Helsinki was nine hours from Montreal and the overnight flight arrived in the morning. Harin had flown internationally enough times to have a precise method for it: the window seat on the left side for the specific angle of darkness during the transatlantic portion, the neck pillow that she kept in her carry-on and which had been a gift from Yoon Daeho three years ago and which she had never replaced because the dimensions were exactly right, the specific combination of noise-canceling headphones and a program with no dialogue that her brain would not invest in but that kept the audio space occupied. She did not expect to sleep. She sat for eight hours with her notebook and reviewed the Turin notes and then reviewed the post-Turin adjustment notes and then closed the notebook and looked at the darkness outside the window.
Turin had happened nine days ago.
She had thought about Turin extensively in the nine days since it happened, in the specific way she thought about performances: not as memory but as data. The scores had been what they were, which was good, genuinely good, in a way that had surprised the federation and had not surprised Coach Han. The short program had landed the lift clean on the first attempt, which was the thing she had been least certain about going in, and the step sequence had been the best she had ever produced in a competitive context, and the component judges had given them the highest marks she had received in pairs work since the two solo seasons where her step sequences had been the technical peak of her program. There had been a moment in the step sequence, in the section where the music was building, where she had given the music what it was asking for and had felt it land in real time, felt the audience before she saw them, felt the specific shift in collective attention that competition audiences produced when something true was happening on the ice.
She had not cried at rink side. She had gone back to the hotel room and sat on the bed in the performance costume for twenty-three minutes before she called Coach Han.
Nine days later, she was on a flight to Helsinki.
The ISU had booked apartments in a building near the central training facility. She arrived in the morning, collected the key, found the elevator, found the fourth floor. The apartment was clean and functional and smelled of the specific neutrality of spaces that housed many different people briefly and none of them for long. She set her bags down and stood at the window and looked at the Helsinki street.
She had the key code. She had the training schedule. She had the ISU documentation for the Helsinki block and the Fukuoka documentation in the folder behind it. She had thirty-four days until the Grand Prix Final.
She also had, directly across the corridor, the sound of another key in another lock.
She was still at the window. She did not turn around.
She heard the door across the corridor open and then close. She heard, a minute later, the sound of bags being set down. Then quiet.
She turned from the window.
She unpacked. She organized the apartment in the systematic way she organized every temporary space: training gear by the door, program materials at the desk, personal items in their functional locations. When she had finished, the apartment felt sufficiently hers for a temporary space. She did not invest in more than sufficiency. It was not useful.
She made tea in the small kitchen and sat at the window with the program notes.
The adaptation was real now. She had felt it in Turin and she had felt it in the nine days of preparation since Turin and she could feel it now, sitting in the Helsinki apartment, in the specific awareness she had developed of the space on the other side of the corridor. Not dramatic, not emotional in any way she could not account for. Just accurate. He was there, in the way the ice was there at five-thirty-two, present and available and not requiring her to do anything about it.
She drank the tea. She reviewed the notes.
At seven in the evening, there was a knock at her door.
She looked at it for a moment. She was not expecting anyone. The coaches were on the second floor and had not said they were coming up. Sophie was in Montreal. Petra was in Helsinki but at a different building.
She went to the door.
Cas was in the corridor, in the dark jacket he wore when he was not in training clothes, holding a takeout container.
She looked at him.
"There's a good Finnish place two blocks over," he said. "I didn't know what you'd want so I got two options." He held up the container. "Neither of them has em dashes," he added, which was not what he said but which was the kind of thing he said when he was navigating the edges of their arrangement, testing the register.
She almost smiled.
"Which two options?" she said.
"One with salmon," he said. "One without."
"Without," she said.
He handed her the container. He kept the other one. She stood in the doorway for a moment.
"There are better chairs in here," she said.
He came in.
They ate at the desk by the window, which was the only flat surface large enough for two containers, and they looked at the Helsinki street below and talked about the program and the adjustments Coach Mira had scheduled for the Helsinki block and the specific elements they were targeting for improvement before Fukuoka. The conversation was technical and specific and she recognized it as the conversation they had developed over seven weeks, the working conversation, which was more comfortable than the versions of conversation that required more careful management.
He stayed for forty minutes.
When he left, she stood at the door for a moment after it closed.
She went back to the desk. She picked up the program notes she had set down to eat.
