Second ring. Voicemail.
Again.
Second ring.Hi, you’ve reached Angelo Reyes. I’m either training, sleeping, or making bad decisions. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you?—
I ended the call.
My teeth found the inside of my bottom lip and pressed down—not hard enough to break skin, but enough to create a point of pressure I could anchor my focus to while the certainty I’d been warding off for weeks settled over me with the quiet, suffocating finality of a verdict read aloud in an empty courtroom.
He’s not coming.
Not probably. Notmaybe. Not the cautiously optimisticthere’s still timeI’d been feeding myself since midnight when my alarm had torn me from the shallow, fitful approximation of sleep I’d managed between ceiling-staring sessions. The certainty was absolute. Airtight. The kind that didn’t leave room for alternatives because the pattern was too established, the evidence too voluminous, the precedent too deeply carved into the four weeks of missed practices and empty rinks and a man who had chosen a diver’s thighs over his own Olympic future with the consistency of someone making a lifestyle commitment.
Angelo Reyes was not going to show up for this audition.
Which was a big fucking problem.
I took a breath. Not the measured, clinical kind—the shaky, shallow, rationed kind that came when your lungs decided to downgrade their participation from full partnershipto reluctant freelance arrangement. My shoulders dropped. Not the relaxed, post-exhale kind of drop—thesinkingkind. The involuntary surrender of a body that understood, before the mind had finished processing, that the thing it had been bracing for had arrived.
I stared at the phone in my hand. The screen had gone dark. My reflection stared back from the glass—distorted, warped, a funhouse version of a woman in a competition-grade practice outfit standing at the boards of an empty arena at five in the morning with no partner, no pack, and approximately one hundred and seventy-three minutes until the qualifying evaluation that was supposed to determine the trajectory of her entire athletic existence.
You’re fucked.
The words landed in my skull with the blunt, graceless impact of a puck hitting the boards. Crude. Final. Accurate.
You are completely, irreversibly, categorically fucked.
My legs began to tremble.
Not the fatigue-induced quiver of overworked muscles—I knew that sensation intimately, had lived inside it for two decades, could distinguish between the productive shake of exertion and the neurological tremor of distress the way a sommelier distinguished between grape varietals. This was fear. Pure, systemic, cortisol-driven fear radiating outward from the base of my spine like a power surge through fraying wires, turning my quadriceps to liquid and my calves to static and my knees—my fuckingknees—into traitors that wobbled beneath me as if the ice were shifting and not my nervous system.
I pressed my free hand flat against the boards. The cold bit into my palm through the thin layer of sweat that had gathered there, and I focused on the temperature. Focusedon the texture—the smooth, scuffed surface of the plexiglass, the faint vibration of the cooling system humming beneath the concrete, the tangible, physical reality of a solid structure beneath my fingers.
Breathe.
I closed my eyes.
Breathe, Moreau. You have survived worse than this. You have survived blood on the ice and a stretcher and a hospital room and the sound of twelve thousand people gasping in unison. You survived the man who smiled when you fell. You survived the months of darkness and the nights of silence and the rehab that made you relearn how to walk before you could remember how to fly. You survived all of that, and you are not—you are NOT—going to collapse in an empty rink over a man who couldn’t be bothered to answer his phone.
But the breathing wasn’t working.
Because this wasn’t about Angelo. Not really. Not at the molecular level where panic lived and fed and bred. Angelo was the catalyst, but the reaction was older. Deeper. Rooted in a truth so foundational to my experience that it had essentially become the bedrock of my psychology, load-bearing and immovable.
You cannot obtain your dreams by relying on others.
And there it was. The core wound. The sentence etched into the architecture of my nervous system by every coach who’d moved on, every federation official who’d looked away, every partner who’d failed, every Alpha who’d vanished. The cumulative, compounding evidence of a life spent learning, over and over and over, that the people you needed would not be there when the ice got thin.
And that’s what hurts.
Not the absence of a skating partner. Not the logisticalcrisis of an audition without a pairing. Thepattern. The relentless, merciless confirmation that no matter how I clawed back from the wreckage—no matter how many months of rehabilitation, how many solo sessions, how many predawn alarms and protein shakes and counted breaths and backwards numbers from ten—I was still standing in the same position I’d been in on that stretcher. Alone. Unpartnered. Asking the world for support and receiving the echo of my own voice bouncing off empty walls.
My father, who had nursed my Olympic dream from its very first wobbly crossover at four years old, who had driven me to every practice and sewn sequins onto my first competition costume with hands that were better suited to carpentry than craft—he was fighting. Fighting an illness that had dismantled his body the way Garrison had dismantled my career: systematically, without mercy, and with an outcome that no amount of determination could reverse. He loved me with every cell he had left. But he was in no position to carry me. Not anymore. Not when he could barely carry himself.
And Candy—fierce, loyal, irreplaceable Candy—had her own finish line approaching at terminal velocity. The summer Olympic trials were six months out, and her gymnastics qualification timeline was its own ticking detonation, its own bureaucratic maze of pack requirements and performance benchmarks. She’d already given me more than any single human should be asked to give. Asking for more felt like theft.
So who’s left?
Who is in your corner, Octavia Moreau, at five in the morning, in an empty rink, with three hours until the world asks you to prove you belong here?
