The ISU approval came through on Thursday afternoon, which gave Harin approximately sixty hours between receiving the email and arriving at the rink on Monday morning. She spent a portion of those hours reading. She spent another portion in the water, swimming laps at the aquatic center three blocks from her apartment, which she did when she needed to think through something physical while letting her mind work on something else entirely. She spent the rest of it doing the preparation that could be done in advance of beginning something she had never done before.

She made a list. This was not unusual. She made lists the way other people made decisions, iteratively and with revision, beginning with what she knew and working outward from there. The list for the ninety days ahead was longer than most lists she made and more uncertain at its edges, because the territory beyond the next two or three weeks was not territory she had mapped before and could not map without information she did not yet have.

What she knew: the entry point of the training. The competitive timeline. The regulatory requirements. The specific technical gaps in her pairs skating, which were considerable, because she had been a solo skater for fifteen years and pairs skating required a set of skills that partially overlapped with solo work and partially did not overlap at all.

What she did not know: how they were going to function in the same space for the amount of time that this was going to require. She had worked with Jung Seo for two seasons and he had been predictable, which she had understood at the time as simply the quality of a good partnership. She understood now, thinking about Monday, that predictable was something you built over time, and that she and Cas were starting from a position of knowing each other well enough to have specific frictions and not knowing each other nearly well enough to have navigated them.

She went to the rink at the aquatic center and swam until the specific texture of Monday stopped feeling like a problem to be solved and started feeling like a fact to be managed.

Coach Han called on Saturday evening.

"How are you feeling about Monday?" he asked.

"Prepared," she said.

A pause. "That's not what I asked."

"I know," she said.

He let it be. He was good at letting things be when she was not ready to address them directly, which was one of the qualities she relied on in him and occasionally found useful to examine, because it had the potential to allow her to not address things for longer than was useful. "I've spoken with Mira," he said. "She's reasonable about the structure. Difficult, but reasonable. I think we can make the coaching situation work."

"Good."

"Petra Lund is available," he said. Petra Lund was a choreographer Harin had worked with twice on her solo programs. She was methodical and direct and had the quality of being able to listen to what a skater was actually doing rather than what the skater said they were doing. "Mira knows her work. Neither of us loves the other's first choice, so Petra is a reasonable second choice for both of us."

"Agreed," Harin said. "Tell her we want her."

Coach Han paused again. "Are you going to sleep this weekend?"

"I sleep."

"Harin."

"I sleep adequately," she said.

He said goodnight and hung up, with the tone of a man who understood he had received approximately as much as he was going to receive and was making peace with that.

She slept adequately.

Monday arrived the way things arrived when you had been calculating toward them: without surprise, and with the specific weight of things that had been real in theory and were now real in practice. She arrived at the rink at six-thirty, which was thirty minutes before Coach Mira's stated start time and ninety minutes before what she would have arrived for a solo session. She used the extra thirty minutes to skate through the ice quality and her own warm-up patterns, to establish herself in the space before the space became shared.

Cas arrived at six fifty-eight.

She was mid-warm-up when she heard the gate, and she clocked it the way she clocked most things, peripherally and without making it the center of her attention, and then she continued her warm-up. She was aware of him lacing up at the boards, aware of him stepping onto the ice at approximately the same time Coach Han and Coach Mira arrived from opposite ends of the rink entrance, aware of him running his own warm-up in the far half of the ice. She did not look directly at him until both coaches were on site and the session formally began.

"Side-by-side work first," Coach Mira said. "Basic positions, nothing technical. I want to see how you move next to each other before we try to make you move together."

It was a sensible approach and Harin had expected something like it. She skated to the center of the rink. Cas skated to the center. They stood approximately two arm lengths apart, which was the standard starting position for side-by-side pairs work, and looked at each other with the particular expression of two people who have agreed to do something difficult and are now confronting the specific mechanics of doing it.

"From the top," Coach Han said.

They moved.

The first pass was not a disaster in the way that later attempts at actual elements would be disasters. It was a simpler kind of failure: they were two individuals skating in the same space, not two skaters skating as a unit. The difference was not visible in any single element but was present as a quality of the whole, something in the spacing and the timing and the way their weight shifted relative to each other, and every coach watching could see it even when nothing had technically gone wrong.

"Again," Coach Mira said.

They ran it again.

And again.

After the fourth pass, Cas said, without particular emphasis, directed at the ice rather than anyone specifically: "Your rhythm accelerates in the final third."

Harin was quiet for a moment. "Your entry is half a count late."

"I know. I've been correcting for it in solo work. It shows up differently next to someone."

