Chapter 32 Shine Like A Diamond #2
“There’s a blog post trending,” she continued.
“Published approximately fourteen hours ago. Framed as exclusive information. The post details your recovery period—specifically, the assertion that you were isolated during your hospital stay because access to your room was deliberately restricted. That Garrison Hale’s pack blocked visitation from outside parties.
That you spent months recovering alone, without pack support, without the Alphas who were reportedly trying to reach you. ”
She paused. Let the information settle.
“Two former nurses from the rehabilitation facility have provided on-record statements corroborating the account. They’ve described your recovery in detail—the days spent alone, the absence of visitors, the attempts by external parties to deliver correspondence that were intercepted before reaching you.
The post specifically references handwritten letters. ”
No fucking way.
I gawked. The expression was total—jaw descending, eyes widening, the full-facial, the-information-has-exceeded-my-processing-architecture configuration of a woman who had just been told that the most private, most painful, most carefully guarded chapter of her life was now trending on the internet with corroborating witness testimony and a narrative structure that suggested the author understood the story from the inside rather than the surface.
“How much was leaked?”
Foxwood sighed. The sound carrying the measured, more-than-you’d-like weight of a coach who had read the blog post in its entirety and whose summary was going to be significantly shorter than the source material.
“The post is comprehensive. The author appears to have access to details that exceed what standard investigative journalism could produce—specific dates, room numbers, shift schedules. The writing style is…personal. Passionate. The kind of prose that suggests emotional investment in the subject rather than professional detachment.”
Candy.
The name detonated in my awareness with the specific, I-should-have-known, exasperated, devastating certainty of a woman who had just identified the source of a security breach and who recognized the perpetrator’s methodology because she’d been witnessing it for years.
Candice Hollister Holmes. My best friend.
My roommate. The woman who processed emotional injustice the way she processed athletic challenges—with relentless, maximum-effort, refuse-to-accept-the-status-quo determination—and who wrote blogs.
She writes BLOGS. The famous ones. The ones with the anonymous bylines and the devoted followings and the specific, viral, hits-different-because-the-author-clearly-KNOWS-the-subject authenticity that distinguished Candy’s writing from standard media coverage.
She’d built a readership during her gymnastics circuit years by publishing anonymously about the sport’s institutional dysfunction, and the blog had developed a reputation for insider accuracy and emotional honesty that mainstream outlets couldn’t replicate because mainstream outlets weren’t staffed by gymnasts who’d lived inside the machine they were critiquing.
And she turned those skills on MY story. Without telling me. Because telling me would have meant asking for permission, and asking for permission would have risked receiving a no, and Candy Hollister Holmes does not accept nos when she believes the truth deserves to be told.
I cursed.
“Fuck. Candy.”
Foxwood tilted her head. “What about candy?”
“No—my best friend. Her nickname is Candy. She’s…
she’s one of those anonymous bloggers. The kind whose posts go viral because she writes from lived experience rather than research, and the audience can feel the difference.
” I pressed my fingers against my temples.
“The nurses knew about the letters. Candy knew about the letters because I told her about the letters. And Candy has the writing skills, the platform, and the specific, zero-fucks-given, the-world-needs-to-know-this moral conviction that would produce exactly the kind of blog post you’re describing. ”
She went viral. My best friend weaponized our private conversations into a trending exposé on the morning of my first Olympic performance, and the internet is apparently responding with the collective outrage that the story deserves and that I’ve been too close to it to generate on my own.
I’m going to kill her.
And then I’m going to thank her.
In that order.
Foxwood reached behind her.
Produced a box from the preparation room’s counter—small, approximately the dimensions of a shoebox, wrapped in brown paper that carried the generic, institutional look of something that had been processed through a security checkpoint.
The paper was slightly creased. A scanning sticker—the kind applied by the Olympic venue’s mail-screening team—was affixed to the upper corner, its barcode confirming that the contents had been examined and cleared.
