"Ren sends me clips. With your permission, I assume."
I had given Ren permission to film my programs for technical review. I had not considered that the films would travel to Seattle and produce a phone call that would reactivate the precise neurological cascade I had spent seven months trying to extinguish.
"I'll think about it," I said.
I did not think about it. I panicked.
The panic was not rational. Panic never is. It is the body's emergency broadcast system, firing without editorial oversight, flooding the nervous system with chemicals designed for situations involving predators and cliffs and other immediate threats to survival. A regional figure skating competition in suburban Atlanta was not a predator. My body disagreed.
I was in the rink parking lot at 5:30 AM. Mars was not here yet. I had arrived early, which was unusual, because the early arrival was not about skating. The early arrival was about needing to be somewhere that felt safe, and the parking lot of the Decatur rink at predawn had become, through association, a safe place.
My hands were shaking. The shaking was the first symptom. Then the vision: the peripheral field narrowing, the world contracting from panoramic to tunnel, the tunnel aimed at a single point of light that was the memory of a Nashville arena and 15,000 faces and a body in the air that had forgotten how to land.
I gripped the steering wheel. I counted. Four in, four hold, four out, four hold. The counting was the anchor. The counting was the rope between the cliff and the ground. I counted and the panic did not escalate into the full, vision-destroying, world-contracting episode and the not-escalating was the victory and the victory was exhausting.
Mars's car appeared at 5:15. I saw it through the windshield, the dark sedan pulling into its usual spot three spaces from mine. I saw him get out, tall and deliberate, his equipment bag over one shoulder, his coffee in his other hand. He walked toward the building and then he stopped.
He looked at my car. At me, behind the windshield. The goalie's reading. The instantaneous, unconscious assessment of body position, angle, trajectory.
He changed direction. Crossed the parking lot. Opened my car door.
I was folded over the steering wheel. My hands were on the wheel and my forehead was on my hands and the shaking was still there, reduced but present, the aftershock of a system that had been flooded and was slowly draining.
Mars did not say "it's okay." He did not say "breathe." He did not ask what happened or offer solutions or fill the space with words.
He put his hand on my back. Between my shoulder blades. The exact spot where a teammate touches you after a hard shift, after a bad play, after the kind of moment that requires the presence of another body rather than the sound of another voice.
His hand was large and warm and steady. The steadiness was not performative. It was the steadiness of a man whose hands stopped ninety-mile-per-hour projectiles for a living and who understood, at a cellular level, what it meant to be the thing that held still when everything else was moving too fast.
I breathed. The hand stayed. The parking lot was quiet. The morning dark held us.
"Competition," I said eventually. My voice was rough. "My coach called about a regional. Six weeks. Here in Atlanta."
His hand did not move. "And the call triggered this."
"The call triggered this."
"How bad?"
"Not the worst. I've had worse. The worst was three months after Nationals. Full blackout. Woke up on the floor of my apartment in Seattle with Axel sitting on my chest looking at me like I was the most disappointing thing he'd ever seen."
"Your cat judged you for a panic attack."
"My cat judges me for everything. He is an equal-opportunity critic."
The tiniest sound. Not quite a laugh. A vibration in the air near my ear that suggested Mars Santos had nearly laughed and had caught it before it fully emerged.
"Can you compete?" he asked.
"I can land everything at 5 AM with you in the stands. Put another person there and my body locks up. Put 2,000 people in an arena and I'll fall before the first jump."
"You don't know that."
"I know my nervous system. It has a very clear policy on audiences."
"It has a very clear policy on audiences that aren't me." His hand moved on my back. Not stroking. Shifting. The slight adjustment of a man who was choosing his next words with the same precision he chose his next positioning in the crease. "Maybe the question isn't whether you can compete. Maybe the question is whether the signal can travel."
"The signal?"
