Beyond The Boards

Excerpt

Prologue

Lennox

The first thing I remembered was the light.

Not streetlights. Not the familiar amber glow of the route I’d driven a hundred times. This was different—white and hungry, filling my windshield too fast, too close, coming from the wrong direction.

There wasn’t time to swear.

There wasn’t even time to think move.

Only the brief, ugly comprehension that something was about to happen that couldn’t be undone.

Impact hit like a fist through paper.

Metal screamed.

Glass burst into glittering shards that turned the inside of my car into a snow globe made of knives.

Then silence—thick and sudden, like someone had thrown a blanket over the world.

My lungs forgot how to work for a beat. When they finally remembered, the air came in sharp and shallow, scraping my throat on the way down. My hands were still wrapped around the steering wheel as if I could hold the universe steady by refusing to let go.

I blinked once. Twice.

My left leg didn’t feel like mine.

It felt distant. Detached. Wrong. Like it belonged to someone else and I’d woken up wearing the wrong body.

I tried to shift it—just the smallest movement, just enough to test.

Pain detonated so bright my vision went white around the edges.

I didn’t scream.

I didn’t make a sound at all, which would have surprised anyone who’d seen me take a hit on the ice and come up spitting blood through a grin.

But this wasn’t the rink.

There was no whistle. No adrenaline. No crowd noise turning fear into fuel.

Just the cold, blunt truth settling in my bones.

This is bad.

The horn of another car blared somewhere far away, warped and muffled, like my ears had been stuffed with cotton. I tasted copper. Realized I’d bitten my tongue hard enough to bleed. Somewhere beneath the chemical tang of airbags and burnt rubber, my stomach rolled.

My phone lay on the passenger-side floorboard, screen cracked, still glowing like it was trying to be helpful. Notifications I couldn’t read. A spiderweb of glass over everything.

And for one stupid, human second—one—I thought about tomorrow’s skate.

Practice at dawn. The routine. The way my body always felt most alive when my blades met the ice.

Then the weight of reality pressed down.

Not tomorrow. Not that life.

Not the one I’d built since childhood, since I’d been a little girl with frayed laces and a mouthguard too big for my face, taking up space in rinks that didn’t always want to make room for me.

A voice shouted outside the car. Another answered.

Footsteps skidded on pavement. Doors opened and slammed. The night filled with motion that didn’t reach me, not really—not yet.

“Ma’am?” someone called, closer now. “Can you hear me?”

I could. I didn’t answer.

It wasn’t bravado. It wasn’t shock, exactly.

It was the math.

Body. Ice. Time.

The kind of math you don’t want to do, because you already know the answer.

A face appeared at my window, distorted by fractured glass. A man in a reflective vest, eyes wide and panicked like he couldn’t decide if I was alive or not.

“Don’t move,” he said, too loud. “Okay? Don’t move.”

As if I had a choice.

Behind him, under the harsh wash of headlights and flashing lights, someone swayed—held up by an officer. Blond hair. A laugh that didn’t fit the moment. A voice slurred into the night.

“I’m fine,” she insisted, like it was the only phrase she knew. “I’m fine. I’m—”

The officer’s grip tightened.

Drunk.

My brain supplied the word like a curse.

Not weather. Not a freak accident. Not a bad break.

A decision. A stupid, selfish decision that collided with my life and left it in pieces.

The resentment came later. The rage. The months where I lay awake picturing her face and wondering how something so small as one choice could take something so big from me.

But right then, pinned in place, shock humming through my bones, there was only the certainty.

The ice was still out there. Rinks still existed. Hockey would keep spinning.

It just wouldn’t spin with me on it the same way again.

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