If he went home, I might lose him.
The thought sat heavy in my chest.
But when I imagined him standing beside federation officials, smiling while pieces of himself disappeared one by one, I realized something worse.
Losing him would hurt.
Watching it happen would hurt more.
Because if Luka walked away from me, at least he would still exist somewhere in the world exactly as he was.
I could live with heartbreak. I wasn’t sure I could live with watching him erase himself.
I locked the phone, letting it fall beside me on the bed.
Tomorrow I would skate.
Tomorrow the cameras would follow me again.
Tomorrow Luka would make whatever choice he believed he had to make.
And for the first time since he walked out of my room, I understood something with absolute clarity.
If he chose survival, I would let him go.
I would hate it. I would probably spendyearshating it. But I would let him go, because loving Luka had stopped being about keeping him.
It was about wanting him to remain himself.
I looked down at the old video one last time. Luka pushed out of a spin, glanced toward the boards, and smiled before he remembered not to.
The smile vanished.
The image didn’t.
And sometime before sleep finally came, I realized what I wanted most wasn’t for Luka to choose me.
It was for him to stop disappearing.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
February 10
Dean
Practice iceat the Olympics never really settled into silence. Even at six in the morning there were coaches calling corrections from the boards, blades carving deep crescents into fresh resurfacing, music clipping in and out as programs overlapped each other.
I circled through a step sequence, letting muscle memory take over while my brain stubbornly refused to cooperate.
Outside edge.
Turn.
Check.
Breathe.
Usually skating settled me. Today it felt as if I was trying to hold water in my hands.
