One.
The worst part had not been the pain.
Pain had a shape. A beginning and a middle and, eventually, mercifully, an end. Pain could be medicated, managed, distracted from, slept through. The worst part had been the isolation—the vast, soundless emptiness that surrounded a person whose entire identity had been publicly shattered and who discovered, in the aftermath, exactly how many people in her life had been there for the skater and not the girl wearing the skates.
Six months in a rehabilitation facility in upstate New York. A sterile, beige-walled institution populated by torn rotator cuffs and shattered tibias and the gaunt, hollowed-out expressions of athletes confronting the possibility that their bodies had betrayed them for the last time. My room had a window that overlooked an employee parking lot. The bed had metal rails. The nightstand held a plastic water cup, two prescription bottles, and a phone I’d stopped answering by the second week.
The calls had trickled in at first—coaches, federation officials, a publicist from the skating association who’d wanted to “craft the messaging.” Teammates who’d transmitted variations of the same text:thinking of you, stay strong, sending light.Each message arrived with diminishing frequency and conviction, the way an echo loses its shape the further it travels from the original sound.
And the nights. The long, punishing stretches of darkness spent studying a ceiling that yielded no insight, listening to the institutional drone of a building that never fully powered down, inventorying every rupture in the life I’d built and discovering no one on the far side of the damage willing to help me hold what was left.
My mother had called twice. Both conversations clockedunder four minutes and carried the emotional temperature of a contract negotiation. My father?—
Not now. Not him. Not today.
No one came. Not consistently. Not in the way thatmattered—the showing-up-at-two-a.m.-with-takeout-and-no-agenda kind of mattering. The sitting-in-the-chair-beside-the-bed-and-not-requiring-a-single-word kind. The species of presence where the person’s arrival was the medicine, and everything else—the food, the conversation, the hand on your arm—was supplementary.
Nobody did that.
Not until Candy.
A warmth spread through my chest that had nothing to do with blood sugar or body temperature, and the smile that pulled at the corners of my mouth was involuntary—muscle memory of a different kind. The kind that remembered joy.
Candice Hollister Holmes.Candy.Five-foot-four inches of wild ginger curls, freckled constellations, and the kind of loyalty that required a warning label. She’d been three time zones and an ocean away at a gymnastics invitational in Prague when my knee had detonated on live television, and herentire coaching staffhad conspired to quarantine the news until her competition concluded—because every single person on that team understood, with the certainty of people who’d witnessed it firsthand, that the moment Candy learned what happened, the laws of physics and good sportsmanship would cease to apply.
They’d managed to hold the perimeter for forty-three hours.
Forty-three hours before a Czech radio broadcast threaded my name through the arena speakers alongside the phrasescareer-threatening injuryandstretchered from the ice, and Candy—standing behind the uneven bars with chalk-white hands and competition braids and the focused intensity of an athlete thirty seconds from her mount—had processed both phrases simultaneously and detonated.
The account I’d assembled from her traumatized teammates painted a portrait of controlled devastation. She’d dropped the chalk. Walked—not run,walked, which was somehow more terrifying—to her head coach. Delivered four sentences: “I need a phone. I need a flight. I need everyone to get the fuck out of my way. And if anyone tries to stop me, I will dislocate their shoulder, and I know exactly how to do it.”
Six phone calls. One red-eye ticket. A screaming confrontation with a federation liaison who’d attempted to invoke her competition contract. An Uber driver in Prague who reportedly ran three red lights and later told a teammate he’d done so because—and this was a direct quote—“the small angry girl with the red hair scared me more than the police.”
She’d walked into my hospital room fourteen hours later. Six in the morning. Duffel bag on one shoulder. A pint of cookie dough ice cream in one hand, baklava in the other and a look on her face so molten with protective fury that I’d started crying before she’d crossed the threshold.
She hadn’t offered platitudes. Hadn’t told me to stay strong or that I’d come back from this or that everything happens for a reason. She’d kicked off her shoes, crawled into the hospital bed beside me, pulled the thin institutional blanket over both our bodies, and asked: “Who do I need to kill, and do you want it to look like an accident or a statement?”
I’d laughed. For the first time in two weeks, I’dlaughed.
The memory of her settled over me now like a weighted blanket—her untamed ginger curls and scattered freckles and the scent that was purely, unmistakablyCandy: wild strawberries and fresh-cut grass layered over a base of warm cinnamon so vivid and aggressive it could disperse a room full of posturing Alpha pheromones in under thirty seconds. Her scent didn’t ask permission to occupy space. Itdeclared. Loudly. With exclamation points.
My racing heart eased. The residual vertigo loosened its grip. The ceiling stopped swaying and committed to stillness.
The one person in my life who didn’t vanish.
Every other connection I’d built had evaporated in the aftermath. Partners. Coaches. The federation contacts who’d spoken about my potential in the present tense and then quietly shifted to the past. Even Kai—especiallyKai—who’d been absent for years before the fall but whose ghost somehow grew louder in the wreckage, as if the universe couldn’t resist underlining the lesson:the people built to catch you will always be the first to let go.
Candy stayed. Through the surgery. Through the rehabilitation. Through the midnight panic attacks and the mornings I couldn’t swing my legs over the side of the bed and the afternoon I’d launched a crutch at the wall hard enough to crater the drywall and then crumpled to the floor and wept until my ribs ached. She’d restructured her entire training schedule, moved into a sublet three blocks from the facility, and spent five months being the person who arrived.
Every single day.
She was at her own training now—a conditioning block at Olympia’s east-side gymnastics complex, preparing for the summer qualification circuit that would determine her ownOlympic trajectory. Two Omegas chasing two separate Games on two separate timelines, tethered by the kind of bond that didn’t weaken with distance but was immeasurably richer when the distance closed.
I should text her. Tell her I ate the granola bar. Tell her the vertigo passed. Tell her I’m managing.
Am I managing?
My hand drifted to rest across my eyes, blocking the fluorescent glare that leaked through my lids. In the self-imposed darkness, my breathing leveled. My pulse counted its way toward baseline. The rink hummed its electric vespers, and the cold settled on my exposed skin like a second atmosphere.
