FAB: Come next weekend to Reiteralm.
FAB: I’ll make time for you.
FAB: Train you on some brutal slope.
ZLA: You won’t be hard on me, would you?
FAB: Not unless you ask nicely…
Beat.
ZLA: On the slope, I mean.
FAB: Anywhere you like.
Silence. The good kind and the terrible kind at once. I stare at the typing dots as if I can will them into staying.
FAB: Say yes.
FAB: I’ll ask Max, my ski tech, to teach you some tuning magic. He’s a genius.
FAB: If you say yes now.
FAB: It’s a time-limited offer.
For a second, nothing. Then:
ZLA: Yes.
It’s only three letters, but the way my whole body reacts, you’d think I just won another globe.
I let the phone drop onto my chest and stare at the ceiling for a moment, listening to my pulse thud in my ears. Adelboden is still humming in my legs; the hill, the noise, the podium. This feels sharper than all of it.
In a week, my golden girl will step out of a train in Salzburg with her race skis and that stubborn tilt to her chin. I’ll be there, not as a ghost in her TV or a man on a terrace, but in real life, with a car and a room key and a plan that has nothing to do with almost.
For the first time all season, the next race block doesn’t feel like the only thing on the calendar.
Chapter 10
The Polished Gams
Kitzbühel, Austria
FABIO
Kitzbühel is quieter on slalom morning.
Not quiet, exactly—this town doesn’t really do quiet during Hahnenkamm week—but the roar from yesterday is gone. The most drunk ones screamed themselves hoarse for the downhill and then poured what was left of their energy into the night; today it’s the lifers. The ones who know what the Ganslern does to your legs.
It’s just after seven thirty when I step out of the hotel. The air bites clean at my face; the sky is a washed-out winter blue, the kind that makes every edge mark on the hill look sharper. The streets are half-asleep. A few delivery vans. A couple of locals with shopping bags. Two kids in oversized race-team jackets bouncing ahead of their parents, plastic cowbells already hanging from their wrists.
The rest of the circus is either already up by the finish, staking out places in the stands, or dead to the world with sunglasses over their hangovers.
I walk the long way, past the closed-up bar where they were singing alpin-pop songs on tables eight hours ago, past a bakery that smells like coffee and sugar and briefly tempts me inside. There are Hahnenkamm posters in every second window—Streif photos, old Gams trophies, glossy shots of guys in tuck position who look more heroic than they felt.
The closer I get to the hill, the more it narrows down to us. Security barriers. “Team only” signs. The music from the finish is just a muffled thud this early, like someone testing a heartbeat.
I cut in behind the stands, away from the fan entrance, toward the little side path that leads to the racers’ chairlift. It’s an old four-seater in the back, slow and clanking, reserved just for us so we don’t have to queue with tourists. No line yet, just a couple of coaches with radios around their necks and one serviceman smoking, leaning on a stack of skis.
