“Of course she did.”
“She said you’re trying to make this about you.” Nina’s voice shifts into a perfect imitation of our mother: polite, airy, and fucking sharp at the edges. “She says the initiative needs to bealigned.”
Aligned. Another word forobedient.
“And Dad?” I ask, even though I already know.
Nina’s expression tightens. “Dad thinks you’re positioning yourself.”
“For what?”
She looks at me like I’m being deliberately stupid. “For the association.”
I let out a breath through my nose. Slow. Controlled. The way I learned to breathe before a short program, because the body does better when the mind is pretending not to panic.
“I’m not?—”
Nina cuts me off. “They want you to keep them relevant. Your image keeps them relevant. Your proximity to decision-making keeps them relevant. This initiative is yours and it scares them because they didn’t script any of it.”
I grip the armrests of my chair. My nails bite into the upholstery. “It’sours, Nina.”
She smiles.
“And,” I say, shifting in my seat, “I did it because if I’mgoing to carry this fucking name for the rest of my life, I would like it attached to something that actually changes the sport.”
Nina’s face softens in the smallest way. “Izzy…”
I don’t let myself linger there. If I sit in that emotion too long, I’ll start wanting things. I’ll start believing I’m allowed to want things.Differentthings.
Instead, I reach for the safest pivot. The one thing I can talk about without cracking.
“Is he here yet?”
I already know the answer. His name has been on my screen for weeks. Video clips. Judges’ notes. That free skate at Worlds in Vegas I’ve watched more times than I’ll ever admit to anyone, more times than I even want to admit to myself.
“They’ve been here since six,” Nina says.
“Oh my god.” A smile threatens to form on my face, but I don’t want Nina to catch my enthusiasm about the athlete we’re developing and his coach.
“Izzy,” she adds, voice turning dry, “I think she’s worse than you.”
She’s one hundred percent talking about Cecilia Montenegro.
I haven’t seen her in years. Not properly. Not up close and outside of archival footage and result sheets and from across the ice at certain competitions. Her senior career started after mine did. I went to my first Olympic Games in 2006 and she went in 2010. By then, I was already established and existing in a seamless bubble of sponsorships and infrastructure I barely registered as privilege.
We never overlapped in the way people assume rivals do.Other skaters were competition in theory, of course, but not necessarily in practice.
And, my parents never allowed for distractions. My world was small by design: training, travel, press, repeat. The machine kept me moving so I didn’t have to look sideways.
“That’s not funny,” I tell Nina.
“I’m not joking,” she says as she straightens in her seat. “She was on rink two before the Zamboni finished, looking around and studying the space.”
Nina says it like it’s a personality flaw.
But I know what it means when someone arrives early. I know what it means when someone watches before they move. It means they’ve learned the cost of being unprepared, and they’re not interested in paying it again.
“What about him?” I ask, and I mean Rodrigo, but Nina hears the other question anyway.
