The last week of the final training block before Fukuoka had the quality of all final weeks: the sessions ended earlier than they had been, the coaches spoke less and watched more, the pace of the work shifted from building to sharpening, and the specific mental focus required was different from any other stage of the preparation, more contained and more precise, directed at preservation rather than development.
Coach Mira called the sharpening week a specific term that Harin had heard other coaches use and that meant the same thing in every context she had encountered it: stop adding, start protecting. The program was complete. The body knew it. The remaining days were for letting the knowledge deepen without introducing anything new that might disrupt what was already there.
Sessions ended at noon.
On Tuesday afternoon, the specific afternoon that had been in her mind since the previous morning when Coach Mira had announced the noon cutoff, she was at her apartment at twelve-thirty and was not doing anything in particular, which was unusual enough to require active management. She managed it by going for a walk.
She was on the corner of Rachel and Saint-Denis when her phone buzzed.
Text from Cas: "Are you free this afternoon?"
She was, technically, free every afternoon this week. "Yes," she sent.
"There's a photography exhibition on Laurier. About athletes."
She thought about whether she wanted to go to a photography exhibition about athletes in the final week before the Grand Prix Final. She thought about whether she wanted to go anywhere with him, in the week that was also the final week of the arranged proximity, the last segment of the formal structure before whatever came after it.
She sent: "I'll meet you there."
The gallery was on Laurier, a twenty-minute walk from her apartment. It was a medium-sized space with the specific warm lighting of galleries that had thought carefully about what they were housing, and the photographs were large and black-and-white, athletes in the moments before or after or adjacent to performance rather than in performance itself.
He was there when she arrived, which meant he had gotten there first. She had also gotten places first for eleven weeks. She was aware that they had the same relationship with earliness.
They moved through the gallery in the way she moved through galleries, which was her own way, making her own path at her own pace, not managing the experience of the other person present but also not ignoring them. He moved in his own way, which she had not seen before in a gallery context and which turned out to be: slower than her at some photographs and faster at others, with the specific attention patterns of someone who read images the way she read information, extracting the specific thing and then moving.
The photograph that stopped him was large, in the center of the main room. Two gymnasts on the balance beam, caught mid-sequence, neither performing for the camera, both inside something that was entirely theirs. The image had been taken from below and to the side, at an angle that was not the angle of performance photography, and what it captured was not the achievement but the process, the specific quality of two people doing something very difficult together and being completely inside it.
He stood in front of it for a long time.
She stood beside him.
"This is what Petra meant," he said.
She looked at the photograph. She thought about what Petra had said: the documentation of two people who have already found each other. She looked at the gymnasts, at the quality of their shared attention, at the way the image had captured something that was not about the beam or the routine but about the specific texture of being inside something together.
"Yes," she said.
They stood in front of the photograph for a while longer. The gallery was quiet around them, a few other visitors moving through other rooms, the warm lighting and the particular smell of a gallery, slightly cool and neutral.
He said: "After Fukuoka."
It was the sentence they had been saying for several weeks. But he said it differently this time, not as a timing note or a coordination point. He said it the way you said the name of something you were looking at, as identification. This is what this is: after Fukuoka.
She turned and looked at him.
"After Fukuoka," she said. The same thing: identification. This is what this is. Both of them naming it, standing in front of the photograph of two people inside something together.
The distance between them was, she noticed without planning to notice, smaller than the standard two arm lengths. The gallery was not wide and there were other visitors and neither of them had moved toward the other. The reduction was simply what had happened when they had both stopped managing the distance.
She looked back at the photograph.
"Eleven days," she said.
"Eleven days," he agreed.
They left the gallery after another twenty minutes and walked toward the metro in the Montreal afternoon, which was cold and clear and the specific kind of November afternoon that occurred when the wind was not up and the cold was simply present rather than aggressive.
He walked beside her. Two arm lengths had become, somewhere in the preceding eleven weeks, approximately one arm length when they were not in a context that required professional spacing. She was aware of this without doing anything about it.
"The photograph," she said. "What you were thinking."
"About the gymnasts?" he said.
"About what it shows," she said.
He was quiet for a moment. "I was thinking that the camera caught something the gymnasts probably couldn't see from the inside," he said. "The way they were in it. You can't see yourself from that angle when you're inside it."
She thought about this. "Is that why the fan account exists," she said. It was not quite a question.
