Not the jump.
The coaching.
Our eyes meet for half a second before she looks away, like the moment wasn’t intentional.
Rodrigo circles back towards me, and I force my attention onto the ice.
“De vuelta,” I say.
Still, my body stays coiled. Protective in a manner that borders on feral. Every correction someone else makes—the choreographer, the jump specialist, the skating skills coach—feels like a threat, even when it isn’t meant to be.
This place doesn’t know him at all. And I do.
That’s the difference.
Isabella watches sometimes. Not constantly—she doesn’t hover—but her presence is impossible to miss. Always in motion, always greeting someone, always exactly where she needs to be.
She runs this place without running it. Everyone defersto her, and I see her family’s name and the legacy they’ve built everywhere in her.
What I don’t expect, however, is for her to defer to me.
It happens mid-session, almost casually. A technical discussion breaks out near the boards—two coaches debating step sequences, voices overlapping. Isabella steps closer, listening, nodding along.
Rodrigo glances at me. I shake my head once. No.
She sees it.
“What do you think?” she asks, turning to me.
The question tightens something in my chest.
“I think he’s overcorrecting because you’re changing too many variables at once,” I say. Flat. Honest. Not softened for the room or for my skater.
The rink goes dead quiet, the silence sharpening because someone important is listening.
Isabella nods immediately. “Okay. Then we don’t do that.”
Just like that. Zero pushback and complete trust in my word.
The coaches shift, recalibrate, and move on easily. The rink fills again with noise, skates cutting into ice, commands resuming like nothing momentous just happened in front of everyone’s eyes.
“That’s your call,” Isabella adds lightly, as though it’s self-evident. “You know him best.”
Four words that sound incredibly plain and almost careless. They shouldn’t mean anything.
But something in my body gives. It feels like a muscle unclenching after years of staying tight. Recognition. WhatI’ve chased without ever naming. The thing I wanted back when I was still skating, still trying to prove that quiet didn’t mean weak.
I hate how immediate it is. How my body reacts before I can stop it.
Because I remember her voice from years ago, threaded through a round table microphone, carried by bad acoustics and worse timing. I remember the way she’d said it—not cruel, not even sharp. But casual and thoughtless.
“Sometimes,” Isabella had said then, “skating doesn’t need to be shiny. Clean lines matter more than embellishment.”
It had sounded like wisdom. A small talking point during what was probably a meaningless interview that passed as truth because it came from skating royalty.
And I had shrunk under it, standing at the edge of the rink, hearing my own style reduced to excess. To decoration. To something completely unnecessary in the face of competition. I’d taken it home with me, that comment. Let it sit in my bones and confirm every quiet doubt I already carried.
So hearing her now—standing here, in this place, with all its power and machinery—defer to me so easily and publicly, makes my stomach twist.
