Blade

Chapter Thirty-Three Ana

Chapter Thirty-Three

Ana

Now

Slowly, I get up off the ground. Rise to my feet. Take a few steps back from Grace.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I know—you must be pretty scared.” I look behind me and see the two chairs that face each other in the center of the room.

It’s still the same, all these years later.

The place Westin used to have us sit for our sessions.

He always took the chair facing the door.

We would sit in the other one, facing his desk.

“I’m going to sit down now,” I tell her. I walk to the chairs and take the one for the skaters. Grace stays pinned against the wall to the left of Westin’s desk.

“I came here alone,” I tell her. “I walked from the condo. I followed your footsteps. But we don’t have long.” I point to her unlaced boots. “That bracelet around your ankle. They know where you are. Attorney Frauhn—and the police.”

Grace looks at her boots. I can see that she didn’t realize the implications of it when she ran away.

“Please,” I ask her. “Just sit down. Tell me why you don’t trust me. Why you don’t think it’s safe. I want to understand what I’ve done.”

Grace looks around the room, thinking about what to do. I’ve seen this before. She feels trapped. Alone. Like there’s no way out. And yet she didn’t run away. She came here, to The Palace. There has to be a reason.

“You don’t have to sit,” I tell her when she doesn’t move away from the wall. “We can just talk. You stay where you are, and I’ll stay here. Okay?” And then I begin, building a bridge the way I’ve been trained to do.

“Can you consider the possibility that there are things you don’t know?

Or that there’s more to the things that you do know?

More facts. More circumstances. With me, but also with your mother,” I ask.

“Whatever it is that has made you not trust her, that can be true—right alongside the fact that she loves you.”

I give this a moment as her face softens.

“All of these things can be true. All at the same time,” I say again.

She pushes away from the wall and takes one step forward.

“You must be tired. Just sit down. Take Dr. Westin’s seat. You know how much he would hate that.”

I see the acknowledgment on her face. We’ve both been in this room for sessions with Westin. It’s one small thread connecting us. But it’s enough to make her take the short walk to the chair. She sits across from me on the edge. Ready to bolt if she needs to.

“Let’s talk about the day Emile was killed. Can we do that?”

She nods. Yes.

“Okay. So you got back from training in the afternoon. You were in the TV room at Avery Hall when you had the fight with Tammy. Right?”

Another nod, affirming these facts.

“Where were your skates?”

Her eyes move to the corner—of this room.

“Your skates were here? In Dr. Westin’s office?”

“I had a session after practice,” she begins quietly. “I can’t land the quad toe, and Dawn says I have to get more speed. But something is holding me back.”

Anger rises inside me. Fourteen years later and she’s still at this. They both are.

“So you had your session, and then you walked home?”

“But I forgot my skates. I had them with me because they needed to be sharpened.”

Finally, she’s talking. And in full sentences that make sense—that are part of the story. I’ve broken through but now tread carefully so she won’t shut down again.

“You were going to take your skates to the pro shop—but then you forgot them because the session with Dr. Westin distracted you. Is that right?”

“I hate coming here,” she says.

“Okay,” I say, remembering the same feeling about these sessions. How Westin was so calm when he listened to our despair, always circling back to why Dawn was right and why we needed to stop being afraid. “So you forgot your skates.” I repeat what she’s said to anchor us in the story.

“What happened next?”

“I walked back to Avery and saw the other girls on the couch, talking,” she says. “We’d all heard about Emile and his California plan that day. I thought that’s what they were whispering about, but . . .”

She stops as a new wave of emotions comes. So I press forward, hoping to bring her with me.

“What were they talking about?” I ask. “When Tammy told you to ask Emile?”

“I thought they were lying. But they weren’t. Emile told me.”

“What did he tell you, Grace?” I ask. Luring her closer.

She tightens her face and stares at me. I feel a chill run down my spine.

“About my mother,” she says. “And about you.”

“Okay.” My heart races as I imagine what is going through her mind.

This secret her mother kept all these years.

A secret so difficult to comprehend. A girl not much older than Grace, the child who sits across from me.

Her mother’s cheeks. Her father’s dark hair and eyes.

