“I’m sorry about Ari. If I’d known who she was from the start…”
“You don’t need to explain yourself. I’ll take my apology in the form of a lifetime’s worth of favors,” she said with a smile that promised she would find uniquely bizarre requests for him to fulfill as payback. “But seriously, Drew. Get your shit together. If you’re not careful, you’re going to miss out on the best that life has to offer you. Like Ari.”
“You’d be okay with that?” he asked, surprised.
“No. But youdoactually like her, don’t you?”
Drew nodded as he watched his sister’s face soften. “Yeah,” he admitted. His grandparents looked back and forth at them, then Thandie sighed and gave him a long, hard look.
“So… what are you going to do about it?”
40Ari
DAY NINE OF THE 2026 OLYMPICS
Ari was supposed to be heading to a celebratory team breakfast but instead she was sitting at the edge of her bed, replaying each scene from last night. The sight of Drew holding flowers for her, the comfort she’d felt around his grandparents and how, for a moment, she’d allowed herself to forget that this was all just pretend.
But then she thought about how tense things had gotten when Thandie arrived. The moment Drew had said this would never work out, and how she’d run out of the restaurant before she could let him say goodbye. She’d made the mistake of allowing herself to imagine an unlikely world in which she and Drew did make it work. She’d found whispers of it in the carefree laughter that came out whenever she was around him. In the way he reached out for her hand at the exact moment she needed it most. And in how many times she’d glanced over to find him smiling at her with those bright, kind, warm eyes. Because Drew wasn’t likethe boys she’d dated before. As she got ready to leave her room, she thought back to all the guys in her past.
Ari had a type: athletic, charming, and a little too intense. She’d spent so much of her life managing every situation around her that she’d found herself drawn to men who did the managing, who took care of things, made plans, and made sure everything was under control. But Drew was different. He never tried to change or direct her. She didn’t feel like she was auditioning to be the other half of some sports power couple, nor did she feel like she had to curate an image of perfection to seamlessly fit into his world. With Drew, she felt lighter, more girlish, almost entirely unburdened.
Usually, when she started seeing someone new, her brain went on high alert. She was always looking for red flags and listening for alarm bells. But Drew had put all his cards on the table that very first night. So, instead of looking for signs that it wouldn’t work, she’d absentmindedly started looking for reasons why it might. However, thoughts like that went against the terms and conditions of their arrangement. She and Drew had always had an expiration date, and now it was over. She wanted to go back in time, walk back into the restaurant, and tell him that she liked him for real. But she couldn’t. So, instead, she put on her coat and left GB House to join her teammates for their quarterfinal-qualification breakfast.
Her phone started ringing as she opened the front door, so she patted herself down, trying to figure out which of the eight pockets in her puffer coat she’d put it in. When she pulled it out and saw that it was her mom, she answered immediately.
“Arikoishe, congratulations!” her mom said. She was on the other end of the phone, singing and ululating. So, her momhadheard about their win. Her congratulations were coming a day late, but Ari had always been quick to forgive.
“Thanks, Mama!” she said, stepping out into the snow. Excited to FaceTime with her mom and give her a play-by-play of the game. But she quickly realized that her mom hadn’t just called to congratulate her.
“Well done, but I wanted to call you to talk about your sister. She’s becoming a serious problem now, very unruly,” her mom said with irritation.
Ari felt deflated. She loved her mom. When Ari was a teenager, she, her mom, and her sister had spent every night snuggled up on the sofa watching TV, and every weekend walking around the shops. Without their father in the picture, they were a tight unit. A solid three-rope bond. And because of that, Ari had always been her mother’s closest confidante. It had started in small ways, with her mom telling her about how stressful work was or telling her about the latest extended-family drama. Then Ari became the first person her mom called whenever anything bad happened. Her mom told her about her money worries, the relatives back home who blamed her for the divorce, and all the arguments she had with Ari and Anesu’s dad. Her mom spent hours confiding in her, and on more than one occasion, her mom ended the night weeping in her arms.
At first, Ari had seen it as a sign that her mother trusted her and thought she was responsible enough to talk to about grown-up things. But as she’d gotten into her later teenage years and started trying to build a life for herself, it became a burden. She knew that she was the only person her mother truly trusted, but that responsibility had started to weigh down on her. Her mom had so much going on that there was only enough air in their conversations forherissues. Now Ari was tired of it.
“Mom, when is my quarterfinal game?” Ari asked softly,coming to a pause in the middle of the path that led out of GB House. She sat in the silence that confirmed her mom didn’t know.
“Why did I break up with Harrison?” she asked, her eyes beginning to water as the silence continued.
“Arikoishe,” her mom said gently. “We can talk about that when you come home, but first we need to fix the wedding dilemma.” As Ari walked in the snow that morning, listening to her mother talk about how betrayed she felt by the situation, she realized she couldn’t go on like this. She didn’t want to. So, she shook her head and took her gloves off to better handle her phone. Getting her contacts up and tapping on the screen until she connected another call.
“Girl, I can’t talk for long. I have to head out in ten minutes,” her sister said as she appeared on her screen. She had half a face of makeup on, the lines of her contour still standing out against her neck and cheekbones.
“I think it’s going to take you more than ten minutes.” Ari smiled, then remembered that she wasn’t just calling to chat. She tapped a few more buttons until a third face appeared on the screen.
“Arikoishe, is everything alright?” said her dad, sounding panicked. Ari rarely called him, and never without prior warning. It was strange to hear his voice on the other end of the phone. He still had a full head of hair, but it was speckled with strands of gray, highlighted by the sun pouring through the windows of his house in Harare, Zimbabwe. She’d never visited him and had no intention of going to his wedding. But on the two or three occasions a year when she called her dad, she always imagined what his home looked like. She wondered whether he had any framed photos of his daughters, if he’d kept any of the clothes she remembered from her childhood, or if he ever walked the halls of his new place and thought about his family.
But instead of asking him that, she tapped a few more buttons on her screen until the call merged and all four of them were on the line.
“Mom, Dad, Anesu. I love you, but I’m gonna say this for the first and last time: You’re all draining the life out of me.”
“You’re being a bit dramatic,” said Anesu.
“What is he doing here?” asked her mom.
“Is everything okay?” questioned her dad.
No. Everything wasn’t okay. With them, or with her. But as snow fell in St. Moritz that morning, she realized that only the latter was her responsibility. They hadn’t all sat on a call together like this in years, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
