nothing happened, while the boy who checked him sat on the bench nursing a shoulder that clearly got the worse end of the collision. Liam’s face, that half second crack in his easy grin before he muttered those five useless words and walked away too fast to be casual. I keep replaying it, trying to find the moment where it should have made sense, and never finding it.

*Rosethorne kids heal fast.*

It isn’t an answer. It’s barely even a sentence. It’s been sitting in my chest ever since, right alongside the ache that still hasn’t fully gone away, refusing to resolve into anything that makes sense. Some nights the ache flares sharper than others, and tonight it throbs low and insistent, as if my own body is keeping score of everything I don’t understand.

I give up on sleep around 12:45 and reach for my phone, the screen too bright in the dark room. I squint against it, letting my eyes adjust, and before I’ve really decided to do it, my thumb is already typing his name into the search bar. Puck Hale.

I tell myself I’m just curious. Anyone would want to know more about a boy whose touch leaves burns and who defends you with two words that make grown teenagers bow their heads like something ancient just spoke through him, I tell myself, my thumb hovering over the screen. I don’t examine that explanation too closely. It wouldn’t hold up if I did, and some quieter, more honest part of me already knows it.

The first several results are what I expect. A few local sports write ups about Rosethorne’s hockey season, his name mentioned alongside stats, assists, a couple of quotes from a coach praising his instincts on the ice. Nothing strange. Nothing that explains anything. I scroll further, thumb moving on autopilot, half convinced I’m about to give up and put the phone down, when a headline near the bottom of the second page catches my eye, and my stomach drops before I’ve even finished reading it.

*Local Hockey Standout’s Future in Question After Brutal On Ice Collision.*

The date on the article puts it just over two years ago. I click it before I can second guess myself, my pulse ticking up in a way that feels disproportionate to a news story about a sport I barely follow.

It’s from a regional sports outlet, the kind that covers high school and youth league games nobody outside a fifty mile radius would ever care about, written in that flat, slightly overwrought style local sports writers always seem to fall into. I skim the first paragraph fast, my heart already picking up speed before I’ve even reached the part that matters.

*A collision during Saturday’s matchup between Rosethorne and a visiting club team has left one player’s competitive future uncertain, after what witnesses describe as an unusually forceful check that ended in serious injury. Rosethorne forward Puck Hale, then a freshman, delivered a hit that several onlookers characterized as showing unusual aggression inconsistent with his typical playing style, resulting in a collision that sidelined opposing player Dominic Valentine with what sources close to the family describe as a career ending injury.*

I read the sentence again, slower, letting each word actually land instead of skimming past it the way my eyes want to. My mouth has gone dry, and I swallow hard against it.

*Unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style.*

That phrase sits wrong in my stomach, twisting slowly. It doesn’t sound like a description of a hard hockey hit at all. It sounds like something a witness says when they watched a person do something that didn’t fit who they thought that person was, something closer to an aberration than an accident. I picture the hit two nights ago, the sound like breaking bone, Puck up on his feet in under two seconds like his body had simply refused the concept of injury altogether. I think about how carefully controlled he always seems, how deliberate, how precise even in his silence, and I try to picture him losing that control so completely that it ended someone’s career and made witnesses reach for a word like aggression instead of just aggressive play. The image refuses to settle into place, no matter how many times I try to force it.

I don’t recognize the name Dominic Valentine. It doesn’t mean anything to me yet, just three words attached to an injury I have no other context for, a stranger’s ruined future folded into a story about a boy I can’t stop thinking about. But something about the surname snags at the edge of my memory, faint and unplaceable, like a word on the tip of my tongue that won’t quite surface.

I keep reading. The article is short, thin on actual details the way these local pieces always are, more speculation than substance, quoting an anonymous source who says the family has declined to comment further, quoting a school administrator who calls it "a tragic accident," his tone flat and rehearsed in a way that tells me the school worked hard to make this go away as quietly and quickly as possible. There’s no follow up piece linked. No update on what happened to Dominic Valentine afterward, whether he ever skated again, whether anyone ever explained what actually happened on that ice two years ago. The silence afterward feels almost louder than the article itself, a story someone worked hard to bury.

My hands go cold around my phone.

I sit up slowly in bed, careful not to wake Mandi, the blue light of the screen the only illumination in the room. I read the article one more time from the top, trying to reconcile it with the boy who caught my arm on the cobblestones the first day I arrived here, gentle even in that first accidental touch. The boy who told a hallway full of hostility to be quiet with two words and then walked away shaking. The boy who’s been booking the ice slot before mine every single week since before any of this even started, without ever once explaining why. Every memory I have of him argues against the version of him sitting in this article, and yet here it is, printed in black and white, refusing to be unwritten.

*None of it fits together cleanly,* I think, my jaw tightening. *Or maybe all of it fits together too well, in a shape I don’t want to look at directly yet.*

I take a screenshot of the article before I can talk myself out of it, my thumb pressing the buttons automatically while some more careful part of my brain quietly protests that I’m crossing a line I can’t uncross. I pull up the notebook, the same one I’ve been filling for weeks now, the one with Alexa’s eleven seconds of stillness after a howl, the twins’ too fluid grace, the golden eyes at my window on the first full moon. I add the screenshot to the newest page, right under Liam’s five useless words from two nights ago, one more entry in a file that keeps growing heavier than I want it to be.

My hands are shaking as I do it.

I don’t fully understand why. It isn’t fear exactly, not the way fear usually feels, sharp and immediate. It’s something slower and heavier than that, something that feels less like I should be scared and more like I already know this matters, though I don’t yet understand how much. Maybe it’s the way every new piece of this puzzle seems to circle back to Puck, no matter how hard I try to make it point somewhere else.

I set the phone down finally, screen dimming to black, and lie back against my pillow in the dark, staring up at that same water stain. Dominic Valentine’s name repeats itself quietly in my head, a name my mind refuses to let go of even though I don’t yet know why it should. Somewhere beneath the exhaustion pulling at my eyes, a small, stubborn certainty settles in: I won’t be able to stop until I know exactly what it means.