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"Practice," the kid says, and does a small spin, and skates off.

Audrey watches him go with murder in her eyes. "I'm going to fight that child."

"You can't even reach that child."

I skate backward holding both her hands, towing her in slow loops while children half her size lap us offering advice that gets steadily more insulting.

“Why are your arms doing that?” a little girl asks, whizzing by with a friend. “She looks like the inflatable man outside my dad’s tire shop.”

The friend shakes his head. “At least those stay upright.”

Audrey threatens both of them. One threatens her back and she respects him for it.

And every time her ankles fold, I catch her, which means every few minutes her entire body slams against my chest, and my hands land on her hips, and we both remember with crystal clarity what those hands were doing at the farm two nights ago.

The families drift toward the market eventually, and the DJ trades remixes for something slow as the rink lights shift to a soft ambiance.

Fresh snow starts falling around us, and I keep Audrey on the ice when everyone else leaves.

I skate backward with both her hands in mine, drawing her away from the boards, then pull her carefully against my chest.

I hold her close as we turn slow circles at center ice while the empty rink mirrors the market lights, and for a minute the whole mountain belongs to us.

"I talked to your mom today," she says against my collarbone. "About the first available trial date. She sent me a voice memo that was nine minutes long and forty percent recipes."

I laugh and nod. "That's Mom operating at low intensity."

I can't hide the pride, but something else pushes up underneath it.

"Just—don't hang everything on one idea, okay?" She tilts her head back, confusion in her eyes. "I know how that farm punishes optimism, Audrey. I've watched it completely break my dad twice and my brothers more times than that. If the test run fails, that is not a weight you carry. I won't let it become another thing you feel responsible for."

She goes quiet for a second, caught by the edge in my voice.

"Miles, I need this project too. Not for the farm. For me." Snow catches in her lashes. "I don't know where I belong when Christmas ends. I still haven't looked at my phone, you understand that, right?"

"I do, but—"

"There is no home I want back, no job waiting, no plan that was ever actually mine. Doing this… with your beautiful family who need help… It's the first thing since I ran that feels like it belongs to me. And it keeps me from thinking too hard about everything I left burning behind me."

I look down at our fingers, woven together against my chest, her new skates between my old ones.

"Alright," I say, not sure what else to say. "Alright. I'm just trying to keep your expectations in check."

"I know."

I pull her closer against me and breathe in her beautiful scent. "Can I ask you something, though?"

She nods. "Yeah?"

"Is that what we are too?" I ask. "Something keeping you from thinking about real life?"

Her smile stops.

She looks up at me, and I watch the war happen behind her eyes. The temporary arrangement she demanded against whatever this thing between us has actually become. The thing neither of us has treated as temporary for days.

As her lips part to reply, a voice booms across the empty rink.

"Stratton!"