A child unable to comprehend the decision another child faced fifteen years ago.

The violence she feared. There are so many missing pieces Grace doesn’t know.

But there’s no time for this now.

“What exactly did Tammy say?” I ask.

A switch flips inside her. She tilts her head with indifference as if none of this matters. But her eyes sharpen like two daggers, pointed right at me.

“She said my mother didn’t want me. That you drove her to a clinic to have an abortion.”

And there it is. Finally spoken out loud. I can see the expectation on her face. For an apology. A plea for forgiveness. But I don’t give her any of that. “How did Tammy know?” I ask instead. I have to find out what happened the night Emile disappeared.

She looks at me with a blank stare. She doesn’t know, but I have my suspicions.

“Shannon talks to all of you, doesn’t she?” I ask. “Like you’re her friends.”

“Yeah,” Grace admits. “I asked her if it was true, and she wouldn’t tell me. She just tried to hug me, saying all that matters is that I’m here. I told her if she wouldn’t tell me the truth, I wanted to see Emile. Tammy said he knew the truth.”

“So he came and picked you up.”

“Yes.”

“And then what happened, Grace? Where did you go?”

She takes a long breath, closes her eyes. Silently mouthing words to herself. Fight the fear. As much as she hates Dr. Westin, she’s internalized the training she learned right here in this room.

“He didn’t deny it when I asked him. He said it was complicated and we should go to his office to talk, and then I remembered that I’d left my skates.

We drove to the rink, and we went inside.

The sessions were over. The snack bar was closed.

I was gonna grab my skates and leave them outside the pro shop so they could be sharpened in the morning. ”

“And where did Emile go?” I picture the scene. The pro shop was in the back of the snack bar. I get a flash—the spinning wheels of the sharpener, the high-pitched squeal when the blades were pressed between them. The smell of burning metal and polished leather.

The rink would have been dark by then, maybe just the emergency lights glowing in the hallways. I think back to the night Mio took us there, me and Indy.

“He said he was going to his office to wait for me.”

“His office?” I ask her. Emile never had his own office when I was here.

But she points at the wall to the right. “In there.”

“So you were both coming to this hallway—to the offices. You to get your skates from this office, and Emile to wait for you in his?”

“Yeah,” she says. “But he went ahead of me because I had to use the bathroom. So I went to the locker room first. When I was done, I walked up through the bleachers and down the hall, and that’s when I heard them yelling.”

“Who?”

“Dawn and Emile. They were in his office, and the door was closed.”

“What were they yelling about?”

Now her face grows more distant. Cautious.

“Emile was saying ‘I know everything’ over and over. And Dawn was saying stuff like ‘How could you do this to me?’ and about how she’d given him a life. After he’d failed as a skater.”

“What did Emile say he knew?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want the answer.

“He said he knew about Indy Cunningham, and how Dawn ruined her career.”

I know what that was about. The drugs Indy had to use. The report made to the officials at Sectionals the Olympic year, after she’d landed the triple Axel.

Two weeks later, Indy came back to The Palace. Her mother was with her. Patrice. Fucking Patrice. She begged Dawn to help her appeal the decision of the USFS and ISU to not let her compete at Nationals. To help them reverse the disqualification.

Dawn swore she was doing what she could. She said she didn’t know who’d reported her. Dawn told her there was always next year, and too bad she would miss the Olympics. Four years wasn’t that long to wait.

It washes through me, the sequence of events, electrifying my arms.

Indy had just wanted to go home to train again with Bobby Stark. She had no idea why she’d really been sent away. None of us did.

But then Grace has more to tell me, about the other things Emile said the night he disappeared.

“He said he knew things about other girls who skated with her. And how this place would be ruined if people found out.”

“What about them?” I ask, my voice trembling.

But she doesn’t answer. Instead she says, “They weren’t alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone else was in the office when they were fighting. I think it was Dr. Westin,” she says.

“It was a man, and he wasn’t yelling. And Dr. Westin’s door was wide open, and the lights were on, so I think he left here and went with Dawn to confront Emile.

And then I heard someone coming from the back hallway, the one that leads to the small rink.