She processed this. It was accurate. She had noticed the entry timing and had been attributing it to something else, but his framing of it as a solo compensation pattern was more specific than her read had been.

"Mine does the same thing," she said. "The acceleration. It's a solo pattern."

Coach Han made a note. Coach Mira made a note. Harin and Cas looked at each other for a moment with the expression of two people who have identified a problem they are both going to have to solve.

"Again," Harin said.

The fifth pass was better, not because either of them had changed anything structural, but because they were now both watching for the specific things they had named, and watching for a thing was the first step toward correcting it. Coach Han made a different kind of note. Coach Mira nodded at something.

After two hours of side-by-side work, Coach Mira introduced the first paired element: a simple pairs spin, entry-level, the kind that any two skaters with adequate technical foundation could theoretically execute. The theoretical and the practical, as was frequently the case, had a gap between them.

First attempt: timing off. Both coaches expected this.

Second attempt: Harin corrected her entry angle without being told. Cas corrected his timing without being told. They were still half a count off from each other.

Third attempt: better. Not good. Better.

"Break," Coach Han said, at the end of the third attempt. His voice was completely level, which meant he had calibrated his expectations going in and they had been approximately met.

Harin skated to the far boards. She was not tired in any physical sense, because what they had been doing was not physically demanding relative to solo training. She was tired in the specific way that came from sustained concentration without the feedback loop she was used to, the one that told her when something was right. In solo skating, she felt the rightness in her body when an element landed exactly where it was supposed to. In this, the feedback loop included another person, and she did not yet know how to read it.

She stood at the boards and drank water and looked at the ice.

Cas came over to the boards after a moment, not to where she was standing specifically, but within a reasonable conversational distance, which in the context of a forty-meter rink was still not very far from where she was. He was also drinking water. He also looked at the ice.

"What time do you usually end your evening sessions?" he asked, after a moment.

"Depends on the day."

"Roughly."

She considered why he was asking this. "Eight. Sometimes nine."

"I'm usually done by seven-thirty," he said. "If we need extra time in the evenings for pairs work, I can push that."

She looked at him. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because if we're going to negotiate practice time, it's easier to know each other's schedules before we need to use the information."

It was a practical thing to say. It was exactly the kind of thing she would have said if she had thought of it first. She was aware that she had not thought of it first.

"I can be flexible on evenings," she said. "Mornings are harder."

"I gathered," he said. "You were here at six-thirty."

She had assumed he had not noticed. She should not have assumed that.

"Mornings are mine," she said. "If you want the early ice, I'll work around it, but it's what I use for the individual work I can't compromise."

He looked at her directly. "I'm not going to take your five-thirty sessions, Harin."

She held his gaze for a moment. He had used her name again, the same way he had in the ISU corridor, without announcement or particular emphasis, just as the natural thing to call her. She was not sure when he had decided that.

"Thank you," she said.

He nodded. He looked back at the ice.

"The spin entry," he said. "Is your issue with the right side specifically?"

"Yes."

"Mine is the same side. That's unusual for a pairing."

She had noticed this too, in the second attempt. Two right-side issues in a paired spin created a specific kind of misalignment that was different from the more common scenario of one skater compensating for the opposite tendency. "We'll need to rebuild the entry approach rather than just adjust timing," she said.

"Yes," he said. "That's what I thought."

They looked at the ice together for a moment, both thinking through the same problem from their individual angles. Harin noticed this. She was not sure what to do with noticing it.

"Break is over," Coach Mira said, from the other end of the ice.

They pushed off the boards.

The afternoon session was harder than the morning. Harder in the way that learning things was harder than identifying the gap, because identifying the gap was only information and learning things required the physical repetition of getting it wrong enough times that the right version could establish itself in the body.

They ran the spin entry sixteen times before Coach Mira called the day.

Twelve of those sixteen were wrong. Four were functionally correct, in the narrow sense that the element completed without technical failure. None of them were good.

"Day one," Coach Han said, as Harin unlaced her skates at the boards. He said it in the tone that meant: this is where you start, not where you stay.

"Day one," she agreed.

She was the last one out of the rink, which was also how she did most things. She stood in the empty arena for a moment after Coach Han left, in the afternoon light that came through the high windows at the far end and fell across the ice in long flat angles. The rink was quiet. The ice surface held the marks of the day's work, lines and curves and the particular disturbed texture of an ice that had been skated hard.

She had done this before. Started from zero with something she needed. The step sequence, this past spring. The layback spin, two years ago. The triple Axel, four years ago, which had taken six months to make reliable. She had started from zero every time and she had built each thing to the point where it was hers. This was not different in kind. It was different in that what she was building was not something she could build alone.