"Probably," he said. "Outside view of something the inside can't see."
"But we see it now," she said.
"We see it now," he agreed.
They reached the metro station. The staircase went down and they were going different directions , she was walking, he was taking the metro. They stopped at the top of the stairs.
"Eleven days," she said.
"Eleven days," he said. He looked at her for a moment with the real expression. "Then we build something new."
She nodded. She turned and walked in her direction. She did not look back, because looking back was not how she moved.
But she was aware, for the entire walk home, of the specific eleven days that were remaining and of what would replace them.
That evening she sat at the kitchen table with the notebook and wrote for a long time, more than she usually wrote in a session. She wrote about the gallery and the photograph and what he had said about the inside view and the outside view. She wrote about eleven days and the specific quality of counting days that you were not counting as a countdown to an end but as a countdown to a beginning.
Then she wrote: The gallery. He said it first this time. I said it back. Both of us understood the sentence.
She looked at this.
She wrote: I am ready.
She was not writing about Fukuoka.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed.
In the morning, 5:32.
Eleven days.
On Friday of the gallery week, the day after she and Cas had stood in front of the photograph of the gymnasts and named the thing they were both inside, she went to the rink at 5:32 as always and ran the program as always and the program was exactly what it had been every morning for the preceding four weeks, which was: ready.
She had been ready for some time. This was the thing she kept arriving at: the readiness had preceded her awareness of it. The program had been ready before she named it ready. The step sequence had been giving the music everything before she decided to give it everything. And the other thing, the thing in the folder, had been true before she filed it as a possibility.
This was the pattern, she thought, of things that happened to her rather than things she made happen. She made things happen in the technical domain, in the preparation and the drilling and the accumulation of data. But in the other domain, things happened, and she noticed them, and processed them, and eventually named them.
Yoon Daeho had described it precisely once: you don't move until you know what you're moving into.
Eleven days.
After the morning session, Coach Han had asked her to stay for a brief individual meeting, which was unusual at this stage of the preparation. He had a single question.
"Are you ready?" he said.
She looked at him. She considered the question in all its dimensions: technical readiness, program readiness, competition readiness. She also considered the other dimension that Coach Han had not specified and that she understood he was including.
"Yes," she said. "In every way I know how to measure. And in the ways I don't know how to measure yet."
Coach Han nodded. He closed his notebook. "I have nothing else," he said.
This was the highest thing he could say. She had known him long enough to understand its weight.
That afternoon, with the shortened sessions and the free time, she did what she had done with most of the free time in the preceding week: she sat with the program in her mind rather than on the ice, running it through the way a musician might run a piece through in silence, checking the soundness of the structure without producing the sound.
It was sound.
She thought about the Japanese venue, which she had looked at in videos and photographs and which had a specific quality of arena lighting she had noted from the footage. She thought about the practice ice, which she would adjust to in the first two days. She thought about the order of events, the short program on day one and the free skate on day three, and the two days between them in which she would need to hold the quality of the short program without degrading it through over-preparation.
She thought about Fukuoka and what it was going to feel like to be there.
Then she thought about after Fukuoka, which was the container of the thing she was waiting for, and she let herself think about it fully rather than managing it. She had been managing it since the parking lot conversation. The managing had been correct , the competition needed her full professional attention, and the thing in the folder needed to wait for a moment that was not defined by competition pressure or the ninety-day arrangement or any of the other structures that had organized the preceding sixty days.
After Fukuoka had a period at the end. She and Cas had both said it. Both meant it.
She let herself think about what after Fukuoka contained, without the management layer.
It contained a conversation. Multiple conversations, probably. It contained the ISU invitation, which required a decision. It contained the question of what the thing in the folder was when it was not being held carefully and processed carefully but was simply present and real.
It contained him, in the apartment on Saint-Laurent, seven blocks from her.
She sat with this.
She was not afraid of it.
She was, she realized, looking forward to it in the specific way she looked forward to things she had prepared for thoroughly and was confident in, which was to say: quietly, without drama, with the clear recognition that she had done everything she could do in advance and that what remained was to arrive.
She went to the rink one more time that evening, not for a session, just to be on the ice alone for thirty minutes. She ran the step sequence twice. Both times: the music received what it asked for.
She stepped off the ice and removed her skates.
Eleven days.
She was ready for everything.
She drove home.
She sat at the kitchen table.
