Chapter 8 Théo
I had been in Chicago nearly two weeks and I still hadn’t called Coach Miller.
I had called my mom, finally, on day five, which had been its own particular endurance event.
She had peppered me with questions for half an hour in that specific way she had—not aggressive, just relentless, circling back to the same subjects from different angles like she was hoping a different approach would yield a different answer.
How are you eating? Are you sleeping? Have you talked to anyone?
And by anyone, she meant a therapist. I had answered everything in the vague, technically true way I had perfected over years of managing her worry, and by the end of the call she had sounded marginally reassured and I could have another few weeks of reprieve.
I had FaceTimed Sabrina two days later, which was only marginally better.
She knew me too well for vague and technically true.
She sat cross legged on her bed in Toronto and looked at me through the screen with those sharp green eyes and said almost nothing, which was worse than questions.
Sabrina’s silences had texture. This one said I can see exactly what you’re doing and I’m letting you do it for now but don’t mistake my patience for agreement.
I had told her I was fine.
She had said okay, Théo in the tone that meant the opposite of okay. She was already planning to visit me sooner than later.
Fine was relative. I was vertical. I was eating. And I was going to start skating again, which was more than I’d managed in months.
Avery had arranged it with his coach—an exercise in diplomacy I suspected had cost him more than he let on—to give me early morning ice time at the Frost training facility before the team arrived.
I was fairly certain I had signed something that effectively transferred ownership of my soul to the Chicago Frost organization but standing at the boards that first morning with my skate bag over my shoulder, I found I didn’t particularly care.
The ritual of it. That was what I had missed without letting myself admit it.
The specific weight of the bag. The smell of cold air and rubber and the particular mineral cleanness of a freshly cut surface.
The routine of sitting on the bench and pulling the skates out and working the laces in the way I had done ten thousand times since I was small enough that the boots came halfway up my shins.
I loved it. I hated it. The scale between those two things had been shifting for years and lately it tilted more toward hate than I knew how to account for.
But the ice was still the ice.
I noticed him on my second morning.
He was in the stands—not the player benches, but the unlit seats in the shadows. Black t-shirt with the Frost logo, matching cap pulled low. His face was half-hidden but the silhouette was unmistakable. Derek Sullivan, coffee in hand, watching me skate like he had nowhere to be.
I found that I didn’t really mind his presence. Maybe I was interrupting his routine of sitting and staring at the empty ice for half an hour before he left to go weight train or wherever it was he disappeared off to.
We hadn’t spoken since the night at the bar.
That night had been... too much. The alcohol had loosened something in both of us and I’d said things I normally kept buried.
He’d listened with those steady brown eyes and I’d let myself be seen in a way I immediately regretted the moment I sobered up.
The vulnerability hangover was worse than the actual one.
So ignoring him seemed like the best option.
The only option, really. If I pretended the conversation hadn’t happened, maybe it would unmake itself.
Maybe he’d forget the way I’d talked about Toronto, about the pressure, about feeling like I was constantly not enough.
Maybe I could go back to being Avery’s younger brother instead of whatever pathetic version of myself I’d revealed after too much vodka.
Occasionally I would run into him in the hallway of the facility as I was leaving.
We would exchange a nod—brief, impersonal—and that was the extent of it.
He never pushed. Never brought up that night.
Never looked at me with pity or concern, which would have somehow made it worse.
I couldn’t tell if he was respecting my space or if he’d already filed me away as someone else’s problem.
I knew, through Avery’s stream of consciousness at the dinner table, that Derek was mentoring him in the particular way veterans did with players they’d identified as worth investing in.
The math of team sports was strange like that—Derek was six years older than Avery, which in hockey years meant something.
Meant the team was already thinking about what came after.
Who would carry the line forward. They saw something in my brother worth cultivating and it was Derek’s job to get him there.
To train his own replacement.
Such a strange concept for a figure skater.
I only understood self-interest. Watching your back.
The person next to you at the boards wasn’t your teammate—they were your competition, waiting for you to fall so they could take your spot on the podium.
No one in my world mentored anyone. You clawed your way up alone and if someone offered you a hand, you checked it for knives first.
Derek just… gave it away. Freely.
I tried to ignore his presence and mostly succeeded.
The first morning I noticed him, I had just finished my warm up.
I was working my way up to a jump, skating in wide arcs—building momentum slowly, letting my body remember the language of the ice before asking it to do anything complicated.
Edges and crossovers and the satisfying bite of the blade at the apex of a curve.
My legs remembered. Muscle memory was stubborn that way, outlasting everything else.
Then I set up for the triple.
A triple axel, the jump I had landed so many times it should have been reflexive, should have been like breathing. Three and a half rotations. I had been landing quads in competition since I was 16.
But my body felt wrong.
Not injured, not broken—just wrong. Like my centre of gravity had quietly relocated while I wasn’t paying attention.
Four months off the ice had done something to my proprioception, to the interior map my body kept of itself in space.
I went into the jump and felt it immediately, the wrongness of the rotation, the mistimed landing edge.
I spun out. A spray of ice as my skate cut across the surface awkwardly, my free leg swinging wide to compensate. I didn’t fall, barely, but it was ugly.
I reset.
Did it again.
Wrong again. Better but wrong. The rotation was there but the landing was soft, uncertain, my knee bending too far as I came down like I was bracing for an impact I didn’t trust myself to absorb.
Again.
And again.
I lost track of how many times. I stopped counting attempts the way you stop counting when the number stops being useful information. I was sweating through my training jacket, my hair damp at the temples, the cold air burning in my lungs in a way that felt correct, at least.
At some point I registered that the stands were empty. Derek had gone without my noticing, slipped out as suddenly as he had appeared.
In his absence, Avery had materialized on the bench.
He was sitting with his elbows on his knees and a water bottle in his hand, watching me with the patient expression of someone who had been there long enough to have formed an opinion but was waiting to be asked for it. He held the water bottle out when I skated up to the boards.
I sat down. Pulled off a glove and took the water. My hands were shaking slightly, the fine tremor of overworked muscles, and I tucked the glove between my knee and the boards so he wouldn’t see it.
“How are you feeling, Théo?”
I drank. Let the cold settle in my chest. “Rusty. But taking four months off will do that.”
“You’re being hard on yourself.”
“I’m being accurate.” I looked out at the ice. The marks I’d left in it—the spray patterns of bad landings, the evidence of the morning written into the surface. “The triple should be automatic. It’s been automatic since I was 14.”
“You haven’t skated in months.”
“I literally just said that.”
Avery absorbed my tone without reacting to it, which was either patience or wisdom or both.
He had gotten better at that lately. The Avery I remembered from childhood would have pushed back, would have turned it into an argument out of sheer reflex.
Something about maturity and distance had sanded certain edges down.
“There’s no rush,” he said.
I looked at him. “I’m 21, Avery. If I don’t get back into shape—actual shape, competition shape—this is it. This is where it ends.” I turned the water bottle in my hands. “The Olympic qualification window doesn’t care about my timeline.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“You could call Coach Miller,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“Théo.”
“I heard you.”
“He’s good. He’s not going to—he’s not Renaud. He’s not going to push you the way—”
“I said I heard you.”
The ice was quiet around us. From somewhere deeper in the facility came the distant sound of the building beginning to wake up—equipment being moved, voices down a corridor.
I looked at the marks I’d left in the surface. The evidence of the morning, written in ice.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
Avery looked at me for a long moment with those dark eyes that were the same as mine and saw things I preferred they didn’t.
“Okay,” he said finally. “You want to get breakfast?”
I looked down at my skates. The familiar weight of them on my feet. It felt both normal and strange.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”