We ate at the dining table. He asked me about Coach Miller and I found myself telling him about the training schedule, the terrible coffee, the way Miller had asked what I wanted to get out of skating instead of telling me what I should want. Derek listened like it mattered. LikeImattered.
I asked him about their trip. He told me about their games, about Petrov’s hangover, about Kenzo’s boyfriend surprising him in Philly. His eyes crinkled when he laughed and I realized I wanted to make him laugh again. And again. And again.
It was almost domestic.
It terrified me.
After dinner, he put on the episode ofGame of ThronesI had been watching earlier, picking up right where I’d left off. I had nowhere else to be, no excuse to leave, so I sat with him on the couch. Aspen jumped up and curled between us, his warm weight a buffer against the part of me that still wanted to bolt.
“Who’s a good boy?” Derek asked, scratching behind Aspen’s ears. Aspen’s tail thumped against the cushion.
I was responding to a text from Sabrina and answered without looking up from my phone. “Depends. Are you asking him or me?”
Derek’s hand stilled on Aspen’s fur. I could feel him staring.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
I smirked, still not looking up. “Whatever you say, daddy.”
The silence stretched for a beat too long. When I finally glanced over, Derek’s face was flushed, his jaw tight in a way that had nothing to do with anger.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” he muttered.
“Probably.” I locked my phone and tossed it aside, leaning back into the cushions. “But what a way to go.”
???
The next day, I practiced at Coach Miller’s rink.
I knew I should be easing back in. Building slowly. Doing all the sensible things Miller had suggested. Instead, I was on the ice by 7 a.m., pushing myself just as hard. Old habits.
The building was quieter than I was used to—no Renaud barking corrections from the boards, no cluster of anxious skaters fighting for ice time and approval. Just the hum of the refrigeration system and the scrape of blades on fresh ice.
The quiet wasn’t empty. It was… clean. Like someone had wiped the noise off the walls.
I did my warm up the way I always did—edges first, then turns, then spins—because ritual was the only thing my body still trusted. Without it, everything felt like guessing. My hips were a half beat behind where my brain wanted them. My timing was there but my confidence wasn’t. I could feel the lag in my centre of gravity.
I met a few of the other skaters, mostly by proximity. A pairs team from Michigan working on their throw jumps, the girl launching herself with terrifying faith and the guy catching her like he’d done it a thousand times. A teenage girl with a fierce ponytail who landed her double axel with mechanical precision, face unreadable even when she nailed it. An older man—forties, maybe—skating figures in slow, meditative loops like he was the only person in the building.
No one asked about my career. No one whispered about Toronto or rehab or why Théo Beaubien was training at a second tier rink in Chicago instead of preparing for Olympics. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they didn’t care.
It was still a disaster, in some ways. My body felt foreign to me—too heavy, too slow, the muscle memory that used to be automatic now requiring conscious effort. I under rotated a triple salchow and nearly fell on my ass. Old me would’ve spiralled. Renaud would’ve said something about commitment or discipline or focus.
Coach Miller just nodded from the boards and said, “You’re pulling your arms in too early. Let the rotation build first.”
I tried again. Still under rotated but closer.
“Better. You’re rushing because you don’t trust it yet. That’s okay. Again, when you’re ready.”
No disappointment. No sharp correction. Just patience.
I practiced for two and a half hours and left sweaty and wrung out, my legs trembling in that satisfying way. Outside, Chicago was starting to change. Leaves turning red and yellow. The days growing shorter.
On the train back, the urge to document the city hit me. A woman’s red scarf against a sea of black coats. The blur of the L tracks cutting across the sky. A kid swinging his legs off the seat, humming to himself like the world was still safe.
I didn’t even have my proper camera with me—that was still in Toronto, collecting dust in a closet along with everything else I’d left behind. Just my phone. But the impulse was there, flickering to life like a pilot light I’d thought had gone out.
I used to see the world this way all the time. Framing shots in my head. Noticing the way light fell on ordinary things and made them worth capturing. Somewhere along the way—between the calorie counting and the competitions and the slow erosion of everything that made meme—I’d stopped looking. Stopped noticing. The world had gone grey and flat and I hadn’t even realized it was happening until I was too numb to care.
