“Yeah, and you left without saying goodbye.” She folded her arms. “Without saying anything, actually, aside from your big speech about what a bitch my dead mother was.”
I shifted my weight. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“Don’t apologize. That speech was the most honest thing anyone said all day.”
She looked me over, noting my layered workout clothes and the tote I carried.
“Going skating?”
I nodded, tucking the bag closer against my fleece jacket.
“Mind if I join you? I’ve got my skates in the trunk.”
I gave her suede ankle boots, already stained with slush, a dubious glance. “You have different shoes in there too? It’s a bit of a walk.”
“I’ll be fine,” Bella said with a familiar smile.Challenge accepted.“Lead the way.”
She kept pace with me as I headed into the woods, an occasional heavier huff of breath the only sign that the slippery terrain gave her any trouble. I kept expecting her to ask where we were going, but she didn’t say a word—until we reached our destination.
“Holy shit,” Bella said. “You have your ownice rink?”
About a year into my self-imposed exile, I’d had the old stable building where Heath used to hide out converted into a private skating facility. The ice surface was small, and I had to spend a good hour a day dragging a rake-like tool back and forth to keep it smooth enough to skate on, but it was all mine.
I hauled open the sliding barn doors and switched on the fairy lights strung across the rafters. The east-facing wall was all windows, looking out on the forest and the lakeshore beyond. The panes retracted so I could skate in the open air when the weather was better, a refrigeration system keeping the ice frozen even in the summer heat.
Bella spun around in awe.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you could never give it up.”
I’d certainly tried. The first few weeks after Vancouver, I did nothing except sleep and eat and seethe with rage. Then I decided I needed a project to occupy my time, so I vowed to fix up the house. If I couldn’t reach my full potential, at least my home could.
For months, I stripped paint and steamed wallpaper and scrubbed woodwork. I piled trash on the beach and lit a bonfire. I cleaned out my brother’s room and finally let myself cry about his death—and his life—gasping in dust and stale smoke until my lungs burned.
No matter what I did, though, my body roiled with restless energy. When it was warm outside, I walked in the woods until my feet blistered. When the weather turned, and the silence became too much, I played my parents’ records—Hounds of LoveandPrivate DancerandRumours,volume turned as loud as it would go—but that only made me want to move, to dance.
To skate.
Money can’t buy happiness, but for me it bought the next best thing. I found a contractor who specialized in at-home hockey rinks—and who, thankfully, had never heard of Olympic ice dancer Katarina Shaw. Several months and a significant chunk of my savings later, the stable had been transformed.
At first I’d been clumsy on my blades, my limbs pathetically uncoordinated from disuse. I fell on my ass over and over and over again, until my backside was one big blue-purple bruise. But there was no onethere to see, no one to judge. For the first time in my life, I was skating only for myself.
“We need music,” Bella announced after lacing up her skates.
“There aren’t any speakers.”
“You built yourself a whole damn rink and didn’t bother to install a sound system?”
“I’m usually alone.”
Some days, I skated with headphones in and a playlist blasting, but most of the time my only accompaniment was the meditative scrape of my blades.
Undeterred, Bella took out her iPhone, starting up a pop song with a lively drumbeat and propping the device against the boards to make the most of the tinny speakers.
She did some basic footwork in time with the tempo, singing along—something about traffic lights and busy streets. When she saw my blank look, she laughed.
“Oh my god, you really have turned into a hermit, haven’t you? This has been all over the radio for months. One of my junior teams wants to skate to it next year.”
I joined her on the ice, and we circled each other, tracing overlapping ellipses.
