“Cool. Don’t spiral while I’m gone.”
Too late.
Nathan disappeared toward the coffee station while I replayed the footage again from the beginning.
This time I stopped looking at Mila and watched Luka instead.
The version of him on the screen looked untouchable, nothing like the man I’d encountered earlier, who’d looked as though one wrong move might split him open.
I scrubbed a hand over my jaw and leaned back harder against the chair.
None of it fit together cleanly.
Athletes laughed nearby. Someone dropped a tray. A coach barked instructions across the room in rapid French.
The man on the screen moved with Mila like they shared the same pulse.
The man at the rink had stood inches from me and never told me to leave.
I stared at the dark screen in my hand.
If Ethan was wrong, and theywerea couple, this had become far messier than I wanted to admit.
If Ethan was right, then the version of Luka I’d met at the rink made even less sense.
Luka
By the timeI reached the arena again, the conversation with Mila had settled into something impossible to ignore.
I should have gone back to training.
I found myself looking for Dean.
The decision had happened somewhere between the café and the arena. I didn’t bother weighing advantages and consequences, or stopping to ask myself whether it was sensible.
I simply chose a direction and started walking.
The rink had lost the stillness of early morning. Sessions overlapped now, coaches crowded the boards with clipboards tucked beneath their arms, and music from different programs bled together beneath the constant scrape of blades across the ice. The entire building had settled into the familiar rhythm of Olympic preparation, ordered and relentless.
I searched the rink once before realizing Dean wasn’t there.
Then I checked again anyway.
The locker rooms yielded nothing. Neither did the adjoining corridors. By the time I reached the far end of the building, I had abandoned any pretense that this search was casual.
He should be here.
“Looking for someone?”
I turned sharply toward the voice.
Tomasz Zielinski leaned against the wall several feet away, arms folded across his chest. I recognized him immediately. Polish singlesskater. Reserved in interviews. Publicly out, though careful about his private life in ways I had always understood instinctively.
He watched me too closely for the question to mean nothing.
“No,” I answered.
Tomasz smiled. “Right.” Then he pushed himself away from the wall. “If you’re looking for Foster, you just missed him.”
