Chapter 2 #2
But the vertigo had pried the lock. Jimmied the deadbolt on the door I kept sealed with chains and stubbornness and the sheer, exhausting expenditure of refusing to look over my shoulder.
When the world spun, my mind spun with it—dragging me backward, always backward, to that rotation.
The one that never completed. The launch that had started with his hands on my waist and ended with my blood freezing into the ice and the silence of a stadium holding its breath while my future bled out at center rink.
I closed my eyes.
Mistake. Enormous, predictable mistake.
Because behind my eyelids, the past was not a memory. It was a location. And I’d just walked through the door.
The fragments arrived the way they always did—not as a narrative but as a sensory ambush.
The wet, visceral pop of my knee dislocating.
The metallic taste of blood where my teeth had punctured the inside of my lip.
The cold—not the familiar, partnered cold of training, but the antagonistic, clinical cold of a surface that had been beneath my blades for twenty years and had never once warned me that it could also be a weapon.
The referee’s whistle, shrill and final.
The percussion of the medical gate slamming open.
Gloved hands, too many gloved hands, strapping me to a board while the announcer narrated the death of my career with the polished solemnity of a man reading a teleprompter.
And the spinning. Always the spinning. The world orbiting a fixed axis of pain—the same rotation happening now behind my sealed eyelids, the vertigo and the memory feeding each other in a loop I couldn’t break.
How easy it was to drown in that current.
How effortless, how seductive, how terrifyingly natural it felt to let the sensation pull you under and hold you there in the dark water of the worst day of your life.
The panic had arrived first. Primal. Animal.
The full-body, fight-or-flight detonation of a nervous system registering catastrophic structural failure.
Nothing cerebral about it—no calculation, no strategy, no coherent thought beyond the blinding, electric awareness that I am broken and I cannot get up and everyone is watching.
The fear had followed. Quieter. More insidious. Less a scream than a whisper repeating on a loop: Will I skate again? Will the joint hold weight? Will my body remember how to fly, or will it flinch every time a partner’s hands grip my waist, every time the ice rushes upward from below, every time—
The anger.
God.
The anger.
That had been the last to arrive and the longest to leave.
Longer than the knee’s healing. Longer than the nine months of physical therapy, the graduated progression from crutches to brace to the first tentative, flat-footed steps on rubber matting before my blade was permitted to touch frozen water again.
The rage had been a fracture of its own—not in the cartilage or the ligaments but in the foundation of who I understood myself to be.
A structural failure no surgeon could repair and no rehabilitation timeline could predict.
It wasn’t the motivational kind. Not the fuel that coaches bottled and sold.
It was the kind that turned your hands into fists at three in the morning.
The kind that bolted you upright in a hospital bed with your pulse hammering and your jaw clenched so tight your molars ached, and the only thought—the only single, all-consuming, incandescent thought—was the desire to destroy.
To take every fragile, breakable, reachable object within arm’s length and reduce it to rubble, because the person who actually deserved the destruction was walking free.
Unpunished. Unchallenged. Standing on the same ice that had swallowed my blood, absorbing the sympathy of a public that had watched him smile and chosen not to see it.
Breathe.
I pressed my palms flat against the bench.
Fingers spread. Wood grain biting into the pads of my fingers.
The countdown—backward from ten, measured, deliberate—the way the therapist at the rehabilitation center had taught me during those suffocating hours after midnight when the hospital walls compressed and the silence became its own species of violence.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
The ceiling stabilized overhead. The steel beams stopped swimming.
Seven. Six. Five.
My heart rate responded. The frantic, skittering pulse eased by degrees, finding its footing the way a skater finds the clean edge after a shaky entry—tentatively, and then with growing conviction.
Four. Three. Two.
The ice hummed beneath the boards. The fluorescents droned. The air tasted like minerals and quiet.
One.
The worst part had not been the pain.
Pain had a shape. A beginning and a middle and, eventually, mercifully, an end.
Pain could be medicated, managed, distracted from, slept through.
