He winked.
At the camera. Full deployment. The single-eyed, charisma-loaded,I-know-exactly-what-I’m-doinggesture that had been generating GIF compilations and fan accounts since his first post-game interview at Olympia and that was now being delivered to an audience of hundreds of millions on the opening night of the Winter Olympic Games.
I rolled my eyes.
The gesture was involuntary, genuine, and approximatelyas effective at concealing my amusement as a paper umbrella was at concealing a monsoon. The eye-roll—the comprehensive, full-orbital,you-are-incorrigible-and-I-am-choosing-not-to-stop-yourotation that had become my trademark response to Luka’s public charm offensives—was, I knew, exactly the reaction the cameras wanted. The dynamic. The contrast. The serious, composed, figure-skating Omega and the charming, smirking, winking hockey goaltender whose chemistry was visible to the naked eye and whose bickering was the specific, sizzling,they’re-definitely-togetherenergy that social media algorithms were designed to amplify.
The reporter was delighted. The expression visible behind her microphone—the bright,this-is-going-to-be-my-best-segmentenergy of a journalist who had just captured the kind of organic, unscripted, chemistry-on-camera moment that broadcast producers spent entire careers chasing.
“This may be the pairing we all need to be watching, ladies and gentlemen!” she said into her mic, the commentary directed at the broadcast feed with the enthusiastic, editorial,I-am-making-a-recommendationenergy that floor correspondents deployed when they believed they’d identified the story of the evening. “The start of these Winter Games is going to bespectacular!”
The interviewer moved on. The camera pivoting to the next delegation, the next athletes, the next sound bite in the relentless, content-generating machinery of Olympic broadcast coverage. The moment—our moment, the carefully curated, strategically deployed, chemistry-on-camera performance that had just been transmitted to hundreds of millions of screens—was in the archive now. Filed. Distributed. Already being clipped and shared and analyzed by the social media ecosystem that would spend the nextseveral weeks constructing narrative from the raw material we’d provided.
I swallowed.
The lump in my throat was made of years. Of hospital rooms and rehabilitation facilities and solo practice sessions at four in the morning and the specific, accumulated,I-have-been-building-toward-this-since-I-was-fourweight of a lifetime’s investment arriving at its maturation date. The stadium’s noise—the sixty-two-thousand-voice roar, the pyrotechnics, the orchestral score swelling through the speaker system as the torch relay ceremony prepared to commence—surrounded me like a living thing, and I stood inside it with my Olympic uniform fitted to my body and my pack’s scent threaded through the monsoon around me and my name in a broadcaster’s mouth and my father’s gold bracelet on my wrist and the knowledge, settled deep in the bedrock of my chest where the most important truths lived, that this wasit.
This is the moment.
Not the one I imagined on Dad’s shoulders in Montreal. Not the one I dreamed about in a hospital bed while the pulse oximeter beeped. Not the one I rehearsed during the dark months of rehabilitation when the ceiling was my only audience and the question of whether I’d ever stand on competition ice again was the only conversation I had with myself. Not any of those versions, because those versions were imagined by a woman who was alone, and the woman standing in this stadium is not alone.
I have a pack. A real one. Assembled from chaos and chemistry and sixty undelivered letters and a bureaucratic crisis at eight in the morning and the specific, inexplicable, refuses-to-be-explained scent compatibility that connects five people whoseindividual damage has produced, somehow, a collective strength that none of them possessed in isolation.
I have Luka. Whose knees found frat house floors and whose hands found throw entries and whose forehead found Kael’s during panic attacks because a dead woman taught him how to breathe and he carried the lesson forward like a sacred thing.
I have Kael. Whose sixty letters never arrived but whose skates were kept on the third shelf and whose rink was frozen every winter for a woman he refused to believe was gone and who is currently, I have no doubt, somewhere in this procession with his jaw clenched and his composure locked and his frosted-pine scent broadcasting at captain’s frequency while the man beneath the performance is terrified and thrilled and exactly as stubborn as the day I met him.
I have Maddox. The enforcer who sprinted. Who held. Who noticed headaches before they were mentioned and brought Advil without being asked and whose quiet, cedar-scented, standing-in-the-gap presence has been the structural foundation that every other dynamic in this pack has been built on top of.
I have Renzo. The playboy who discovered he was a bottom when it comes to their dynamic, allowing me to be expressive and unique in comparison to all the average Omegas. Whose green hair and clean-zesty-mint scent and genuine, uncalculated laughter in the shower had been the first evidence that new connections could be built that weren’t replacements for old ones but additions to a life that had room, after all, for more than I’d let myself believe.
And I have myself.
Octavia Moreau. Twenty-five. Omega. Figure skater. Rebuilt knee. Three perfect tens. A program set to “Die on This Hill” that she intends to skate with every ounce of the fury and the love and the specific, bone-deep, I-will-not-be-denied defiance that has carried her from a stretcher in Toronto to a stadiumholding sixty-two thousand people who are about to watch her prove that the girl who bled on the ice was never the end of the story.
She was the beginning.
The torch relay commenced.
The flame traveled from bearer to bearer—each one a former Olympic medalist, each handoff accompanied by the stadium’s escalating roar, the fire’s journey tracing the perimeter of the arena floor in a procession that was both ceremonial and symbolic, the light passing from one generation of competitors to the next with the implicit message that the flame was not created at these Games but carriedtothem by every athlete who had ever competed and every dream that had ever been pursued on frozen surfaces under stadium lights.
The final bearer ascended the stairs to the cauldron.
The flame caught.
The stadium erupted.
And I stood in the light and the noise and the overwhelming, heart-swelling,this-is-real-this-is-happening-this-is-minemagnitude of the moment, and I thought about Garrison Hale.
Somewhere in this stadium, behind a different flag, in a different uniform, he is standing in the same light. Hearing the same noise. Feeling the same flame. And he has no idea what’s coming for him.
He set me up. Dropped me. Intercepted the letters. Manufactured my isolation. Engineered a silence that cost me five years and a pack and the kind of trust that takes a lifetime to build and a single man to destroy.
And now he’s going to watch me compete.
Going to see me on the ice he tried to take from me. Going to hear the crowd respond to a woman whose namehe thought he’d erased from the competitive record and whose score—three perfect tens, Garrison, in case you missed it—is already higher than anything his replacement Omega has produced in five years of trying to fill the space I left.
They’re about to tackle their dreams.
