Morrison called something across the room to Thomas. Thomas consulted his clipboard and called back. Avery groaned through another set and Morrison told him, without looking over, to stop being dramatic—he was 22, act like it.
I focused on the burn in my legs and the number climbing on the display.
Twenty-eight years old. In most careers, that was nothing—barely getting started. In hockey, it was the beginning of the end.
I tried not to think about it too much, but the math was always there, lurking at the edges. Most players peaked somewhere between 24 and 28. The lucky ones stretched into their 30s if they were smart about their bodies and luckier about their injuries. Morrison was the exception, not the rule. And I’d already lost half a season to a freak accident that had nothing to do with the game itself.
The knee would hold. Probably. Butprobablywasn’t the same asdefinitely, and every time it twinged in the morning, I wondered if this was the season it all started to slip. The season I stopped earning the letter on my chest.
Across the room, Avery powered through another set of lunges. Twenty-two years old. Fresh legs. A body that hadn’t accumulated a decade of micro-damage. He was good—really good—and getting better every week. Second line now but not for long. Anyone with eyes could see it.
I was mentoring him. That was the word we used.Mentoring.Teaching him how to read defensive schemes, how to protect the puck along the boards, how to position himself for the breakout pass. All the things someone had taught me once, back when I was the hungry kid with fresh legs and something to prove.
The thing no one told you about mentoring was that you were training your own replacement.
I’d done it before—at every level. Bantam, juniors, the AHL. Helped the younger guys find their footing, watched them climb, felt genuinely happy when they made the next roster. But I’d always been climbing too. There was always a next level to reach, a new challenge to chase.
What happened when there wasn’t?
What happened when the kid you were mentoring started outskating you and there was nowhere left for you to go?
I watched Avery land another lunge, easy and explosive, and felt something complicated twist in my chest. Pride, maybe. And underneath it, something darker. The quiet fear of becoming irrelevant. Of waking up one morning and realizing the game had moved on without you—and the A on your jersey was just a reminder of who you used to be.
Morrison caught my eye from across the room and gave me a small nod. Steady. Reassuring. Like he knew exactly what I was thinking.
Maybe he did. He’d been doing this longer than any of us.
I nodded back and kept pedaling.
4. Théo
The basement gym in Avery’s building matched my mood. Dark and a bit foul. The kind of space that existed purely out of obligation—a checkbox on the building’s amenity list that nobody had bothered to make decent. One flickering fluorescent tube. Rubber flooring that reeked of old sweat and disinfectant. A treadmill that squeaked on every third rotation like a small animal in distress.
I was on it anyway—incline set to 12, sweat sliding down my spine, the belt chattering under my feet. Thirty minutes in and counting.
Avery had woken up early. The sound of him blending his protein shake had punched through the wall at 6 a.m. and dragged me out of a thin, unsatisfying sleep. So I was running on bad rest and leftover irritation and approximately 800 calories worth of Thai food that I was now trying to negotiate with my body about.
That was my fault. I had intended to stick with the papaya salad. I had been resolute about it, sitting next to Avery as he spread out the takeout containers. But the smell of curry, spicy and warm, had made my stomach snarl. And then, because I was apparently committed to the bit, I had some of the pad Thai as well.
Now the treadmill complained and my lungs burned and it all felt… correct. Earned. Punishment with a heart rate.
Maybe Avery had gotten all the easygoing genes along with the height and the broad shoulders and the ability to eat whatever he wanted and put on muscle like it was a casual hobby. Maybe there had been some cosmic allocation happening in the womb during those ten months between us and he had simply arrived first and taken his pick.
I turned the incline up to 14.
If there was one thing I was genuinely good at, it wasn’t drive. It wasn’t discipline. It was avoidance. I had a gift for it. An artistry, almost.
Which was why I’d been putting off the coach conversation for weeks.
My body was feeling rusty—months away from figure skating had taken their toll and if I wanted to keep competing at the senior level, I couldn’t keep ignoring that. But finding a coach meant navigating the wreckage Renaud had left behind.
He probably already poisoned the well with most of the elite coaches. His network stretched across the skating world like a spider’s web and I had no doubt he’d already put out the word:Théo Beaubien, difficult. Théo Beaubien, unstable. Théo Beaubien, not worth the trouble.Going to anyone in his circle would mean more of the same—the calorie counting, the weigh-ins, the way he’d look at me like I was a project to be fixed rather than a person to be coached.
So I needed to go outside the circle.
Sabrina, a fellow figure skater and my best friend since we were nine years old, was the only person who knew the full scope of what had happened in Toronto. She found Coach Miller through one of her late night internet rabbit holes—the same obsessive energy she usually reserved perfecting a new routine, she spent on finding me a new coach. She’d sent me a barrage of links at two in the morning. Forum posts from former students.A few interviews where he talked about sustainable training and the mental health of athletes.
Sabrina: He’s not part of Renaud’s cult.