She wrote: Day 58. Eleven days. The gallery. He said it first. After Fukuoka: the conversation, the decision, all of it. I have been preparing for this as carefully as I have prepared for the competition.
She wrote: I am ready for Fukuoka. I am also ready for what comes after it. I have been ready for longer than I knew.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed at ten forty.
She slept immediately.
In the morning: 5:32.
Ten days.
The program held.
She was ready.
She thought about the photograph from the gallery for the rest of the week, not in the way of something that required processing but in the way of an image that had become part of how she understood what she was doing. The gymnasts on the beam, inside something together, the camera catching what could not be seen from within.
She had spent eleven weeks being inside something. The fan account, Petra, the judges in Turin, Veronika the journalist: all of them had described what was visible from the outside. She had been building the inside understanding at the same time and through a different method.
Both views were now available to her. She could see the thing from outside and from inside simultaneously, which was an unusual perspective to have on one's own situation, and she found it stabilizing rather than complicated. She knew what she was in. She knew it from every angle.
She ran the step sequence on Friday morning, the final Friday before Fukuoka, and she ran it at the level that it had settled at since Helsinki and confirmed in Turin and sustained through the Montreal final block. She ran it at the level of giving the music what it asked for without argument, which was the level she intended to give it in Fukuoka.
After the Friday morning solo session, she walked back to her apartment in the Montreal December and packed the competition luggage she had been preparing methodically since Sunday. She had a specific packing system, which she had refined over years of competition travel, and which accounted for every item in its correct location. She went through the system. Every item was where it was supposed to be.
She stood in her packed apartment on the Friday before Fukuoka and looked at the luggage.
In nine days she was going to skate the best program of her career with him at the Grand Prix Final in Fukuoka, Japan. The program was ready. She was ready. The component judges would see what Petra had described and what Turin had previewed and what the fan account had been documenting. And after the program, after the competition, after all of it: the conversation they had been counting toward since the parking lot in Montreal.
She was ready for all of it.
She sent him a text: "Is the apartment on Saint-Laurent confirmed?"
His response: "First of the month. The super said the noise level is acceptable."
She looked at this. She thought about what it meant for the apartment on Saint-Laurent to be confirmed, for him to be seven blocks away, for the Montreal that existed after Fukuoka to be one that contained both of them.
She sent: "Good. See you at the rink tomorrow."
"Five thirty-four," he sent.
She smiled. She did not usually smile at text messages from people she was not Yoon Daeho. She acknowledged this as information and put the phone down.
She sat at the kitchen table.
She wrote, in the notebook, the last entry before Fukuoka: Day 59. Nine days. Luggage packed. Apartment on Saint-Laurent confirmed. The program is ready. I am ready.
She looked at it.
She added: I know what I'm moving into. I am ready to move.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed.
In the morning: 5:32.
Nine days.
She was already there.
The night before the departure to Japan, she sat at her kitchen table with the notebook and the luggage packed by the door and the Montreal apartment in its organized stillness.
She was not anxious. She had identified this as the defining quality of the pre-Fukuoka period and had continued to find it true: she was not anxious. She was something else. She was ready in the specific way she was ready when she had done everything available to be done and was simply waiting for the doing to begin.
She opened the notebook and looked at the entries from the preceding two weeks. The final block. The session Coach Han had called enough. Petra's words. The gallery and the photograph. The apartment on Saint-Laurent confirmed.
All of it had been heading here: the packed bag and the departure in the morning and the nine days of Japan and the free skate and the conversation that waited on the other side of all of it.
She wrote the final entry before Fukuoka: Last night in Montreal. Nine days. Everything is ready. The program. The partnership. Everything else that has been building since September.
She looked at it.
She added: I know what I'm moving into. I chose it deliberately. I am ready to move.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed at ten-thirty.
She slept immediately and completely, the sleep of someone whose direction was clear and whose preparation was finished and who needed the rest for what was ahead.
In the morning: 5:32.
One last Montreal session.
Then Japan.
Then everything.
She thought, one more time, about what Daeho had said: you were skating like you had somewhere to be. Somewhere you already were.
She was there now. She had been there for some time. After Fukuoka was the occasion for doing something about being there, but being there was not contingent on Fukuoka. It was simply what was true.
She let this be simply what was true.
Nine days.
She was ready.