She sat at the Helsinki window and looked at the street and let the evening be what it was: the first evening in Helsinki, the thirty-first day of the arrangement that had always been defined as ninety, with fifty-nine days remaining, in a city where the dark came early and the quiet was a different quality than Montreal's quiet.
She wrote in her notebook: Helsinki. Day 31. The program is ready. The lift is stable. The adaptation is real. He brought dinner.
She looked at that last sentence.
It was factual and complete and said no more than what had happened and she let it stand.
In the morning she was at the Helsinki rink at five-thirty-two. The ice was different in quality from the Montreal ice, harder, which required a small adjustment in her blade pressure and edge technique. She made the adjustment in the first five minutes and the session proceeded normally.
Coach Han arrived at six-forty for their pre-session check-in. She told him the ice quality, the adjustment, the three morning runs of the step sequence, which had all been clean.
He made his notes and said: "How are you finding Helsinki?"
"Quiet," she said. "Good training conditions."
"And the arrangement?" he said.
She looked at him. He was looking at his notebook. He asked this the way he asked most things that were adjacent to what he actually wanted to know.
"Working," she said.
He nodded. He closed the notebook. "Good," he said.
At seven, the joint session began.
The Helsinki sessions were more intensive than the Montreal sessions had been. Coach Mira had increased the repetition count for each element and reduced the breaks, and the sessions ran two and a half hours rather than two. This was appropriate preparation for competition conditions, which were longer and more compressed than training conditions. She understood it as correct.
The first Helsinki session was the best joint session they had had. Not dramatically so, not in any single element, but across the whole of the work, there was a quality in how they moved together that had not been fully present in Montreal. Something that had been building had, at some point in the nine days between Turin and Helsinki, completed a transition she had not tracked in real time.
At the end of the session, Coach Mira said: "Whatever Turin did, keep it."
She and Cas looked at each other for a brief moment.
"We will," he said.
Thirty-three days to Fukuoka.
In her notebook that evening she wrote: Day 32. Helsinki block, session 1. Best joint session. The transition completed somewhere between Turin and here. What Turin did: I found out what it feels like when it works under real conditions. I'm not going to unlearn that.
She closed the notebook and went to bed at ten thirty.
In the morning she was at the rink at five thirty-two.
The ice was still harder than Montreal. She worked with it rather than against it. By the fourth lap of the warm-up, she had stopped noticing the difference.
This was also, she thought, the appropriate metaphor for most things that had happened in the past thirty-two days. She had spent enough time with the conditions that she had stopped noticing them as different. They had simply become the conditions she worked in.
She ran the step sequence.
She ran it twice.
Both times, she gave the music everything it asked for.
She was ready for Fukuoka.
She had been ready for longer than she had told herself she was.
She had not expected Helsinki to feel different from Montreal in the way it did. She had expected the technical differences: the ice, the facility, the schedule density, the coaches on a different floor. She had not expected the specific quality of close quarters that same-floor living produced, which was not intimate exactly but was more immediate than the city-scale separation they had maintained in Montreal.
In Montreal, she had been twelve minutes from the rink and he had been, as best she knew, staying at a hotel near the rink that was not near her apartment. Their paths had not crossed outside of training and the specific events that the arrangement required. In Helsinki, the path to the rink was six minutes and it was always the same path, and the corridor was always the same corridor, and the elevator was always the same elevator.
She was not thinking of this as a problem. She was thinking of it as data.
She had spent the preceding seven weeks building a comprehensive picture of Casimir Renner, more comprehensive than she had built of most people she had worked with in her career, because most people she had worked with had not required the level of attention that a pairs partnership required. The picture was, she had come to understand, more complete than she had realized she was building. And Helsinki, with its narrow geography and its same-floor arrangement, was adding detail to the picture in ways that the Montreal professional distance had not.
The Finnish takeout on the first evening was one detail. The specific way he had knocked, not with the efficiency of someone doing a necessary thing but with the particular knock of someone who had been deciding for approximately ten minutes whether to knock and had finally decided that not knocking was less honest than knocking.
She knew this was what the knock had been because she had done the same calculus herself, twenty minutes earlier, when she had thought about going across the corridor and asking if he wanted to share the finding-food problem and had decided it was outside the established parameters.
He had gotten there first. This was also data.
She added it to the folder.
The folder was, at this point, quite full.
