"Yes."
"How does it feel?"
The kitchen goes still. I pull out the chair and sit, my hands open on the table, palms up, the fingers uncurling from fists I didn't know I was making.
"Done," I say.
Cole crosses the kitchen. He grips the back of my neck.
"The number still works," Cole says. Repeating Marco's words back to the room. "He left the door open on purpose."
"I know."
"He's waiting for you to cross it again."
"I know."
"Will you?"
Cole's hand stays on my neck as I look at him, his blue eyes steady, his grip the same one that has held me since we were sixteen.
"I don't know," I say.
He nods once.
Monday night, the hearing is Wednesday, and Maya hasn't slept properly since the second letter. The four-count runs longer. The cycles multiply. She sits at the kitchen table with her laptop, and her hands aren't moving.
"Come with me," I say.
She looks up. "Where?"
"The rink."
"It's ten o'clock."
"I have access."
In the doorway, Cole waits. His eyes move from me to Maya, then his chin lifts once.
"Go," he says. To her. "I'll be here."
The walk takes seven minutes. Campus is empty. The athletic complex sits dark against the sky, the parking lot cleared, the lights off behind the glass. I unlock the side entrance with the code Addison gave the seniors in September. The hallway smells like rubber and disinfectant. Our footsteps echo off the concrete.
I hit the panel inside the rink door. The lights come up in sections. First the ice, then the boards, then the overhead floods, the building waking in stages until the full surface sits empty and gleaming under white light, sixteen thousand square feet of ice with nobody on it.
Maya stops at the boards.
For four years, she's spent every game watching from the press box, third row, left side, sixty feet above the surface. Every game, every practice, every shift I've ever skated while she tracked the patterns and wrote the numbers and built the picture from altitude. She knows this ice from above. She's never stood on it.
"I don't have skates," she says.
"You don't need them."
I open the gate.
She steps through. Her boots hit the ice, and she grabs the boards with both hands, her weight shifting, her balance recalibrating. The surface holds differently when you're standing on it. The cold rises through the soles. The building sounds different from floor level—bigger, the ceiling farther away, the glass taller.
She lets go of the boards and takes a step. Her boots slide, and she catches herself, arms out, a sharp breath through her nose. Another step, steadier. A third. Her hand trails along the boards, then lifts away. She's walking on ice.