I didn’t want anyone to see me, so I came in here to hide.

And then I heard more yelling. Emile knew things, and he said he’d held on to the secrets for too long. ”

“What things?” I ask again, Dawn’s words ringing in my ears. About what Emile knew. About the Orphans. About me.

“I heard my mother’s name. And her friend—Kayla,” Grace says. “But then I heard your name. Ana Robbins. That’s when it got quiet. All of them just stopped.”

“When he said my name?” I ask. “Is that why you told me last night that this was all my fault?”

Grace nods. “You did something they’re all afraid of—didn’t you?”

“What did they say I did?”

Grace looks away. She doesn’t want to tell me.

“Grace—what do they know?”

She looks at me with a new kind of fear. Like she’s afraid of me.

“I . . . I couldn’t hear them when they stopped yelling.

But when Emile said ‘I know everything,’ Dawn said something like ‘No one will believe you,’ and then he laughed at them.

That’s when I heard her door open, and I thought Dr. Westin might be coming back, so I sneaked out through there.

” She points to the wall behind Westin’s desk.

Okay, I whisper to myself. It’s okay.

Then Grace gets up from the chair.

“I have to show you something,” she says.

She walks across the room to the other side, then behind Westin’s desk.

There’s a break in the wall where she was pointing, a panel that opens to a closet with office supplies.

But Grace slides the panel to the right and walks inside, and I follow, turning on the phone light when she shuts the door behind us.

“Look.” She points to a spot on the floor, under one of the shelves. I take my phone and shine the flashlight.

There’s a semicircle extending out from the wall. Dark red.

I bend down to touch it. The pool is thick, the center still sticky. I know the smell. Blood.

“Jesus,” I whisper. “How did you know this was here?”

“I came back the next day, before they found Emile’s body. I wanted to look for my skates, but they were gone. I thought maybe someone had moved them into the closet. This is what I saw when I opened the door.”

I study the scene. The wall where the blood seeps through—it separates this room from the office next door. “Emile’s office,” I say. And Grace nods.

“Is there blood there too?” I ask her. But I know the answer. If they’d found blood anywhere in The Palace, the investigation would have taken a sharp turn.

“I think they killed him,” Grace says. “In his office after that fight they had.”

“But the field . . . that’s where his body was found,” I remind her.

She starts to panic. I can see the shaking run through her body.

“I . . . I don’t know—they must have moved it!” she says. “And then cleaned it up—the blood in his office. They didn’t know about this closet—that it had seeped under the wall.”

And now her behavior begins to make sense.

Grace did know something. Just not enough to come forward.

“I think they used my skate to kill him,” she says, tears beginning to stream down her face. “Then they cleaned them and put them in my locker.”

My head is spinning with the implications of this. Was it a setup? Or did they try to protect Grace by cleaning her skates?

“So you think Emile got your skates from in here, in Westin’s office, then went back to his office, where Dawn found him. And Westin was there too.”

“Yes,” she says. “I didn’t see my skates in here when I came to look.”

“And then they had that fight. And Emile . . .”

“Died.”

She’s detached again when she says this, and I understand. This is where her mind needs to go to say these words and be in this place where it happened.

“But I have to tell you something else.”

“Okay . . .”

“When I ran outside, there were four cars in the lot that I recognized.”

Suddenly there’s a clanging of metal. A door opening down by the ice. Grace looks at me, terrified.

“Someone’s coming!” she says. And then she moves to the back of the closet, not into the office. She reaches the end of the shelves. They almost touch the wall, but there’s a small gap.

“This way!” she says, and then she slips into the gap and disappears.

I try to follow, but the space is too narrow. The shelves don’t move, even when I lean my body into them. They’re flush against the front wall and bolted in place.

I shine the light into the gap, press my back against the wall, and turn my head and see another door that’s behind the shelves, in the gap. Grace has managed to open it enough to get through.

“Grace!” I whisper, but she’s already gone, and I try to piece together the layout of the room and the hallway outside and where this escape has taken her.

Because I can’t get through. And then I hear another door open. And a voice.

“Ana? Grace? Are you in here?”