On the third day of Helsinki, they ran the program in conditions that were closest to what Fukuoka would actually require: the full two programs back-to-back, under competition timing, with both coaches watching from the boards as judges would watch. The short program was clean, the paired spin was at its best performance, the step sequence was at the level Coach Han had called competition-ready two weeks earlier.
Then the free skate.
The free skate opening, with Petra's revised choreographic structure and the spin entry adjustment they had been drilling, was different from the version she had performed in Turin. The Turin version had been the best they could do with the time they had had. The Helsinki version was the version they had built after Turin, after the specific knowledge of what it felt like to perform under real conditions, after the nine days of post-Turin work that had incorporated everything they had learned about what the program actually was.
At the end of the free skate run, Coach Mira was quiet for a long time.
Coach Han made a note.
"Twenty-seven days," Coach Mira said, finally. "This is the program for twenty-seven days from now."
She meant: do not change it. Do not experiment. Do not improve it in ways that require relearning. This is the program. Drill it until it is automatic.
Harin understood this instruction. She also understood that there was a significant difference between the program as it currently existed and the program as it would exist after twenty-seven days of drilling, not in content but in depth. The drilling would not change what the program was. It would change how deep into the body it lived.
She was thinking about this on the walk back to the building that evening, the six-minute walk in the Finnish dark, with Cas beside her at the distance he maintained.
"What Mira said," he said. "About this being the program."
"Yes," she said.
"She's right," he said. "But she's also describing what's going to happen to it between now and Fukuoka."
She looked at him. He was looking at the street.
"The drilling," she said.
"The drilling is how it gets into you," he said. "Right now it's in your memory. After twenty-seven days of running it, it'll be in your body the way the morning warm-up is."
She thought about the morning warm-up, which she had been running in the same sequence since she was nine years old and which did not require any part of her mind to execute. She thought about what it would mean to skate the program with that quality.
"That's what we're building," she said.
"That's what we're building," he agreed.
At the building entrance he held the door. She went in. She pressed the elevator button and he stood beside her and they rode to the fourth floor and went to their respective doors and she said "good night" and he said "good night" and she went inside.
She stood at the window.
The Helsinki night had the quality of all Finnish November nights: fully dark by four, quiet, the city doing its version of being a city without requiring her to participate.
She had, she realized, stopped thinking about the ninety days as a countdown. She had started thinking about them as a timeline with two ends: Fukuoka on one side and everything that came after it on the other. She had not been thinking explicitly about everything that came after it. But it was there, visible at the edge of the picture, and she was aware of it.
She sat at the desk and opened the notebook.
Day 33, Helsinki, she wrote. The program is ready. We are building it into the body. Twenty-six days to Fukuoka.
Then: The folder is heavy. The picture is detailed. I know what I know.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed.
She was asleep by ten fifty.
In the morning she was at the rink at five thirty-two.
Twenty-six days.
The ice was good.
She ran the step sequence.
She ran it again.
She gave it everything.
She thought, on the walk back to the building the next afternoon, about what it meant to have a program that lived in the body rather than the memory. She had programs that lived in memory, her solo programs from the preceding three seasons, and she could run them from any starting point, any element, at any point in the program. The memory was complete.
But this program was different. It had been built differently, in conditions she had not chosen and with a person she had not selected, and it was building into her body in a way that she recognized as more complete than memory. More like how she ran the morning warm-up, the one she had been doing since she was nine years old, the one that needed no mind to execute.
She thought this was because the program was not only hers. It belonged to both of them. And what belonged to both of them could not be held only in her individual memory but had to live in the relationship between them, in the specific space they occupied together on the ice, in the negotiation Petra had identified and that they had been conducting for seven weeks.
She said none of this on the walk. He walked beside her and they talked about the afternoon session's technical adjustments and the schedule for tomorrow and the elements that needed the most drilling in the remaining days before Fukuoka.
These conversations were also part of the program. They were part of how it lived between them.
At the building entrance he held the door.
She went in.
Twenty-five days.
She had all the information she needed. She had known for some time. She was choosing to let the twenty-five days be the twenty-five days.
This was the most careful thing she had ever done. She was aware of this.
She opened the notebook. She wrote: Day 34. Helsinki. The program is in the body, not only the memory. This is because it belongs to both of us. Twenty-five days.
She closed the notebook and went to bed.
In the morning she was at the rink at five thirty-two.
At five thirty-four: the gate.
