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The full-out is a disaster. Then it isn’t. Then it is again.
Tuesday practice, two weeks before the qualifier. Ethan has set the gym temperature to approximately the surface of the sun. His tolerance for error is absolute zero. Delaney has been in her own head since the Monday group chat. It’s showing up in the pyramid sequence — the timing a half-count tight. We’ve run it six times and landed it clean twice. The count isn’t good.
“Bail and reset,” Kara calls. I come down clean. Tuck, catch, feet to the mat. I stand with my hands on my knees and my lungs working. I don’t look at Ethan. I already know what his face is doing.
“Again,” he says.
“Ethan.” I straighten. Keep my voice even. “Delaney, come here.” She crosses the mat. I turn my back on the squad and lower my voice. “Hey. Look at me.”
She does. Her eyes are bright in the not-good way.
“The sequence is fine,” I tell her. “Your timing is fine. The only thing that isn’t fine is that you’re thinking about whether it’s fine. You can’t feel the count when you’re thinking about the count. You know this.”
“I know,” she says. She means it. Meaning it isn’t the same as being able to do it.
“When was the last time you ran it without watching yourself do it?”
A pause. “I don’t know.”
“Then that’s what we’re doing. You’re not going to think about your timing. You’re going to think about — whatever you think about when it’s going right. The thing you go to.”
“My dog,” she says. A little embarrassed.
“Your dog. Perfect. Think about your dog. Load on my count. Let your body do what it’s spent three years learning to do.” I squeeze her arm once. “You’ve got it. I promise you’ve got it.”
We run it again.
She lands it.
I go up on the new count, into the pyramid. There’s the half-second at the top. Weightless. Nothing holding me and everything is. I think about trust, the way I always do up here. Then I think about how trust has started to feel less foreign in my daily life. I cut that off immediately. Now is not the time. I am eleven feet in the air. Then I come down into Cameron and Jordan’s hands like I was poured there.
“That,” Ethan says, “is a routine.”
Priya grabs my hand and squeezes it, grinning. I squeeze back. For the length of that moment, the Nationals qualifier is a thing we’re going to win.
And then I look up — just a reflex, the way you scan a room when something’s going right — and he’s there.
He’s at the back of the gym. Near the double doors. One shoulder against the wall, arms crossed. Not in practice gear. Just him. The flannel, the jeans, the boots. Like he walked over and stood in the back of our gym and watched. Ethan’s still talking. Priya’s still grinning. The squad is doing what it does when a run lands — exhaling, collapsing into each other in the good way. None of them are looking at the back of the room.
I’m looking at the back of the room.
He’s not grinning. He’s not doing anything he’d have to take back later. He’s just watching. The same attention he gives game tape. The same attention he gave me through a hotel door in Burlington. Like he came here to see something specific. And he saw it. And it was what he came for.
I don’t know how long he’s been there. I don’t know if he saw the six runs that didn’t work or just the one that did. I don’t know if he texted first and I missed it, or if he just showed up. Standing here in a gym that smells like rosin and effort, I find I don’t care which. He’s here. He wanted to see this. The specific this that nobody in my other life has ever thought to seek out. The warm, low pull in my chest does the thing it’s been doing since Burlington. Except louder.
Ethan calls water break. The squad scatters.
I cross the gym.
He watches me come and doesn’t move from the wall. Very Theo — let the thing come to him, stay planted. When I get close enough I keep my voice low. The squad has ears.
“You’re not supposed to be in here.”
“Doors weren’t locked.”
“That’s not the same as being allowed.”
“No,” he agrees. His eyes do the warm-open thing. The one he mostly keeps for rooms with no one else in them. “It’s not.”
