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CHAPTER 4
After having livedan exceptionally crazy and chaotic life, Addisyn had expected to appreciate downtime more. For seven days, she’d had nothing—nothing—to do.
Seven days of Nothing. No PR interviews, no gym workouts, no date nights with Brian. Not even a phone call—she’d turned her phone off after her first night in Whistler and hadn’t restarted it all week.
She should have felt relaxed, rejuvenated. But instead she felt unanchored and purposeless, like a small boat turned loose from its moorings and left to drift on an enormous sea. The freedom had become mere blankness.
Addisyn stepped aside to let a group of tourists hurry by. She was wandering about the Whistler Village—a daily habit that had become a necessity. Roaming around, looking at the people, the shops, the mountains.
Looking anywhere, in fact, except inside herself.
She’d hoped she would begin to heal in such a peaceful place, begin to feel the cracks in her soul shrinking. Instead, she felt lost, strangely bewildered, uncertain of...well, everything.
Perhaps it was finally time to do the one thing she’d been putting off.
Fifteen minutes later, Addisyn slowly made her way across the herringbone-patterned sidewalk. Black lampposts gave the area a Dickens look. She stopped to examine one of the colorful banners hinged to the posts. WHISTLER, it proclaimed in large block letters, the swathes of azure blue and lavender purple blending harmoniously.
And there, directly in front of her, was the sight that had haunted her night and day for four years. The sight that was at once her greatest love and her most fiendish fear. The sight she had once dreamed of tattooing on her arm, along with a year and a location.
A larger-than-life silver statue of the five Olympic rings, mounted at the entrance to the Whistler Olympic Village. Home of the 2010 Winter Games.
Everything else blurred into the background, the rings overshadowing her entire being. Addisyn didn’t allow herself to turn away. She needed this time to let the image sink into her. To acknowledge her broken dream and then let it float gently away.
Her eyes traveled beyond the rings and lingered on the beautiful facilities of the Whistler Athletes’ Center. It boasted a gorgeous eighty-room lodge and many smaller buildings—gymnasiums, arenas, weight rooms, swimming pools. And it all existed for one purpose: to help train exceptional athletes.
Addisyn had been one of those exceptional athletes. Because of the Rising Star endorsement, she and Brian had been able to attend the Next Wave conference in this very center. It was six weeks of intensive training, where expert coaches provided assistance to promising young athletes of all nationalities. Addisyn’s training partner at the conference had been from Czechoslovakia, and she’d met skaters from many other countries—several Canadians, of course, along with Russians, Japanese, Lithuanians, Argentinians. Many of them, having started their training earlier than Addisyn, had easily qualified to be Olympians, starring in the next Winter Games.
The experience had been one of her life’s high points. Memories, at once beautifully delicious and intensely painful, rushed through the floodgates of her mind. She could still identify the window of the room that had been hers, still recall the name of her favorite coach, still envision the path she’d walked to the rink each day to train.
She began walking closer, slowly drawing nearer to the mecca of Olympic training.I should be there now. Getting ready for...
“Excuse me!” She hadn’t even noticed the golf cart that had pulled up beside her. A burly fellow in overalls peered at her.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’ll have to turn around. Just athletes allowed here.” The man gave her a quick, apologetic smile and pointed to a sign she’d missed: ONLY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT.
“I...” The words shrank and stuck. What was the use? The man was right. She had no business being here.
She wasn’t an athlete anymore.
She swallowed the burning in her throat and forced a glassy smile. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, I didn’t notice the sign.” Then she turned and walked away from her dream.
She wasn’t authorized. Leave that to the likes of Sheila Harbor.
Unbidden, tears crawled down her cheeks. Angrily she swiped at them with the back of her hand. How could things change so quickly?
She ducked her head and hurried back to the entrance. Enough exploring for one day. She’d head for the gym and hit the weight equipment—the second component of her highly simplified new life, the second anesthetic she used to numb the emptiness she felt.
At the rings, she paused one more time. This was important, she knew—a path to acceptance. If only it didn’t have to hurt like crazy.
People walked by, laughing and chatting. A lean guy with a chiseled face zipped by on an upscale bicycle with handlebars curved like rams’ horns. A tall young woman with blonde hair posed with a dark-haired man for a selfie in front of the rings. But Addisyn felt as though she’d been removed to a deeper world, a world beyond the meager influence of such trivialities. Mechanically, she took a step forward, then another. The rings seemed to draw her in the way that a tantalizing flower might entice a hummingbird. Only the flower was, and always had been, just out of reach.
She stepped onto the little platform almost reverently. Very slowly, in the time it took a lone scrap of cloud to brush against the sun, she placed her hand along the side of the sculpture.
She didn’t know what she was expecting—something more, maybe, than just the painfully cold metal, the unchanging silver curve. For a moment she breathed in, breathed out, waited. For what?
“This was all I ever wanted.” The whisper shivered in the air. Leaning her forehead against the rings, she struggled to not cry. To not lose hope. To not writhe in the scorching flames of abandoned dreams. “All I wanted.”
