The most exposed position in any arena. No boards to brace against, no barrier between your body and the empty space that stretched in every direction like a frozen ocean.
The judges’ table sat thirty feet to my left—a long, draped panel occupied by four figures whose clipboards and scoring tablets would determine, in approximately five minutes, whether the last two years of my life had been a resurrection or a prolonged delusion.
I stood in that center with my hands clasped loosely at my waist and my chin lifted and my pulse doing its level best to crack through my ribcage, and I waited.
The previous competitor’s marks were being tabulated. She’d been good—a willowy brunette from the Montreal pipeline whose technical execution bordered on machine-calibrated precision. Her program had been clean. Her jumps had been landed without visible error.
Her spins had traveled less than four inches across the surface—tight, centered, Level Four entries with clean positions throughout. Flawless, by any objective metric.
And yet…
I’d watched from the sideline tunnel with the critical eye of someone who had lived inside this sport long enough to distinguish between technical competence and artistic transcendence, and what I’d seen was a program thatachievedwithoutarriving. The moves were executed. The positions were held. The edges were clean. But the connection between the skater and the music—that invisible, alchemical bridge where choreography stopped being a sequence of elements and became a conversation between a human body and a piece of sound—had been absent.
Her song, incidentally, had been the same as mine.
“Die on This Hill” by Sienne Spiro.
A devastating piece of music. A track that practicallydemandedemotional excavation from anyone who dared skate to it—the kind of song that started in the quiet, broken place where grief lived and built, bar by bar, into a declaration of survival so raw it could strip the varnish off a courtroom bench. And the brunette from Montreal had skated it like a technical exercise. Hit the beats. Matched the tempo. Landed the jumps on the musical accents. But the emotional architecture—the build from devastation to defiance, the crescendo that required the skater tobecomethe song rather than merely accompany it—had been missing. A rare failure in a discipline built on the marriage of movement and emotion, and one that the judges, if they had any taste at all, would reflect in the scores.
The scoreboard flickered.
The numbers populated in sequence:7.0 – 7.0 – 6.5 – 5.0.
My gaze snagged on the last digit.Five point zero. From the fourth judge—the woman at the far end of the panel whose silver-streaked hair was pulled into a severe chignon and whose expression throughout the morning had maintained the emotional temperature of a glacier. She’d been rating low all session. A 6.2 for the Korean pairs team whose synchronized triple toe loops had been practically identical. A 5.8 for the solo male skater whose quad Salchow had been the cleanest I’d witnessed in person. A 5.0 for the Montreal brunette, who had been technically spotless.
She’s the gatekeeper. The one who grades on a scale that starts at perfection and subtracts for breathing. If I’m going to impress anyone on that panel, she’s the summit I need to reach, and she’s been giving everyone base camp.
A deep breath. In through the nose. Held for four counts. Released through the mouth in a controlled, narrow stream that fogged the cold air directly in front of my lips and dissolved.
The nerves were arriving now. Not the productive kind—the low, buzzing undercurrent of adrenaline that sharpened your edges and quickened your reflexes. These were theotherkind. The variety that wrapped around your chest like a constricting band, that turned your hands cold and your stomach acidic and your thoughts into a recursive loop of worst-case projections that gained speed with every revolution.
Angelo is not here.
I’d scanned the arena when I’d taken the ice ten minutes ago—a quick, sweeping inventory of every face in the competitors’ tunnel, every body in the warm-up zone, everysilhouette in the upper gallery seats. No Angelo. No sheepish, last-minute arrival with a duffel bag and a bullshit excuse. No miracle.
And Luka.
Nowhere.
The rink entrance was visible from my position at center ice—the wide, gated opening where skaters entered and exited the competition surface—and it was empty. No six-foot-two goaltender in hockey gear. No dark navy-purple hair. No green eyes. No rain-soaked-stone-and-clove-and-bitter-chocolate scent threading through the mineral-clean air of the arena.
Isaid Rink Two, eight a.m. He said Rink Two, eight a.m. It’s eight-fourteen and he’s not here.
He’s not here.
The ache that bloomed behind my sternum was instantaneous and vicious and made me furious at myself for feeling it. Because I’dknown. Hadn’t I known? Hadn’t every lesson, every departure, every unanswered phone call and empty hospital room and silent rehabilitation facility taught me precisely this? That the people who said they’d show up were the same people who perfected the art of not being there when the moment arrived?
Stop. Seal it. Lock the door, throw away the key, and deal with the wreckage after the music stops. You have four and a half minutes to prove that Octavia Moreau deserves to be on this ice, and you will not—you will NOT—surrender those minutes to the absence of another person who chose not to be here.
This is your hill.
You’re going to die on it if you have to.
Let the moves resonate. Let the body speak. Pour everyounce of grief and fury and longing into this performance, and let the audience hear the words my mouth will not say.
I am still here.
Despite all of it, I am still here.