She had ninety days. It was enough.

She turned off the lights she had turned on and walked out of the rink into the Montreal afternoon.

Day one, she said to herself. She said it as information, not as reassurance. The distinction mattered.

She drove home and made dinner and reviewed her notes from the session and added questions for tomorrow to the list she kept in her notebook, and then she went to bed at ten forty-five and lay in the dark for precisely eleven minutes before she stopped thinking about spin entry angles and went to sleep.

In the morning, she was at the rink at five thirty-two.

Day two.

The second day was not easier than the first. This was not a surprise. Harin had never expected the beginning of anything to be easy, and she had specifically not expected it here, where the gap between what was required and what she currently had was as visible as it was. What she had expected was that the second day would give her more information than the first, and in this it delivered.

She learned, for instance, that Cas warmed up in precise silence, which she had not been certain of. She had seen him at warmups before, at competition venues, but those warmups had a different texture than what he produced when there was no audience and no performance context, and the difference was that he was quieter in them, more economical in his movement, less of the ease and warmth that characterized his competition presence. This was not a performance he turned off. It was a different kind of working, and she recognized it because she worked the same way.

She learned that he had opinions about ice time that were as specific as her own, and that he expressed them in the same way she did: as facts rather than preferences, because framing them as preferences invited negotiation and framing them as facts invited either agreement or evidence to the contrary. She had used this approach for so long that she had stopped thinking about it as a strategy. Watching him use it, she found herself thinking about it as a strategy again.

She learned that Coach Mira and Coach Han had reached some kind of operational truce over the course of the previous forty-eight hours, because they were disagreeing more efficiently by day two, identifying the specific points of contention and addressing them in sequence rather than relitigating the general question of whose approach was correct. This was progress, even if it did not yet look like harmony.

She also learned, by the end of the second day, that the paired spin entry they had been working on was going to require more than a week to fix. She had known this was possible. Knowing it and having the work confirm it were two different things, and she spent a portion of that evening's quiet time acknowledging the difference.

She was sitting at her kitchen table with her session notes when her phone buzzed with a message from Yoon Daeho, who was training in Seoul and had apparently read the ISU announcement about the emergency substitution application.

"rin-ah. is this real? you and renner?"

She looked at the message for a moment.

"It's real," she wrote back.

Three dots appeared. Then: "how are you feeling about it."

Again, not a question. He had always done this, asked things that should have been questions without the question mark, which she had come to understand was his way of leaving space for her to answer as much or as little as she wanted.

She thought about it for a moment. How was she feeling about it. This was not the kind of question she had been spending much time with, because feeling things about a situation was a separate activity from managing it, and she had been very focused on managing it.

"Prepared," she wrote. "And uncertain about specific things."

"which things."

She considered this. "The parts I can't practice alone."

A longer pause this time. Then: "yeah. that's the hard part."

He had been her friend since they were fourteen years old, competing in the same junior events, staying in the same federation housing in cities neither of them knew, and he was one of the few people she had let close enough to know the difference between the things she said when she was managing and the things she said when she was thinking. He did not push further. He sent a voice note instead, which was his way of saying something that did not fit easily into text, and she listened to it while sitting at her kitchen table with her session notes and the evening quiet around her.

He said he thought she was going to figure it out. He said he thought she was better at learning things than she gave herself credit for, and that what she was bad at was the part that happened before she started learning, the part where she was not yet good at something, which was the specific part she found intolerable. He said he thought Renner was probably going to surprise her. He said this last thing in the tone of someone who understood it would be received as an observation rather than a reassurance.

She put the phone down.

He was probably right about the intolerable part. He had been watching her navigate the intolerable part for nine years and had formed an accurate read of it. The part that was new, that she did not yet have language for, was the specific texture of the intolerance this time, which was different from learning a new jump or rebuilding a spin or fixing the step sequence. Those things had been hard in ways that were bounded, that had clear technical solutions she could work toward individually.

This was harder in a way she had not finished mapping yet.

She closed her session notes and did the rest of the evening's preparation. She went to bed at a reasonable hour. She was at the rink the next morning at five thirty-two, because the morning ice was hers, and that was not going to change because everything else was.

Day three. Then day four. Then the end of the first week, at which point the spin entry was sixty percent consistent and the side-by-side positioning was beginning to develop a kind of muscle memory that had not existed on day one.

Sixty percent was not enough. It was more than zero.

Harin wrote it in her notebook at the end of the first week, in the column she was keeping for technical progress notes. Sixty percent. She did not write good or adequate. She wrote the number and moved to the next line.

The next line was for what needed to happen in week two.

She wrote that down too.