She was already there.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The last week of the final training block before Fukuoka had the quality of all final weeks: the sessions ended earlier than they had been, the coaches spoke less and watched more, the pace of the work shifted from building to sharpening, and the specific mental focus required was different from any other stage of the preparation, more contained and more precise, directed at preservation rather than development.
Coach Mira called the sharpening week a specific term that Harin had heard other coaches use and that meant the same thing in every context she had encountered it: stop adding, start protecting. The program was complete. The body knew it. The remaining days were for letting the knowledge deepen without introducing anything new that might disrupt what was already there.
Sessions ended at noon.
On Tuesday afternoon, the specific afternoon that had been in her mind since the previous morning when Coach Mira had announced the noon cutoff, she was at her apartment at twelve-thirty and was not doing anything in particular, which was unusual enough to require active management. She managed it by going for a walk.
She was on the corner of Rachel and Saint-Denis when her phone buzzed.
Text from Cas: "Are you free this afternoon?"
She was, technically, free every afternoon this week. "Yes," she sent.
"There's a photography exhibition on Laurier. About athletes."
She thought about whether she wanted to go to a photography exhibition about athletes in the final week before the Grand Prix Final. She thought about whether she wanted to go anywhere with him, in the week that was also the final week of the arranged proximity, the last segment of the formal structure before whatever came after it.
She sent: "I'll meet you there."
The gallery was on Laurier, a twenty-minute walk from her apartment. It was a medium-sized space with the specific warm lighting of galleries that had thought carefully about what they were housing, and the photographs were large and black-and-white, athletes in the moments before or after or adjacent to performance rather than in performance itself.
He was there when she arrived, which meant he had gotten there first. She had also gotten places first for eleven weeks. She was aware that they had the same relationship with earliness.
They moved through the gallery in the way she moved through galleries, which was her own way, making her own path at her own pace, not managing the experience of the other person present but also not ignoring them. He moved in his own way, which she had not seen before in a gallery context and which turned out to be: slower than her at some photographs and faster at others, with the specific attention patterns of someone who read images the way she read information, extracting the specific thing and then moving.
The photograph that stopped him was large, in the center of the main room. Two gymnasts on the balance beam, caught mid-sequence, neither performing for the camera, both inside something that was entirely theirs. The image had been taken from below and to the side, at an angle that was not the angle of performance photography, and what it captured was not the achievement but the process, the specific quality of two people doing something very difficult together and being completely inside it.
He stood in front of it for a long time.
She stood beside him.
"This is what Petra meant," he said.
She looked at the photograph. She thought about what Petra had said: the documentation of two people who have already found each other. She looked at the gymnasts, at the quality of their shared attention, at the way the image had captured something that was not about the beam or the routine but about the specific texture of being inside something together.
"Yes," she said.
They stood in front of the photograph for a while longer. The gallery was quiet around them, a few other visitors moving through other rooms, the warm lighting and the particular smell of a gallery, slightly cool and neutral.
He said: "After Fukuoka."
It was the sentence they had been saying for several weeks. But he said it differently this time, not as a timing note or a coordination point. He said it the way you said the name of something you were looking at, as identification. This is what this is: after Fukuoka.
She turned and looked at him.
"After Fukuoka," she said. The same thing: identification. This is what this is. Both of them naming it, standing in front of the photograph of two people inside something together.
The distance between them was, she noticed without planning to notice, smaller than the standard two arm lengths. The gallery was not wide and there were other visitors and neither of them had moved toward the other. The reduction was simply what had happened when they had both stopped managing the distance.
She looked back at the photograph.
"Eleven days," she said.
"Eleven days," he agreed.
They left the gallery after another twenty minutes and walked toward the metro in the Montreal afternoon, which was cold and clear and the specific kind of November afternoon that occurred when the wind was not up and the cold was simply present rather than aggressive.
He walked beside her. Two arm lengths had become, somewhere in the preceding eleven weeks, approximately one arm length when they were not in a context that required professional spacing. She was aware of this without doing anything about it.
"The photograph," she said. "What you were thinking."
"About the gymnasts?" he said.
"About what it shows," she said.
He was quiet for a moment. "I was thinking that the camera caught something the gymnasts probably couldn't see from the inside," he said. "The way they were in it. You can't see yourself from that angle when you're inside it."
She thought about this. "Is that why the fan account exists," she said. It was not quite a question.
