Page 62 of Chasing Gold, Catching Her

And then Alisa seemed to ruin everything the moment she opened her mouth and finally said out loud the thought that had been poisoning her from the inside.

“We’re not rivals on the ice anymore…”

“Why?”

“I’m not going to the Olympics, Tora. It’s obvious that Lev won’t have time to recover from his injury in such a short period, and even if we go to Beijing to try to earn an additional quota, do you really think they would choose us and take that risk a second time?”

Tora grew quiet. She looked away from Alisa and out the window, where the sun was already beginning to paint the sky with new colors, brighter ones, the first pale gold of dawn spreading across the city.

“Well… if you think about it like that, then yes. There is no point in sending both of you.”

Alisa frowned.

Now she was the one searching Tora’s face for answers, but Tora was still looking only at the sunrise.

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“Maybe you should switch to singles and skate alone? You weren’t injured, and you have potential.”

“I don’t…” Alisa shook her head and looked back toward the dawn herself.

Dawn always brought a new day.

Alisa reached for her phone, hoping there would finally be some news from Lev, but instead of a message from him, there was one from the coach.

Shchuka: 8 We only received one quota instead of three. Lev is out for a year to recover, and because of that you as a pair were not selected for the next qualifiers. You are disqualified.

Alisa only let out a long, shaky breath.

Tora turned back toward her.

“What’s wrong?”

But Alisa only looked at the message once more and replied quietly, “I’m so screwed.”

II

Part II

THE TRANSITION PERIOD,

SUMMER 2025

Chapter 12

April and May passed for Alisa with cruel indifference. Summer fully came to the city, but inside her everything remained frozen somewhere in that arena in Boston.

Tora tried to write to her every week. Sometimes Alisa answered with a few dry words and sometimes she disappeared for whole weeks, burying herself in training. She trained alone now, without a coach, without a partner. For two months she skated only because her heart demanded it, because if she stopped she was afraid she would collapse completely. No amount of training could silence her thoughts.

Lev sometimes came to the rink on crutches, his knee imprisoned in a heavy brace and cast. He would sit high in the stands or by the boards, silently watching her skate circles across the empty ice, and then leave without a word.

And Pike, Pike kept training pairs. Alisa would walk past the other rink and see her coach correcting someone’s posture, or someone’s hands in a lift, and it broke Alisa’s heart with humiliating clarity. It felt as though she had been quietly pushed aside, shelved like a broken thing no one knew how to fix.

In Boston, she and Lev had fought. He had told her that she had gained weight, that he couldn’t lift her properly anymore at that day, that the extra kilos had ruined the final element. He told her that she had stopped focusing, that ever since Tora came into her life she had become distracted, more interested in someone else than in skating in general.

And Alisa had shut down completely from everyone. After that, they both stopped texting each other or talk… In truth, Lev could not train for months, but even before that, they had already stopped crossing paths.

Pike told Alisa to take a break, but Alisa kept coming to the rink. Sometimes she tried practicing alone the elements she and Lev used to do together. Without a partner, the ice suddenly seemed bigger. She attempted difficult jumps, the kind where a skater launches into the air, spinning three or four times before landing on a blade no wider than a finger, but she kept falling, over and over. Jumps in singles were so much harder.