"I'm sorry?" he said.
"The toe pick. On the triple axel. Your entry edge is clean but the pick is planting too deep, which costs you approximately two hundredths of a second on the launch and requires compensatory rotation in the air. You're making the compensation, which is why the jump lands, but the landing is slightly back-weighted because the extra rotation shifts your center of gravity by a margin that's invisible to judges but audible to anyone listening to the blade contact."
He continued staring. The staring had a specific quality that I could not read, which was unusual because I read everything. Faces, bodies, trajectories. But this face was doing something that my model did not have a category for. The expression was not angry or startled or offended. It was something closer to recognition. The expression of a person hearing their own language spoken by a stranger.
"You can hear the difference in the landing," he said. Not a question.
"The clean landing has a specific frequency. Approximately 2,100 hertz. The back-weighted landing drops to around 1,800. The difference is subtle but consistent."
"You measured the frequency of my landings."
"I estimated. I do not have instruments."
"You estimated the hertz of my blade contact by ear."
"I have good ears. It is a goalie trait. We track pucks by sound when the visual is screened."
Something happened on his face. The something was small and involved the area around his eyes and the slight relaxation of the muscle group that controlled the tension in his jaw. If I had to name it, which I did not want to do because naming things about this man was the behavior that had caused the leak in the first place, I would call it the beginning of trust.
"You're the goalie," he said. "The one who sits in row three."
"Yes."
"Every morning."
"Yes."
"With the coffee that you never drink."
"I drink it. It is simply cold by the time I remember to."
The almost-something on his face deepened. Not a smile. A thaw.
"Why do you watch?" he asked.
I considered lying. I considered a deflection about ice time and scheduling and the convenience of the facility. These were available options that would have preserved the system and resealed the compartment and allowed me to continue operating within predictable parameters.
I did not choose those options.
"Because I have never seen anything move the way you move," I said. "And I watch things that I cannot solve. It is compulsive. It is not something I can turn off."
The glass was between us. The physical barrier that separated the ice surface from the stands, the plexiglass that I had been watching through for three weeks, was approximately four inches thick and six feet tall and it was the only thing preventing this conversation from being two people standing close enough to touch.
"You can't solve me," Theo said. The words were quiet. Directed at the glass more than at me.
"No," I said. "I am beginning to understand that."
He looked at me for a long time. The looking was not the wary assessment of the first week or the grudging acceptance of the second. It was something else. The looking of a man who had been watched by audiences and judges and cameras for his entire career and who was now, for possibly the first time, beingwatched by someone who was not measuring a score but was simply paying attention.
"The toe pick," he said. "You're right about the depth. My coach used to say the same thing."
"Your coach had good eyes."
"My coach wasn't listening to the hertz."
"No. That part is just me."
He turned and skated back to center ice. He did not say goodbye. He did not make plans. He simply returned to the ice and set up for the triple axel entry, and I watched him adjust the toe pick depth by approximately a quarter-inch, and the landing frequency shifted from 1,800 to 2,100, and the sound was clean, and the sound was beautiful, and I stood at the glass with my cold coffee and listened to the sound of a man I could not solve getting closer to solving himself.
