“How long are you going to delay, Théo? You’ve been dreaming about the Olympics since you were nine. You landed your first quad at 16 and told me you were going to do it at the Games. Remember?”
“I also wanted to marry a prince and live in a castle. Some dreams are just fairytales, okay?”
“Not this one, darling.” Her voice softened, lost some of its edge. “You have it in you. You’ve always had it in you.”
“Had.” I looked away from the screen. Aspen’s fur was soft under my hand. “I don’t know anymore. Ever since—” I stopped. Started again. “Everything feels wrong. My body feels wrong. The jumps feel wrong. I don’t trust any of it.”
She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t try to fix it with an inspirational quote or a pep talk.
Because she knew.
She’d been there for all of it—the weigh-ins that stopped being about performance and started being about control, the Adderall that slid from focus tool to dependency so slowly I didn’t notice until I couldn’t function without it, the morning I called her from the bathroom floor and she dropped everything to come.
She’d trained beside me for over a decade. She knew my body almost as well as I did. She’d watched it change and sharpen and hollow out.
“That’s why you need to call Coach Miller, Théo,” she said, voice gentler now, but still firm. “He can help you get it back. Safely.”
“Maybe I don’t want to skate anymore.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“Avery said you’re still skating almost every day.”
“He’s texting you?” I sat up straighter. “That little traitor.”
“Why do you think I didn’t hop on the plane?” There was something almost smug in her expression now. “I have a source. A very chatty source who is worried about his baby brother and doesn’t understand why you won’t just call the perfectly nice coach who has worked with Olympic calibre skaters.”
“Avery doesn’t really understand how difficult this is for me. He just had to skate around holding a stick and doors flew open for him. I’ve had to struggle for every inch of ground.”
“No. But he knows you’re killing yourself in that rink every morning without a coach, without a plan, without any of the structure that would actually help you.” She leaned closer to the camera. “And he knows you well enough to know that you wouldn’t be doing it if you didn’t still want it, Théo. Even if you’re too stubborn or too scared to admit it.”
I looked at her face on the screen. We had started skating together when we were nine years old, two kids in the same group lesson who had immediately recognized something in each other—not talent exactly, though we both had that, but drive. The specific obsessive quality of children who had found the thing that they would organize their entire lives around without being asked.
Sabrina had gone to the Olympics at 18. Bronze. I’d watched from Toronto, cheering so loud I lost my voice, crying like an idiot from halfway across the world. I wasn’t jealous I wasn’t competing that year—I was proud. Fiercely, impossibly proud.
Women’s skating ran on a different clock. Different bodies, different peak years, different standards. Her making it that early didn’t mean I’d missed my window.
And she wasn’t done. The bronze had been incredible but it wasn’t the colour she wanted. She was fighting her way back, chasing gold with the same relentless intensity she’d had at nine years old.
She understood the weight of wanting something so badly it rewired you. The way it coloured everything. The way it could lift you up and hollow you out in the same breath.
She understood what it cost. And she wanted me to have my shot the same way I wanted her to have hers.
If anyone had the right to call me on my bullshit, it was her.
“I’m scared,” I confessed in a whisper. “I’m scared it won’t come back. I’m scared I broke something I can’t fix.”
“You don’t have to do this on your own, Théo.” Her voice was gentle now, the interrogation over. “Call Miller. Show up. Do the work. Let someone help you, you stubborn asshole.”
Aspen sighed heavily in my lap, apparently agreeing with her.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“You’ll do more than think about it. I’m coming next week and I expect to meet this coach or I’m dragging you to him myself.”
“You’re very bossy.”
