We set up for the throw.
In pairs skating, the throw quadruple Salchow is the Mount Everest of elements. The female skater is launched by her partner with enough force and height to complete fourfull rotations in the air before landing on a single blade. It requires absolute trust. Absolute timing. The male partner’s job is to generate the lift—to propel his partner skyward with enough power that she has the altitude and rotational velocity to complete the element safely.
I’d done this throw a thousand times with Garrison. In practice, in competition, in my sleep. My body knew the mechanics the way my lungs knew how to breathe. He would grip my waist. I would load onto my left back outside edge. He would pull, twist, and launch, and I would fly.
Simple. Routine. Ours.
I felt his hands tighten around my waist—left hand at my hip, right hand bracing the small of my back—and I loaded into the entry edge. My weight settled into that back outside curve, my body already beginning to coil for the rotation. The music was screaming now, every instrument in that orchestra crying out in unison, and the crowd was on their feet, they wereon their feet, because they knew what was coming.
Everyone in that arena knew what was coming.
Now.
He launched me.
And the moment my skates left the ice, I knew something was wrong.
The height wasn’t there. I could feel it in my stomach—that sickening absence of the upward surge I’d felt a thousand times before. My body was already rotating, already committed to the four revolutions that required every fraction of an inch of altitude, but I waslow. Too low. The apex of the throw—the peak where I should have been suspended for that split-second of weightlessness—came and went a full foot below where it needed to be.
He didn’t push me high enough.
The realization slammed into me mid-rotation with the force of a freight train. My arms were already pulled tight against my chest, my body a spinning axis, but the math was wrong. The physics were wrong. I needed four rotations in roughly 0.7 seconds of air time, and he’d given me the launch for three. Maybe three and a quarter.
I’m not going to make it.
Time didn’t slow down the way people say it does. It shattered. It broke into jagged, crystalline fragments that sliced through my awareness one horror at a time. I could feel the rotation count—one, two, three—and my body was already descending, gravity hauling me back toward the ice with merciless indifference, and I was only three-quarters of the way through the fourth revolution.
Open up. Open up NOW.
Survival instinct took over. I threw my free leg out to try and catch the landing, tried to force my body into some semblance of a controlled descent, but I was still rotating. My right blade hit the ice at the wrong angle—not on the back outside edge where it needed to be, but on the flat, with too much sideways momentum and not enough vertical clearance.
The sound was the worst part.
It wasn’t a crack. It was apop—deep, wet, and visceral—followed by a sensation that ripped through my right knee like someone had driven a white-hot railroad spike directly through the joint. My leg buckled. My body slammed into the ice hip-first, and then I was sliding, tumbling, my costume catching and tearing against the frozen surface as momentum carried me across the rink in a grotesque sprawl of limbs and scattered crystals.
The Rachmaninoff cut out.
The silence was worse than the fall.
For one suspended heartbeat, twelve thousand people didn’t make a sound. The judges froze, pens halted mid-stroke. The arena held its breath like the entire building had been plunged underwater. And then?—
The gasp.
It came from everywhere at once. A collective, guttural inhale of horror that rolled through the stands like a shockwave. I heard the little girl in the front row scream—a high, thin, terrible sound—and the woman beside her clapped both hands over her daughter’s eyes. Phones that had been recording in triumph were now recording a catastrophe.
Get up. Get up, get up, get up?—
I tried. God, I tried. I pressed my palms flat against the ice and pushed, and the pain that lanced through my right leg turned my vision to static. White. Then black at the edges. My arms gave out and I collapsed back against the ice, my cheek pressed to the frozen surface, my breath coming in sharp, shallow bursts that fogged the air in front of me in rapid little clouds.
Something was very, very wrong with my knee.
I could feel it—not just the pain, but thewrongness. A looseness where there should have been tension. A shifting, grinding instability that told me something inside had torn. Completely. The kind of damage that didn’t heal in weeks. The kind that required scalpels and months of rehabilitation and the quiet, devastating knowledge that your body would never be quite the same.
Blood.
There was blood on the ice. My blood. A thin rivulet of crimson that seeped from where the blade had caught theinside of my calf during the fall—a secondary injury I barely registered beneath the inferno in my knee. But I could see it, spreading in a delicate, almost beautiful pattern against the white surface. Red on white. Like roses on snow.
My blood is on the ice.
