She catches the third bag easily, and there’s a moment—brief and unmistakable—where her expression softens. It makes it look like she’s choosing to stay here in this version of the moment, instead of pulling back into something safer, more familiar.
We walk back towards the ice, and it feels like the building has settled into a deeper kind of quiet, one that feels almost suspended. As if we’ve stepped outside of the version of this place that exists when people are watching, when everything has a purpose and a direction and a measurable outcome.
I grab a couple of towels from the bench near the boards, not explaining why, just bringing them with me because it feels like the right thing to do and maybe also because my choice of dress was exactly that,a choice.
I also do it because I don’t want this to be fleeting in the way most things in my life have been.
We move to the center without speaking, and when I lower myself onto the ice, the cold hits immediately, sharp and grounding, even through the rough fabric of the dirty towel.
She hesitates for a fraction of a second before following, and I’m aware of it—not in a way that feels hesitant between us, but because that reminds me she still makes choices before stepping into things. I stopped doing that a long time ago.
“You’re everywhere,” she murmurs.
I let my gaze drift upward, tracing the rafters in the same automatic way I’ve done for years. This time I don’t let themmean anything beyond markers of what I’ve already accomplished, what has already been decided and recorded and fixed in place.
“Yeah,” I say finally.
The word feels completely insufficient. Flat. Leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
“I knew, obviously,” Cecilia continues, her voice quieter, more thoughtful. “But it’s so different seeing it like this.”
“How?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“Louder somehow?”
I let out a breath that almost turns into a laugh but doesn’t quite make it there.
“Overwhelming,” I say with a nod.
She turns her head to look at me. “Yeah.” There’s a furrow in her brow, and my hand goes there immediately, smoothing it out with my thumb.
“I used to watch you,” she says after a pause that stretches long enough to feel deliberate.
I turn my head towards her now, studying her gorgeous face, trying to place that version of her alongside the version I know now, trying to reconcile the distance that existed between us then, in the past, with the lack of it now.
“Everyone did.” It sounds right on the edge of arrogant, but it’s not meant to be that. It’s another fact.
“That’s not what I mean.” She exhales slowly and takes a long sip of her beer, like she’s deciding whether to keep going and maybe shift the balance of the moment. “You made it look so fucking easy, Princess. Like none of it touched you.”
I hold her gaze for a second, and for once, I don’t default to deflection. “It wasn’t.”
She doesn’t look away.
“It just looked it.” That’s the part that people believed. That it was effortless, instinctive, a gift I inherited from my talented parents. I let my eyes drift back up to the ceiling, to the names that used to define everything.
“My parents made sure it looked like that,” I continue, my voice quieter now, less controlled. “That everything was perfect in its neat structure and there was never any doubt about what I was doing or where I was going.”
“And there wasn’t?” she asks.
“There was. That’s the problem.”
I shift against the floor, the cold pressing more firmly into my legs now, keeping me here.
“It meant there wasn’t space for anything else,” I add. “Everything had to have a purpose for my career and my career only. If it didn’t serve something, it couldn’t exist.”
The silence that follows feels different.
“I didn’t get to be normal,” I say finally, and even as I say it, I realize how inadequate that word feels, how much it fails to capture what I actually mean. “Not in any meaningful way.”