Twenty-four days.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Helsinki was nine hours from Montreal and the overnight flight arrived in the morning. Harin had flown internationally enough times to have a precise method for it: the window seat on the left side for the specific angle of darkness during the transatlantic portion, the neck pillow that she kept in her carry-on and which had been a gift from Yoon Daeho three years ago and which she had never replaced because the dimensions were exactly right, the specific combination of noise-canceling headphones and a program with no dialogue that her brain would not invest in but that kept the audio space occupied. She did not expect to sleep. She sat for eight hours with her notebook and reviewed the Turin notes and then reviewed the post-Turin adjustment notes and then closed the notebook and looked at the darkness outside the window.
Turin had happened nine days ago.
She had thought about Turin extensively in the nine days since it happened, in the specific way she thought about performances: not as memory but as data. The scores had been what they were, which was good, genuinely good, in a way that had surprised the federation and had not surprised Coach Han. The short program had landed the lift clean on the first attempt, which was the thing she had been least certain about going in, and the step sequence had been the best she had ever produced in a competitive context, and the component judges had given them the highest marks she had received in pairs work since the two solo seasons where her step sequences had been the technical peak of her program. There had been a moment in the step sequence, in the section where the music was building, where she had given the music what it was asking for and had felt it land in real time, felt the audience before she saw them, felt the specific shift in collective attention that competition audiences produced when something true was happening on the ice.
She had not cried at rink side. She had gone back to the hotel room and sat on the bed in the performance costume for twenty-three minutes before she called Coach Han.
Nine days later, she was on a flight to Helsinki.
The ISU had booked apartments in a building near the central training facility. She arrived in the morning, collected the key, found the elevator, found the fourth floor. The apartment was clean and functional and smelled of the specific neutrality of spaces that housed many different people briefly and none of them for long. She set her bags down and stood at the window and looked at the Helsinki street.
She had the key code. She had the training schedule. She had the ISU documentation for the Helsinki block and the Fukuoka documentation in the folder behind it. She had thirty-four days until the Grand Prix Final.
She also had, directly across the corridor, the sound of another key in another lock.
She was still at the window. She did not turn around.
She heard the door across the corridor open and then close. She heard, a minute later, the sound of bags being set down. Then quiet.
She turned from the window.
She unpacked. She organized the apartment in the systematic way she organized every temporary space: training gear by the door, program materials at the desk, personal items in their functional locations. When she had finished, the apartment felt sufficiently hers for a temporary space. She did not invest in more than sufficiency. It was not useful.
She made tea in the small kitchen and sat at the window with the program notes.
The adaptation was real now. She had felt it in Turin and she had felt it in the nine days of preparation since Turin and she could feel it now, sitting in the Helsinki apartment, in the specific awareness she had developed of the space on the other side of the corridor. Not dramatic, not emotional in any way she could not account for. Just accurate. He was there, in the way the ice was there at five-thirty-two, present and available and not requiring her to do anything about it.
She drank the tea. She reviewed the notes.
At seven in the evening, there was a knock at her door.
She looked at it for a moment. She was not expecting anyone. The coaches were on the second floor and had not said they were coming up. Sophie was in Montreal. Petra was in Helsinki but at a different building.
She went to the door.
Cas was in the corridor, in the dark jacket he wore when he was not in training clothes, holding a takeout container.
She looked at him.
"There's a good Finnish place two blocks over," he said. "I didn't know what you'd want so I got two options." He held up the container. "Neither of them has em dashes," he added, which was not what he said but which was the kind of thing he said when he was navigating the edges of their arrangement, testing the register.
She almost smiled.
"Which two options?" she said.
"One with salmon," he said. "One without."
"Without," she said.
He handed her the container. He kept the other one. She stood in the doorway for a moment.
"There are better chairs in here," she said.
He came in.
They ate at the desk by the window, which was the only flat surface large enough for two containers, and they looked at the Helsinki street below and talked about the program and the adjustments Coach Mira had scheduled for the Helsinki block and the specific elements they were targeting for improvement before Fukuoka. The conversation was technical and specific and she recognized it as the conversation they had developed over seven weeks, the working conversation, which was more comfortable than the versions of conversation that required more careful management.
He stayed for forty minutes.
When he left, she stood at the door for a moment after it closed.
She went back to the desk. She picked up the program notes she had set down to eat.