"Probably," he said. "Outside view of something the inside can't see."
"But we see it now," she said.
"We see it now," he agreed.
They reached the metro station. The staircase went down and they were going different directions , she was walking, he was taking the metro. They stopped at the top of the stairs.
"Eleven days," she said.
"Eleven days," he said. He looked at her for a moment with the real expression. "Then we build something new."
She nodded. She turned and walked in her direction. She did not look back, because looking back was not how she moved.
But she was aware, for the entire walk home, of the specific eleven days that were remaining and of what would replace them.
That evening she sat at the kitchen table with the notebook and wrote for a long time, more than she usually wrote in a session. She wrote about the gallery and the photograph and what he had said about the inside view and the outside view. She wrote about eleven days and the specific quality of counting days that you were not counting as a countdown to an end but as a countdown to a beginning.
Then she wrote: The gallery. He said it first this time. I said it back. Both of us understood the sentence.
She looked at this.
She wrote: I am ready.
She was not writing about Fukuoka.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed.
In the morning, 5:32.
Eleven days.
On Friday of the gallery week, the day after she and Cas had stood in front of the photograph of the gymnasts and named the thing they were both inside, she went to the rink at 5:32 as always and ran the program as always and the program was exactly what it had been every morning for the preceding four weeks, which was: ready.
She had been ready for some time. This was the thing she kept arriving at: the readiness had preceded her awareness of it. The program had been ready before she named it ready. The step sequence had been giving the music everything before she decided to give it everything. And the other thing, the thing in the folder, had been true before she filed it as a possibility.
This was the pattern, she thought, of things that happened to her rather than things she made happen. She made things happen in the technical domain, in the preparation and the drilling and the accumulation of data. But in the other domain, things happened, and she noticed them, and processed them, and eventually named them.
Yoon Daeho had described it precisely once: you don't move until you know what you're moving into.
Eleven days.
After the morning session, Coach Han had asked her to stay for a brief individual meeting, which was unusual at this stage of the preparation. He had a single question.
"Are you ready?" he said.
She looked at him. She considered the question in all its dimensions: technical readiness, program readiness, competition readiness. She also considered the other dimension that Coach Han had not specified and that she understood he was including.
"Yes," she said. "In every way I know how to measure. And in the ways I don't know how to measure yet."
Coach Han nodded. He closed his notebook. "I have nothing else," he said.
This was the highest thing he could say. She had known him long enough to understand its weight.
That afternoon, with the shortened sessions and the free time, she did what she had done with most of the free time in the preceding week: she sat with the program in her mind rather than on the ice, running it through the way a musician might run a piece through in silence, checking the soundness of the structure without producing the sound.
It was sound.
She thought about the Japanese venue, which she had looked at in videos and photographs and which had a specific quality of arena lighting she had noted from the footage. She thought about the practice ice, which she would adjust to in the first two days. She thought about the order of events, the short program on day one and the free skate on day three, and the two days between them in which she would need to hold the quality of the short program without degrading it through over-preparation.
She thought about Fukuoka and what it was going to feel like to be there.
Then she thought about after Fukuoka, which was the container of the thing she was waiting for, and she let herself think about it fully rather than managing it. She had been managing it since the parking lot conversation. The managing had been correct , the competition needed her full professional attention, and the thing in the folder needed to wait for a moment that was not defined by competition pressure or the ninety-day arrangement or any of the other structures that had organized the preceding sixty days.
After Fukuoka had a period at the end. She and Cas had both said it. Both meant it.
She let herself think about what after Fukuoka contained, without the management layer.
It contained a conversation. Multiple conversations, probably. It contained the ISU invitation, which required a decision. It contained the question of what the thing in the folder was when it was not being held carefully and processed carefully but was simply present and real.
It contained him, in the apartment on Saint-Laurent, seven blocks from her.
She sat with this.
She was not afraid of it.
She was, she realized, looking forward to it in the specific way she looked forward to things she had prepared for thoroughly and was confident in, which was to say: quietly, without drama, with the clear recognition that she had done everything she could do in advance and that what remained was to arrive.
She went to the rink one more time that evening, not for a session, just to be on the ice alone for thirty minutes. She ran the step sequence twice. Both times: the music received what it asked for.
She stepped off the ice and removed her skates.
Eleven days.
She was ready for everything.
She drove home.
She sat at the kitchen table.
