I was supposed to be the fists between her and every careless, destructive force that the world aimed in her direction.
And for eight years, I was not there.
Étienne drops beside her, gathering books with the silent efficiency of a man whose hands know how to handle fragile things. They exchange quiet words I cannot hear, and Maeshakes her head at whatever he offers, her voice carrying the firm resolve of a woman refusing assistance.
The conversation shifts. Mae announces her intention to race Rafe on the ice. The hallway reacts with the predictable spectrum of disbelief and condescension. Rafe laughs, the sound rich and dismissive and entirely unprepared for the quiet devastation of Mae's response.
"Can you even skate?"
Mae rises from the floor. Books against her chest. Hair across her face. Dignity intact despite the wreckage surrounding her.
She looks him dead in the eyes.
"A little."
Two words that carry the weight of a career. I know because I have delivered my own version of them on a hundred rinks to a hundred coaches who asked me the same question with the same condescension and received the same answer and lived to regret their assumptions.
Rafe's smirk wavers. Recovers. He dismisses the challenge and exits with Cal in tow, leaving behind the ruins of a bag and the promise of a confrontation on ice.
I am vibrating.
"You're going to race him? On the ice? Mae. MAE. Do you understand how iconic that will be?"
"If she wins," Jace adds, his tone carrying the quiet certainty of a man who has already decided the outcome and is simply waiting for reality to confirm.
"WHEN she wins." I correct him with the ferocity of a woman who does not traffic in conditional tenses when the subject is her best friend's capabilities.
Étienne helps Mae collect the final remnants, his storm-blue eyes finding hers with a question I can read from across the hallway because it is written in a language I speak fluently: the language of people who believe in someone whose ownconfidence has been eroded by a world that refuses to see what is obvious.
"Think you can prove him wrong?"
Mae looks down the corridor. At the scattered evidence of a life assembled from scraps. At the books another person is carrying because she no longer has anything to carry them in.
And she smiles.
"One way to find out, I guess."
That's my girl.
The Mae I remember. The one who stood up to bullies with her fists raised and her jaw set and her eyes carrying a fire that no amount of cruelty could extinguish. The one who held my hand on the first day of school because she was brave enough for both of us. The one I left behind when my mother decided that friendship was a luxury Sage Holloway did not deserve.
She is still in there. Underneath the years and the hurt and the careful armor she built from solitude and survival.
And if Rafe Calder thinks his speed on the ice is going to be enough to outrun what lives inside Mabeline Mae Rose when she decides she has something to prove, he is in for the education of his fucking life.
I grab Jace's arm, hauling him toward the east wing because my Omega league meeting begins in twelve minutes and Coach Vasquez's feelings about tardiness have been communicated through both verbal warnings and the implied threat of physical conditioning severe enough to restructure kneecap anatomy.
"We'll be at the race!" I call over my shoulder. "Every second of it! With popcorn and a banner and possibly airhorns if I can find a vendor on this campus who sells them!"
"Please don't bring airhorns," Jace protests as he is dragged along. "This is an academic institution, not a playoff arena."
"EVERYTHING is a playoff arena if you believe hard enough, Nakamura!"
Mae waves from the hallway behind us, her smile small and cautious and carrying the specific brightness of a woman who is beginning to remember what it feels like to have people in her corner.
I wave back with my free hand, the other still locked around Jace's arm in a grip he has long since stopped trying to escape.
We round the corner and the corridor swallows Mae's figure, converting her from presence to absence in the span of a few strides. My legs slow from sprint to walk as the meeting's proximity allows me to downshift from emergency transit to standard locomotion.