She sat at the Helsinki window and looked at the street and let the evening be what it was: the first evening in Helsinki, the thirty-first day of the arrangement that had always been defined as ninety, with fifty-nine days remaining, in a city where the dark came early and the quiet was a different quality than Montreal's quiet.
She wrote in her notebook: Helsinki. Day 31. The program is ready. The lift is stable. The adaptation is real. He brought dinner.
She looked at that last sentence.
It was factual and complete and said no more than what had happened and she let it stand.
In the morning she was at the Helsinki rink at five-thirty-two. The ice was different in quality from the Montreal ice, harder, which required a small adjustment in her blade pressure and edge technique. She made the adjustment in the first five minutes and the session proceeded normally.
Coach Han arrived at six-forty for their pre-session check-in. She told him the ice quality, the adjustment, the three morning runs of the step sequence, which had all been clean.
He made his notes and said: "How are you finding Helsinki?"
"Quiet," she said. "Good training conditions."
"And the arrangement?" he said.
She looked at him. He was looking at his notebook. He asked this the way he asked most things that were adjacent to what he actually wanted to know.
"Working," she said.
He nodded. He closed the notebook. "Good," he said.
At seven, the joint session began.
The Helsinki sessions were more intensive than the Montreal sessions had been. Coach Mira had increased the repetition count for each element and reduced the breaks, and the sessions ran two and a half hours rather than two. This was appropriate preparation for competition conditions, which were longer and more compressed than training conditions. She understood it as correct.
The first Helsinki session was the best joint session they had had. Not dramatically so, not in any single element, but across the whole of the work, there was a quality in how they moved together that had not been fully present in Montreal. Something that had been building had, at some point in the nine days between Turin and Helsinki, completed a transition she had not tracked in real time.
At the end of the session, Coach Mira said: "Whatever Turin did, keep it."
She and Cas looked at each other for a brief moment.
"We will," he said.
Thirty-three days to Fukuoka.
In her notebook that evening she wrote: Day 32. Helsinki block, session 1. Best joint session. The transition completed somewhere between Turin and here. What Turin did: I found out what it feels like when it works under real conditions. I'm not going to unlearn that.
She closed the notebook and went to bed at ten thirty.
In the morning she was at the rink at five thirty-two.
The ice was still harder than Montreal. She worked with it rather than against it. By the fourth lap of the warm-up, she had stopped noticing the difference.
This was also, she thought, the appropriate metaphor for most things that had happened in the past thirty-two days. She had spent enough time with the conditions that she had stopped noticing them as different. They had simply become the conditions she worked in.
She ran the step sequence.
She ran it twice.
Both times, she gave the music everything it asked for.
She was ready for Fukuoka.
She had been ready for longer than she had told herself she was.
She had not expected Helsinki to feel different from Montreal in the way it did. She had expected the technical differences: the ice, the facility, the schedule density, the coaches on a different floor. She had not expected the specific quality of close quarters that same-floor living produced, which was not intimate exactly but was more immediate than the city-scale separation they had maintained in Montreal.
In Montreal, she had been twelve minutes from the rink and he had been, as best she knew, staying at a hotel near the rink that was not near her apartment. Their paths had not crossed outside of training and the specific events that the arrangement required. In Helsinki, the path to the rink was six minutes and it was always the same path, and the corridor was always the same corridor, and the elevator was always the same elevator.
She was not thinking of this as a problem. She was thinking of it as data.
She had spent the preceding seven weeks building a comprehensive picture of Casimir Renner, more comprehensive than she had built of most people she had worked with in her career, because most people she had worked with had not required the level of attention that a pairs partnership required. The picture was, she had come to understand, more complete than she had realized she was building. And Helsinki, with its narrow geography and its same-floor arrangement, was adding detail to the picture in ways that the Montreal professional distance had not.
The Finnish takeout on the first evening was one detail. The specific way he had knocked, not with the efficiency of someone doing a necessary thing but with the particular knock of someone who had been deciding for approximately ten minutes whether to knock and had finally decided that not knocking was less honest than knocking.
She knew this was what the knock had been because she had done the same calculus herself, twenty minutes earlier, when she had thought about going across the corridor and asking if he wanted to share the finding-food problem and had decided it was outside the established parameters.
He had gotten there first. This was also data.
She added it to the folder.
The folder was, at this point, quite full.