She wrote: Day 58. Eleven days. The gallery. He said it first. After Fukuoka: the conversation, the decision, all of it. I have been preparing for this as carefully as I have prepared for the competition.
She wrote: I am ready for Fukuoka. I am also ready for what comes after it. I have been ready for longer than I knew.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed at ten forty.
She slept immediately.
In the morning: 5:32.
Ten days.
The program held.
She was ready.
She thought about the photograph from the gallery for the rest of the week, not in the way of something that required processing but in the way of an image that had become part of how she understood what she was doing. The gymnasts on the beam, inside something together, the camera catching what could not be seen from within.
She had spent eleven weeks being inside something. The fan account, Petra, the judges in Turin, Veronika the journalist: all of them had described what was visible from the outside. She had been building the inside understanding at the same time and through a different method.
Both views were now available to her. She could see the thing from outside and from inside simultaneously, which was an unusual perspective to have on one's own situation, and she found it stabilizing rather than complicated. She knew what she was in. She knew it from every angle.
She ran the step sequence on Friday morning, the final Friday before Fukuoka, and she ran it at the level that it had settled at since Helsinki and confirmed in Turin and sustained through the Montreal final block. She ran it at the level of giving the music what it asked for without argument, which was the level she intended to give it in Fukuoka.
After the Friday morning solo session, she walked back to her apartment in the Montreal December and packed the competition luggage she had been preparing methodically since Sunday. She had a specific packing system, which she had refined over years of competition travel, and which accounted for every item in its correct location. She went through the system. Every item was where it was supposed to be.
She stood in her packed apartment on the Friday before Fukuoka and looked at the luggage.
In nine days she was going to skate the best program of her career with him at the Grand Prix Final in Fukuoka, Japan. The program was ready. She was ready. The component judges would see what Petra had described and what Turin had previewed and what the fan account had been documenting. And after the program, after the competition, after all of it: the conversation they had been counting toward since the parking lot in Montreal.
She was ready for all of it.
She sent him a text: "Is the apartment on Saint-Laurent confirmed?"
His response: "First of the month. The super said the noise level is acceptable."
She looked at this. She thought about what it meant for the apartment on Saint-Laurent to be confirmed, for him to be seven blocks away, for the Montreal that existed after Fukuoka to be one that contained both of them.
She sent: "Good. See you at the rink tomorrow."
"Five thirty-four," he sent.
She smiled. She did not usually smile at text messages from people she was not Yoon Daeho. She acknowledged this as information and put the phone down.
She sat at the kitchen table.
She wrote, in the notebook, the last entry before Fukuoka: Day 59. Nine days. Luggage packed. Apartment on Saint-Laurent confirmed. The program is ready. I am ready.
She looked at it.
She added: I know what I'm moving into. I am ready to move.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed.
In the morning: 5:32.
Nine days.
She was already there.
The night before the departure to Japan, she sat at her kitchen table with the notebook and the luggage packed by the door and the Montreal apartment in its organized stillness.
She was not anxious. She had identified this as the defining quality of the pre-Fukuoka period and had continued to find it true: she was not anxious. She was something else. She was ready in the specific way she was ready when she had done everything available to be done and was simply waiting for the doing to begin.
She opened the notebook and looked at the entries from the preceding two weeks. The final block. The session Coach Han had called enough. Petra's words. The gallery and the photograph. The apartment on Saint-Laurent confirmed.
All of it had been heading here: the packed bag and the departure in the morning and the nine days of Japan and the free skate and the conversation that waited on the other side of all of it.
She wrote the final entry before Fukuoka: Last night in Montreal. Nine days. Everything is ready. The program. The partnership. Everything else that has been building since September.
She looked at it.
She added: I know what I'm moving into. I chose it deliberately. I am ready to move.
She closed the notebook.
She went to bed at ten-thirty.
She slept immediately and completely, the sleep of someone whose direction was clear and whose preparation was finished and who needed the rest for what was ahead.
In the morning: 5:32.
One last Montreal session.
Then Japan.
Then everything.
She thought, one more time, about what Daeho had said: you were skating like you had somewhere to be. Somewhere you already were.
She was there now. She had been there for some time. After Fukuoka was the occasion for doing something about being there, but being there was not contingent on Fukuoka. It was simply what was true.
She let this be simply what was true.
Nine days.
She was ready.
She was already there.
You've reached the end of this chapter