Page 26 of Ice Queen

“Did I say something wrong?” Her voice floats through the air, the very same waver that got me to help her last time still present.

Turning to look over my shoulder, her finger is bent and resting between her nose and her lip. Her eyes don’t stay focused on one thing for too long before jumping to something else. She doesn’t move, but stays crouched on the ground.

Inhaling deeply through my nose, I let it out slowly. I don’t want to explode on this poor girl, but the fact that I was doing exactly what I was asked to do, and the media still somehow spun it into some nefarious thing, is threatening to ruin my whole day.

Coffee and therapy. Coffee and therapy. I repeat over and over. “No,” I grumble before pulling the door of Beautiful Pour open and stepping inside.

The ache in my chest grows tighter when I see Maria’s face. “What did you say to the poor girl?”

Against my better judgment, I turn, looking back in the direction I came. And there, standing in the same spot, is a woman who’s curled in on herself. Shoulder hunched, arms wrapped around her middle, and her head bowed to the ground.

Damn it. “I just told her I had to go, and I do. But I need coffee, and I need to change my clothes.”

Maggie picks that moment to sit at my feet, her tail knocks against the front of my sneakers as she looks out the window, too. Almost as if she’s picking sides, and for once, it’s not mine. I groan, not knowing what to do about this.

“Maria, I don’t have time for this today. Put a thousand on my card and let me pay for her coffee until it runs out. Bring her one every day, I don’t care. But I really have to go.”

I hand over my card before disappearing into the bathroom to change. Maggie sits by the door, watching as I quietly unravel. My hands shake as I take my wet shirt off, letting it fall to the floor with a loud splat. I look at myself in the mirror, my face paler than normal, cheeks tinted pink from my run. But it’s my eyes that pull at the thread that haphazardly holds my inner wound together.

They look haunted, distant, and all wrong. Damn it, my hands brace against the cold porcelain of the sink as my head hangs heavy in front of me.

How did I get here? My contract and commitment to my team are being questioned, even though we’re going to the playoffs this year and I’m second in goals right now. Then there’s this unsettling feeling over the fact that I hurt Kait’s feelings because I was trying to save her feelings.

I haven’t even gone out while on the road in almost three months, and now they’re spinning team required events into something they aren’t. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

“I want you to pick something else to work on today.” Dr. Williams says, pen resting against his notebook. “Not the crash itself. But something it made you believe about yourself.”

I blink a few times, running through the laundry list of things it made me believe before I hold up a finger. “One, the people who get close to me get hurt.”

He nods. “Okay.”

“Two, I’m the idiot who survived when better people didn’t.”

He sighs, but I keep going. My chest heaves as the third finger raises. “Three, if I let myself be happy, I’m betraying them all.”

He snaps his fingers, pointing right at me. “That one.”

“But why?”

“Because it’s the belief that’s still running your life.” He leans forward slightly. “When you think about being happy, what words come to mind?”

I stare at the floor, fingers clenching against the backs of my hands. “Undeserving.”

He scribbles something down on his paper. “So the negative belief is: I don’t deserve to be happy.”

I nod. I don’t really. Millie and her family were larger than life. They had these big, humble dreams that they couldn’t wait to work on once we all moved here from Spain. We were almost there, only ten miles from the airport, when the plane went down.

“When you think about Millie on the plane, what would you rather believe about yourself?”

His question catches me off guard. I frown as I try to put into words what I’d like to believe. “That… I don’t know. That I did everything I could.”

He studies me for a second. “Does that feel true right now?”

I snort, throwing myself against the back of the couch. “No.”

“On a scale of one to seven, where one feels completely false and seven is completely true, how true does ‘I did everything I could’ feel?”

“Two”