On the third day of Helsinki, they ran the program in conditions that were closest to what Fukuoka would actually require: the full two programs back-to-back, under competition timing, with both coaches watching from the boards as judges would watch. The short program was clean, the paired spin was at its best performance, the step sequence was at the level Coach Han had called competition-ready two weeks earlier.
Then the free skate.
The free skate opening, with Petra's revised choreographic structure and the spin entry adjustment they had been drilling, was different from the version she had performed in Turin. The Turin version had been the best they could do with the time they had had. The Helsinki version was the version they had built after Turin, after the specific knowledge of what it felt like to perform under real conditions, after the nine days of post-Turin work that had incorporated everything they had learned about what the program actually was.
At the end of the free skate run, Coach Mira was quiet for a long time.
Coach Han made a note.
"Twenty-seven days," Coach Mira said, finally. "This is the program for twenty-seven days from now."
She meant: do not change it. Do not experiment. Do not improve it in ways that require relearning. This is the program. Drill it until it is automatic.
Harin understood this instruction. She also understood that there was a significant difference between the program as it currently existed and the program as it would exist after twenty-seven days of drilling, not in content but in depth. The drilling would not change what the program was. It would change how deep into the body it lived.
She was thinking about this on the walk back to the building that evening, the six-minute walk in the Finnish dark, with Cas beside her at the distance he maintained.
"What Mira said," he said. "About this being the program."
"Yes," she said.
"She's right," he said. "But she's also describing what's going to happen to it between now and Fukuoka."
She looked at him. He was looking at the street.
"The drilling," she said.
"The drilling is how it gets into you," he said. "Right now it's in your memory. After twenty-seven days of running it, it'll be in your body the way the morning warm-up is."
She thought about the morning warm-up, which she had been running in the same sequence since she was nine years old and which did not require any part of her mind to execute. She thought about what it would mean to skate the program with that quality.
"That's what we're building," she said.
"That's what we're building," he agreed.
At the building entrance he held the door. She went in. She pressed the elevator button and he stood beside her and they rode to the fourth floor and went to their respective doors and she said "good night" and he said "good night" and she went inside.
She stood at the window.
The Helsinki night had the quality of all Finnish November nights: fully dark by four, quiet, the city doing its version of being a city without requiring her to participate.
She had, she realized, stopped thinking about the ninety days as a countdown. She had started thinking about them as a timeline with two ends: Fukuoka on one side and everything that came after it on the other. She had not been thinking explicitly about everything that came after it. But it was there, visible at the edge of the picture, and she was aware of it.
She sat at the desk and opened the notebook.
Day 33, Helsinki, she wrote. The program is ready. We are building it into the body. Twenty-six days to Fukuoka.
Then: The folder is heavy. The picture is detailed. I know what I know.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed.
She was asleep by ten fifty.
In the morning she was at the rink at five thirty-two.
Twenty-six days.
The ice was good.
She ran the step sequence.
She ran it again.
She gave it everything.
She thought, on the walk back to the building the next afternoon, about what it meant to have a program that lived in the body rather than the memory. She had programs that lived in memory, her solo programs from the preceding three seasons, and she could run them from any starting point, any element, at any point in the program. The memory was complete.
But this program was different. It had been built differently, in conditions she had not chosen and with a person she had not selected, and it was building into her body in a way that she recognized as more complete than memory. More like how she ran the morning warm-up, the one she had been doing since she was nine years old, the one that needed no mind to execute.
She thought this was because the program was not only hers. It belonged to both of them. And what belonged to both of them could not be held only in her individual memory but had to live in the relationship between them, in the specific space they occupied together on the ice, in the negotiation Petra had identified and that they had been conducting for seven weeks.
She said none of this on the walk. He walked beside her and they talked about the afternoon session's technical adjustments and the schedule for tomorrow and the elements that needed the most drilling in the remaining days before Fukuoka.
These conversations were also part of the program. They were part of how it lived between them.
At the building entrance he held the door.
She went in.
Twenty-five days.
She had all the information she needed. She had known for some time. She was choosing to let the twenty-five days be the twenty-five days.
This was the most careful thing she had ever done. She was aware of this.
She opened the notebook. She wrote: Day 34. Helsinki. The program is in the body, not only the memory. This is because it belongs to both of us. Twenty-five days.
She closed the notebook and went to bed.
In the morning she was at the rink at five thirty-two.
At five thirty-four: the gate.
Twenty-four days.
You've reached the end of this chapter