I walk back to the bench and sit down beside him. Not touching, but close. Gordie follows and parks himself at our feet, panting happily.
We sit in silence for several minutes. The lake is calm, and the sunlight catches the ripples where Gordie disturbed the water. A heron takes off from somewhere in the marsh, its wings wide and slow.
This man, who has told me and shown me in several ways that he’s dedicated to me, deserves to hear about what I’ve been bottling up. There’s no way I can tell the world about my experience with Coach Savard without telling my boyfriend.
"I need to tell you something," I say. “And I need you to listen and not get upset.”
“Okay…” Alex turns his head toward me. I don't look at him. I keep my eyes on the water because if I look at his face right now, I won't be able to get the words out.
"It's about my old coach. Savard."
He doesn't respond. He just waits, which is the right thing to do. I'm grateful for it, because my stomach is twisted and full of knots.
I take a deep breath, then start. "He started coaching me when I was fourteen. After my previous coach moved away, I was desperate to find someone good. Savard had this incredible reputation. All the other skaters wanted to work with him. When he agreed to take me on, I felt like I'd won the lottery."
Gordie puts his chin on my knee. I rub his ear.
"Savard was charming. Really charming. He had this way of making you feel like you were the only person in the room. When I landed a hard jump, he'd say my name like it was something special.Mollie, ma chérie.And I ate it up because I was fourteen. Nobody had ever paid that kind of attention to me."
Alex’s shoulders stiffen. He knows what’s coming. My story is hardly the first. My throat tightens, but I push through.
"His attention shifted over time. It was so gradual that I couldn't point to a single moment where it crossed a line. Coach Savard started commenting on my body. My legs, my thighs. He'd frame it as coaching, like he was talking about my form.You havegorgeous legs, chérie. Strong thighs.And then he'd ask personal questions. Whether I had a boyfriend. What boys thought of my body."
Alex's breathing has changed beside me. Slower, more controlled. I can feel the tension in him without looking. He flexes his hands.
"He isolated me from other coaches, other skaters. From Indie, who I’d been skating with forever. He convinced me that they were jealous, that they'd hold me back, that he was the only one who really understood my talent. By the time I was seventeen, he was the only adult in my skating life. My parents trusted him completely."
A family walks past on the trail behind us. Two kids, a Golden Retriever. I wait until their voices fade.
"He never did anything I could point to and say, ‘That. That was the moment.’ It was all so… incremental. Little things that weren’t really a big deal, except they made me feel awful. He’d put his hand on my lower back for too long. Stand too close when he corrected my form. He’d touch my face to wipe something away that wasn't there." I swallow. "By the time I understood what was happening, I was so deep in it that I couldn't tell the difference between coaching and something else. I didn't have the vocabulary for it."
Gordie shifts at my feet. I hear Alex exhale very slowly through his nose.
“It never… he never…didanything to me. I said no. But Indie showed me a video a few weeks ago. Savard has a new girl. She's maybe twelve or thirteen.She had a pink bow in her hair and Savard tugged on it after her performance and leaned in to whisper something." My voice goes thin. "It was like looking at a photograph of myself."
Alex's hand twitches on his thigh but he doesn't reach for me. He's letting me finish.
"The fall at Nationals wasn't just an accident. I mean, it was. Nobody pushed me. But twenty minutes before I went out on the ice, I told Savard I didn't want him to touch me anymore. He laughed. He told me I was confused. He told me that everything he did was for my career, and that I was being ungrateful." I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. "I went out on the ice furious and shaking. And then I missed a landing I'd made a thousand times. Savard left before I ever saw him again."
The silence between us is dense. I can hear the water lapping at the shore and Gordie's steady breathing and somewhere far off, a bird I can't identify.
I wait for Alex to clench his fists, promise he'll destroy Savard, make my torment about his own fury. The way men often do when they hear these things, turning the woman's story into a vessel for their rage.
But to my surprise, he doesn't do any of that. When I finally look at him, his jaw is tight and his eyes are dark, but he's looking at me.
"What do you need?" he asks. “How can I help?”
Not ‘what do you want me to do.’ Not ‘how can I fix this.’ ‘What do you need?’
Four words. They crack me open in a way that nothing else could. I start crying, wiping my eyes,trying to tamp down the pain I feel. "I don't know yet. I keep thinking about the girl in the video. And, god, the girls that Savard had at the rink. I think… I have a responsibility to say something. I should dosomething."
"Okay." He seems eerily calm. “What are you thinking?”
"I don’t know. I'm scared. And I'm angry. And… I've been carrying this alone for a really long time."
He puts his arm around me. I lean into his chest and close my eyes. He smells like cedar and soap and sunscreen; he's warm and solid where I press into him. He just holds me. Gordie scoots closer and presses his wet body against both of our legs.
“You’re not going to react?” I ask.
