“Russo.”
“Honestly, I’m fine.”
“You went white when Calloway mentioned scouts this morning.”
He stops skating. “It’s my last shot,” he says. Flat. Like he’s said it in his head so many times. “Scouts came last season. They may come again. But it’s my last year and the window doesn’t stay open.”
“Your friend Zane?” I prompt carefully.
“Yeah, he got signed last fall.”
“Tara mentioned it. That must have been hard.”
“Yeah, well.” He pushes off slowly. “Good for him.”
There’s nothing bitter in it. He saw his friend get the thing you both wanted and was glad for them but still gutted anyway.
I understand that more than he knows.
“For what it’s worth, your skating is better than it was four weeks ago. Measurably. The scouts will see that. And you have that thing that can’t be taught.”
He glances at me. “Thank you.”
We skate in silence for a moment.
“Can I ask you something?” he says.
“Go for it.”
“Why did you stop competing?”
There’s no malice in the question this time. He’s genuinely curious and careful - nothing like the last time he asked it.
I keep skating. “It’s complicated.”
“You don’t have to-”
“There was someone. In Sweden. Someone I trusted. It didn’t end well.”
He doesn’t push or ask for more details. He nods once, and I’m grateful enough for that restraint that I almost say more - Erik, the training sessions that became something else - the way trust and ambition got tangled up. And, of course, the way it ended so publicly and so completely-
“Anyway.”
We skate another loop in silence.
“You make it look easy. The skating. All of it. Like it just… came to you.”
“Nothing about it came easy.”
“Doesn’t look that way from here. You’re here telling me what I’m doing wrong, and you’ve never…”
“Never what?”
“You’ve never had to fight for it,” he says. “Not the way we fight for it. You’re a natural. It shows. You have no idea what it’s like to grind for something that might never happen.”
My voice comes out cooler than I intend. “And do you know what it’s like to have everything taken from you? To have to go somewhere you didn’t plan to be because the thing you built your whole life around got destroyed and you had no other-” I stop.
It’s too much.
