I have been saying this word in my head since the ice. Not out loud. Just in my head, where I've been running it over thesame way I run new footwork, checking the weight of it, the balance, whether it holds.
It holds.
She turns from the window and finds me watching her and doesn't drop her gaze. Toni holds the gaze now. That's different from September, from the service dock, from the hotel corridor. She chose it. She crossed the ice in a wedding dress and chose it in front of everyone, and now she's standing in a thirty-second-floor suite still choosing.
She reaches up and takes her hair down.
I track this. I have been tracking Toni Amato for four months and the specific moment her hair comes out of its arrangement is the moment Antonia arrives. It has been this way since September. I catalogued it then. I catalogue it now. Her hair falls around her shoulders and she tips her chin up. "We made the papers.”
"Trey texted me from the bench," I say. "During the vows."
She smiles. "What did he say?"
"I can't repeat it in this context."
She laughs. The full one. Head back. The one from Rockford that I spent a year looking for and found in a locker room in September and have been deliberately engineering ever since. I cross the room.
Her hands go to my chest. They always go there. Her palm flat over my heart, where she has been putting it since the first night she knocked.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi." Her green eyes are steady. Level shoulders. No wallanywhere on her. "The team is going to be insufferable about this for the rest of the season."
"The rest of my career," I correct.
I reach the zipper at the back of her dress and take my time with it and I intend to continue this policy indefinitely. The silk parts. Her spine is warm beneath my hands, and she exhales. The dress falls. She steps out of it and I catch it before it hits the floor because it is her wedding dress and some instincts are correct.
She stares at me for one second. "You caught the dress."
"I catch things."
The corner of her mouth moves. "I know."
I set the dress over the chair. Turn back. She is standing in the ambient light of the Chicago skyline with her mother's ring at her throat and the superstar bracelet on her wrist, and she is twenty-four years old and my wife and the most specific person I have ever known.
I take my time.
This is a man who has been paying attention to this woman since a bar in Rockford two years ago and intends to continue paying attention for as long as she'll allow it, which, as of two hours ago in front of an arena full of witnesses, is the rest of his life.
She breathes my name, in her mouth, the way it sounds when she has forgotten to manage it. I hold her to me and stay there. A woman in a wedding dress crossed a sheet of ice, determined to be more reckless with the things that mattered. Shechose this. She chose me. I'm going to spend a considerable amount of time being grateful for that.
ANTONIA
I have been saying this word in my head since the ice. My husband. I approach it the same way I do with a new assessment framework: I check the variables and look for any errors. There is no error.
I've been cataloguing Max Stevens since September. I have notes on his tells. The jaw shift. The difference between the performance smile and the real one. The way his weight shifts when he's bracing for something difficult versus when he's at ease. I built a behavioral profile with a thorough methodology and I know this man's patterns the way I know my own.
What I didn't document: the specific quality of his focus when there's no audience. The way it narrows. The way it costs him nothing to be still.
He crosses the room without hurrying. That is its own information.
"Hi," he says again. But the register is lower, quieter. A word not performing for anyone.
"Hi." My voice comes out steadier than I expected.
The significance of the love he holds for me is evident in his actions. I reach up, my fingers tracing the line of his chin, the rough stubble that's grown since this morning. His hands. I have a data point for each location: the small of my back, my shoulders, and my jaw. I have been pretending I don't. I stop pretending.
"You're doing it," he says.
