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Tomorrow I’d either prove Ellie right or prove that my performance in game three was who I really was when it mattered.
My phone buzzed one more time. Still awake?
Yeah.
Me too. I pulled up the game footage from your playoff run two seasons ago. The save you made in game seven? When you went full split and caught it with your glove?
What about it?
That’s who you are tomorrow. Not game three. That guy.
Heat flooded through me.
Get some sleep, she sent. Tomorrow’s going to be good. I know it.
This time, I let myself believe her.
Because the alternative was admitting that I’d spent almost two weeks getting my body back just to prove my head was still broken.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BRASHE
Iwoke up before my alarm, my hip throbbing like I’d reinjured it in my sleep. Except I hadn’t. Ellie had cleared me. The pain lived in my head, which made it worse.
I did my stretches, going through the motions from the instruction sheet even though my hands were shaking too hard to hold the positions right. The coffee I made tasted like metal. The eggs I scrambled turned rubbery because I kept checking my phone for a text that hadn’t come.
Everything was exactly the same as every other game day other than my meeting with the sports psychologist.
“I can’t stop thinking about every mistake,” I said after I’d sat across from Dr. Holman in her office. “By the time the puck gets to me, I’ve already imagined screwing it up three different ways.”
She leaned back in her chair, studying my face. “And when you imagine screwing it up, what happens next?”
“The team loses. Everybody sees I’m not the same goalie. That the injury changed something.”
“So the thought isn’t really about the puck.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The puck is just the trigger. The story underneath is, If I make a mistake, people will find out I’m broken.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes. “Maybe.”
“How many goals have you allowed in your career?”
“A lot.”
“Thousands of shots, hundreds of goals against, and you still made it here. You’re the starting goalie for a pro-orc hockey team. So few get that far. So why does this loss feel different?”
“Before, I trusted myself.”
“No. Before, you trusted yourself to recover.”
I couldn’t see where she was going with this.
She leaned forward, bracing her arms on her desk. “Every goalie gets beat, even the best ones in the world. What separates them isn’t perfection. It’s that they don’t treat a goal against as evidence that they’re defective.”
“Feels pretty defective to me.”
