Candy crossed her arms. Raised a single eyebrow—the left, her precision instrument, the one she deployed for maximum skeptical impact. The posture was identical to mine when I was interrogating someone, which made sense given that we’d been friends long enough to have absorbed each other’s mannerisms the way adjacent plants absorbed each other’s root systems.
“Every athlete,” she said, enunciating each word with the deliberate, hammer-strike clarity of someone laying bricks, “and their damn family generational line, is cocky as fuck.” She held up a finger. “Especiallywhen your father was an Olympic-winning coach for some of the best figure skaters who won championships again and again until retirement. You wereraisedin cockiness. It was your first language. You learned it before you learned crossovers.”
I smirked.
The smirk was involuntary—pulled from me by the mention of my father the way a specific note pulled a specific memory from the archive of your body. Dad. Jean-Pierre Moreau. The man who had coached three separate skaters to World Championship gold, whose name appearedin the ISU Hall of Fame under the coaching category, who had built a reputation for producing technically flawless, emotionally devastating performers through a combination of relentless discipline, surgical precision, and the specific, unshakable belief that his athletes were capable of more than they thought possible. The same man who had sewn sequins onto my first competition costume with carpenter’s hands. Who had taught me to fall on the ice before he taught me to stand on it, becausethe fall is the first thing you learn, chérie. Master the fall, and the standing takes care of itself.
Cocky? Maybe. But he earned it. And maybe I learned it from the best.
Candy’s expression softened. The shift was gradual—the raised eyebrow lowering, the crossed arms loosening, the competitive energy of the banter receding like a tide to reveal the quieter, more vulnerable shoreline beneath. Her voice dropped a register.
“How is your dad?”
The question landed in the warm space between us with the careful weight of someone placing a fragile object on a table. She knew the answer was complicated. She’d known since Prague, since the night I’d told her at the rehabilitation facility about the diagnosis.
I sighed. The exhale was long, controlled, carrying a weight that the bolognese-scented air of the dorm absorbed without complaint.
“He’s surviving the chemo.” A pause. The wordsurvivingdoing the heavy lifting—notthriving, notresponding well, notbeating it.Surviving. The verb of endurance rather than victory. “You know how it is on the body. The fatigue. The nausea. The way it strips the weight off someone who was already lean and turns them into a version of themselves thatthe mirror doesn’t recognize.” I adjusted the clasp of my bracelet—a thin gold chain he’d given me for my eighteenth birthday, the only piece of jewelry I wore to every competition and every party and every hospital visit. “Doesn’t help that my mom is being a bitch.”
Candy’s groan was operatic. A full-body, soul-deep vocalization of exasperation that conveyed, in a single sustained note, approximately fifteen years of accumulated opinion about Vivienne Moreau née Delacroix.
“Why did your father marry your mother?” The question was rhetorical. Had been rhetorical for years. Was asked not because the answer was unknown but because the answer was so baffling that restating the question had become a ritual—a shared liturgy of incredulity that Candy and I performed whenever the subject of my mother arose, which was too often and never pleasantly.
I smirked. “It had to be the lust, because I don’t see why otherwise.”
The honest answer. Vivienne Delacroix had been twenty-three and devastatingly beautiful when Jean-Pierre Moreau had met her at a gala hosted by the French Figure Skating Federation. He’d been thirty-one, freshly retired from his own competitive career, and newly appointed as a head coach with the kind of rising profile that attracted a specific species of attention. The attraction had been immediate, mutual, and—according to the family mythology I’d assembled from overheard arguments and my father’s wistful, carefully edited recollections—primarily physical. The marriage had followed within a year. The incompatibility had taken slightly longer to surface but had done so with the enthusiasm of an invasive species colonizing a vulnerable ecosystem.
My mother was not a bad person. She was adifficultperson. A woman whose emotional range operated within a narrow band that did not comfortably accommodate her husband’s illness, her daughter’s athletic career, or any situation that required sustained empathy rather than short-term performance. She called when it was convenient. Visited when it was visible. And managed my father’s cancer with the emotional depth of someone managing a renovation project that had gone over budget—annoyed, inconvenienced, and perpetually looking for someone else to handle the details.
Candy shook her head with the weary resignation of a woman who had formed her opinion years ago and had seen nothing in the interim to revise it.
“See? What have you learned?” She pointed at me with the instructive energy of a life coach delivering a keynote. “Don’t go fucking everything that moves and get knocked up.”
I laughed. The sound was sharp, bright, carrying the specific frequency of a woman who had processed her family dysfunction through humor so thoroughly that the humor had become its own form of therapy.
“But thankfully,” I said, straightening in front of the mirror and adjusting the neckline of my dress with the practiced hands of someone who understood that the difference between provocative and catastrophic was approximately half an inch of fabric, “they got blessed with the overachiever me and not a party-animal addict, right?”
Candy’s eyes narrowed. The shift was instantaneous—from amused to investigative, the hazel irises sharpening with the focused, analytical precision of a woman whose bullshit detector had just received a signal.
“Please tell me you’re on birth control.”
I smirked. Met her reflection in the mirror. “Yes on birth control. No on heat suppressants.”
The gawk was magnificent.
Candy’s jaw descended with the controlled, dramatic velocity of a drawbridge being lowered, and her eyes widened to a diameter that would have been concerning in a medical context. The strawberry-cinnamon scent spiked—a sharp, involuntary pheromone surge that her Omega biology produced in response to information it categorized as alarming.
“Youwantto experience that?” Her voice had ascended to a register that suggested she was recalculating every assumption she’d made about my decision-making capacity. “You want to go through a full, unsuppressed Omega heat at an Olympic training academy populated by approximately four hundred Alphas whose pheromone control ranges from ‘moderate’ to ‘functionally nonexistent’?”
I rotated on my heel to face her directly. The smirk was still in place, but beneath it, the truth was less cavalier.
“It’s not that Iwantto.” I leaned against the closet door. “Doctor forced me off. The chemical composition of the standard suppressant cocktail reacts with my current medication stack—specifically the anti-inflammatory protocol for the knee and the vestibular therapy compounds for the post-concussive residual. If I try reintroducing suppressants, the interaction produces either a full systemic allergic response or a seizure event.” I delivered this with the clinical, detached fluency of someone who had sat in a doctor’s office and heard the options presented with the cheerful pragmatism of a medical professional who didn’t have to live with the consequences. “So I’m functionally barred from suppressant use until the medicationstack changes, which won’t happen until the knee is fully post-rehabilitation and the vestibular symptoms resolve. Which could be months. Could be the full duration of the season.”
Candy pressed her fingertips against her temples. The gesture of a woman performing emergency cognitive restructuring.
“So you’re going to be unsuppressed. At Olympia. During competition season.”
“Yep.”