The worst part had been the isolation—the vast, soundless emptiness that surrounded a person whose entire identity had been publicly shattered and who discovered, in the aftermath, exactly how many people in her life had been there for the skater and not the girl wearing the skates.
Six months in a rehabilitation facility in upstate New York.
A sterile, beige-walled institution populated by torn rotator cuffs and shattered tibias and the gaunt, hollowed-out expressions of athletes confronting the possibility that their bodies had betrayed them for the last time.
My room had a window that overlooked an employee parking lot.
The bed had metal rails. The nightstand held a plastic water cup, two prescription bottles, and a phone I’d stopped answering by the second week.
The calls had trickled in at first—coaches, federation officials, a publicist from the skating association who’d wanted to “craft the messaging.” Teammates who’d transmitted variations of the same text: thinking of you, stay strong, sending light.
Each message arrived with diminishing frequency and conviction, the way an echo loses its shape the further it travels from the original sound.
And the nights. The long, punishing stretches of darkness spent studying a ceiling that yielded no insight, listening to the institutional drone of a building that never fully powered down, inventorying every rupture in the life I’d built and discovering no one on the far side of the damage willing to help me hold what was left.
My mother had called twice. Both conversations clocked under four minutes and carried the emotional temperature of a contract negotiation. My father—
Not now. Not him. Not today.
No one came. Not consistently. Not in the way that mattered—the showing-up-at-two-a.m.-with-takeout-and-no-agenda kind of mattering.
The sitting-in-the-chair-beside-the-bed-and-not-requiring-a-single-word kind.
The species of presence where the person’s arrival was the medicine, and everything else—the food, the conversation, the hand on your arm—was supplementary.
Nobody did that.
Not until Candy.
A warmth spread through my chest that had nothing to do with blood sugar or body temperature, and the smile that pulled at the corners of my mouth was involuntary—muscle memory of a different kind. The kind that remembered joy.
Candice Hollister Holmes. Candy. Five-foot-four inches of wild ginger curls, freckled constellations, and the kind of loyalty that required a warning label.
She’d been three time zones and an ocean away at a gymnastics invitational in Prague when my knee had detonated on live television, and her entire coaching staff had conspired to quarantine the news until her competition concluded—because every single person on that team understood, with the certainty of people who’d witnessed it firsthand, that the moment Candy learned what happened, the laws of physics and good sportsmanship would cease to apply.
They’d managed to hold the perimeter for forty-three hours.
Forty-three hours before a Czech radio broadcast threaded my name through the arena speakers alongside the phrases career-threatening injury and stretchered from the ice, and Candy—standing behind the uneven bars with chalk-white hands and competition braids and the focused intensity of an athlete thirty seconds from her mount—had processed both phrases simultaneously and detonated.
The account I’d assembled from her traumatized teammates painted a portrait of controlled devastation.
She’d dropped the chalk. Walked—not run, walked, which was somehow more terrifying—to her head coach.
Delivered four sentences: “I need a phone. I need a flight. I need everyone to get the fuck out of my way. And if anyone tries to stop me, I will dislocate their shoulder, and I know exactly how to do it.”
Six phone calls. One red-eye ticket. A screaming confrontation with a federation liaison who’d attempted to invoke her competition contract.
An Uber driver in Prague who reportedly ran three red lights and later told a teammate he’d done so because—and this was a direct quote—“the small angry girl with the red hair scared me more than the police.”
She’d walked into my hospital room fourteen hours later. Six in the morning. Duffel bag on one shoulder. A pint of cookie dough ice cream in one hand, baklava in the other and a look on her face so molten with protective fury that I’d started crying before she’d crossed the threshold.
She hadn’t offered platitudes. Hadn’t told me to stay strong or that I’d come back from this or that everything happens for a reason.
She’d kicked off her shoes, crawled into the hospital bed beside me, pulled the thin institutional blanket over both our bodies, and asked: “Who do I need to kill, and do you want it to look like an accident or a statement?”
I’d laughed. For the first time in two weeks, I’d laughed.