“This was supposed to be given to you,” Foxwood said.
Her voice had shifted—the stern, coaching-authority register giving way to something softer, quieter, carrying the specific, I-am-delivering-this-with-care-because-I-know-what’s-inside tenderness that emerged from her rarely and that I’d come to recognize as the woman beneath the coach.
“I put it through security myself, as a precaution. They confirmed it’s just paper inside. No hazards.”
I accepted the box.
The weight was slight. Paper-weight. The kind of heft that a stack of handwritten letters produced when bound together and placed in a container—not heavy in the physical sense but carrying, in the nervous flutter that ignited in my stomach the moment my fingers closed around the cardboard, a weight that physics could not measure and that the body recognized as significant through channels that had nothing to do with mass and everything to do with meaning.
I placed it on the vanity’s surface. Beneath the lighted mirror.
Between the makeup brushes and the hairspray and the gold bracelet my father had given me for my eighteenth birthday that I’d removed during the costume fitting and that was waiting on the counter to be clasped back onto my wrist before I took the ice.
I lifted the lid.
A sticky note.
Small. Yellow. The standard, three-by-three-inch, office-supply variety that was ubiquitous enough to be invisible in most contexts and that was, in this context, carrying a message whose significance exceeded the dimensions of the paper it was written on by a margin that made the container a study in the disparity between packaging and content.
The handwriting on the note was not Kael’s.
It was feminine. Careful. Written in the specific, round-lettered, deliberately legible script of someone who understood that the words needed to be read without strain and who had applied the penmanship accordingly:
I’ve kept these for close to 5 years trying to get them to you. They’re not all of them, but enough to remind you that you’re not only loved, but a beaming light to the man that wrote these to you.
Signed: Nurse Hope.
My eyes filled.
Instantly. Completely. The tears arriving not as a gradual build but as a flood—the specific, uncontrollable, the-dam-has-been-breached-and-the-volume-behind-it-was-larger-than-the-structure-could-contain variety that happened when an emotion exceeded the processing capacity of every management system the body had developed and the only available outlet was the tear ducts, which opened with the indiscriminate, boundary-free generosity of a valve that had been told everything goes.
Nurse Hope.
The name resurfaced from an archive I hadn’t accessed in years—the hospital months, the rehabilitation facility, the long, airless, visitor-less days that had blurred into a continuum of physiotherapy sessions and ceiling-staring and the rhythmic, lonely beep of the pulse oximeter that had been my most consistent companion.
And then: one day. One specific, particular, unrepeatable day in the continuum—a day that had been worse than the others, not because the pain was worse or the progress was slower but because the loneliness had reached a concentration that the walls couldn’t contain and the ceiling couldn’t absorb and the oximeter’s beep couldn’t fill.
A day when the contemplation had arrived—not as a decision, not as a plan, but as a question.
The specific, terrifying, spoken-to-the-empty-room question of whether continuing to occupy a body that hurt and a life that was empty and a future that had been stolen was a thing she wanted to keep doing or a thing she was doing because stopping felt more frightening than persisting.
And on that day, the door had opened.
And a woman had walked in. Medium height.
Dark hair pulled into the practical, off-the-face style that healthcare workers maintained.
Warm eyes. A name tag that read HOPE in the block letters that the facility’s badges produced, and a presence that had entered the room like sunlight entering a space that had been dark for so long it had forgotten what illumination felt like.
She hadn’t asked questions. Hadn’t prodded.
Hadn’t deployed the clinical, checklist-driven, how-are-we-feeling-today script that the other staff members recited with the practiced, detached efficiency of professionals whose empathy had been rationed by institutional workload.
She had simply been present. Had sat beside the bed.
Had placed her hand on the rail—not on me, not on my arm or my hand, but on the rail, close enough that the option of contact was available without the pressure of contact being assumed. And she had waited.
And I had sobbed.