I had called my mom, finally, on day five, which had been its own particular endurance event. She had peppered me with questions for half an hour in that specific way she had—not aggressive, just relentless, circling back to the same subjects from different angles like she was hoping a different approach would yield a different answer.How are you eating? Are you sleeping? Have you talked to anyone?And by anyone, she meant a therapist.I had answered everything in the vague, technically true way I had perfected over years of managing her worry, and by the end of the call she had sounded marginally reassured and I could have another few weeks of reprieve.
I had FaceTimed Sabrina two days later, which was only marginally better. She knew me too well for vague and technically true. She sat cross legged on her bed in Toronto and looked at me through the screen with those sharp green eyes and said almost nothing, which was worse than questions. Sabrina’s silences had texture. This one saidI can see exactly what you’re doing and I’m letting you do it for now but don’t mistake my patience for agreement.
I had told her I was fine.
She had saidokay, Théoin the tone that meant the opposite of okay. She was already planning to visit me sooner than later.
Fine was relative. I was vertical. I was eating. And I was going to start skating again, which was more than I’d managed in months.
Avery had arranged it with his coach—an exercise in diplomacy I suspected had cost him more than he let on—to give me early morning ice time at the Frost training facility before the team arrived. I was fairly certain I had signed something that effectively transferred ownership of my soul to the Chicago Frost organization but standing at the boards that first morning with my skate bag over my shoulder, I found I didn’t particularly care.
The ritual of it. That was what I had missed without letting myself admit it. The specific weight of the bag. The smell of cold air and rubber and the particular mineral cleanness of a freshly cut surface. The routine of sitting on the bench and pulling the skates out and working the laces in the way I had done ten thousand times since I was small enough that the boots came halfway up my shins.
I loved it. I hated it. The scale between those two things had been shifting for years and lately it tilted more toward hate than I knew how to account for.
But the ice was still the ice.
I noticed him on my second morning.
He was in the stands—not the player benches, but the unlit seats in the shadows. Black t-shirt with the Frost logo, matching cap pulled low. His face was half-hidden but the silhouette was unmistakable. Derek Sullivan, coffee in hand, watching me skate like he had nowhere to be.
I found that I didn’t really mind his presence. MaybeIwas interruptinghisroutine of sitting and staring at the empty ice for half an hour before he left to go weight train or wherever it was he disappeared off to.
We hadn’t spoken since the night at the bar.
That night had been... too much. The alcohol had loosened something in both of us and I’d said things I normally kept buried. He’d listened with those steady brown eyes and I’d let myself be seen in a way I immediately regretted the moment I sobered up. The vulnerability hangover was worse than the actual one.
So ignoring him seemed like the best option. The only option, really. If I pretended the conversation hadn’t happened, maybe it would unmake itself. Maybe he’d forget the way I’d talked about Toronto, about the pressure, about feeling like I was constantly not enough. Maybe I could go back to being Avery’s younger brother instead of whatever pathetic version of myself I’d revealed after too much vodka.
Occasionally I would run into him in the hallway of the facility as I was leaving. We would exchange a nod—brief, impersonal—and that was the extent of it. He never pushed. Never brought up that night. Never looked at me with pity or concern, which would have somehow made it worse. I couldn’t tell if he was respecting my space or if he’d already filed me away as someone else’s problem.
I knew, through Avery’s stream of consciousness at the dinner table, that Derek was mentoring him in the particular way veterans did with players they’d identified as worth investing in. The math of team sports was strange like that—Derek was six years older than Avery, which in hockey years meant something. Meant the team was already thinking about what came after. Who would carry the line forward. They saw something in my brother worth cultivating and it was Derek’s job to get him there.
To train his own replacement.
Such a strange concept for a figure skater. I only understood self-interest. Watching your back. The person next to you at the boards wasn’t your teammate—they were your competition,waiting for you to fall so they could take your spot on the podium. No one in my world mentored anyone. You clawed your way up alone and if someone offered you a hand, you checked it for knives first.
Derek just… gave it away. Freely.
I tried to ignore his presence and mostly succeeded.
The first morning I noticed him, I had just finished my warm up. I was working my way up to a jump, skating in wide arcs—building momentum slowly, letting my body remember the language of the ice before asking it to do anything complicated. Edges and crossovers and the satisfying bite of the blade at the apex of a curve. My legs remembered. Muscle memory was stubborn that way, outlasting everything else.
Then I set up for the triple.
A triple axel, the jump I had landed so many times it should have been reflexive, should have been like breathing. Three and a half rotations. I had been landing quads in competition since I was 16.
But my body felt wrong.
Not injured, not broken—just wrong. Like my centre of gravity had quietly relocated while I wasn’t paying attention. Four months off the ice had done something to my proprioception, to the interior map my body kept of itself in space. I went into the jump and felt it immediately, the wrongness of the rotation, the mistimed landing edge.
I spun out. A spray of ice as my skate cut across the surface awkwardly, my free leg swinging wide to compensate. I didn’t fall, barely, but it was ugly.
I reset.
Did it again.
Wrong again. Better but wrong. The rotation was there but the landing was soft, uncertain, my knee bending too far as Icame down like I was bracing for an impact I didn’t trust myself to absorb.
