Jung Seo called on a Wednesday, which was day four of the seven-day extension. He called at ten-fifteen in the morning, after her solo session but before the joint session, in the specific gap between the two where she typically reviewed notes and ate something and let her body transition between the two different demands.
She saw his name on the phone and answered.
His voice was the voice she had known since they were fifteen years old in the junior circuit, training at the same facility outside Seoul. She had skated with him for three years, which was three years of learning another person's body on ice: the specific quality of his weight, the way he stabilized during throws, the timing of his cues. She had known him through the ice first and through everything else second, which was the particular order of knowledge that pairs skating produced.
He said: "I've been following the review."
She said: "I know."
He said: "How are you?"
She said: "In it."
He said: "That's not an answer."
She said: "It's the accurate one."
He was quiet for a moment. She heard the specific quality of his quiet , she had known his silences for eight years and could read them. This one was the silence of someone who wanted to ask a question and was deciding whether to.
He asked: "What are you building?"
The question arrived and she held it. Jung Seo asking: what are you building. Not what are you skating, not how is the review, not what are the technical development goals for the spring program. What are you building.
She said: "What do you mean?"
He said: "With him. Harin-ah. What are you building?"
She sat with this.
She said: "The spring program. The ISU continued partnership. The next competitive season."
He said: "That's the professional answer."
She said: "Yes."
He said: "What's the other answer?"
She put the phone against her ear and looked at the wall of the practice facility corridor. Cream-colored, institutional, the same wall it had been every other day she had sat in this corridor.
She said: "Something that matters. Something I didn't have before this season."
He said: "Then you know what you're building."
She said: "Knowing what it is doesn't mean I know how it holds up when external things push against it."
He said: "External things like the review."
She said: "External things like the review."
He was quiet again. Then: "You were always the person on our team who wanted certainty before you committed. Do you remember? I had to count five beats with you on throws before you'd actually launch. Always waiting to know it was safe."
She said: "I remember."
He said: "The counting never made the throw safe. The throw made the throw safe. You committing to it made it safe." He paused. "I don't know this person you're building with. But what I see in the Fukuoka footage is you not counting. You're already in the air. That's different from everything I've seen from you before."
She said: "I know."
He said: "So you already know whether it holds up."
She said: "That's not how certainty works."
He said: "You're right. That's not certainty. That's trust. They're different things."
She sat with this for a long time. The corridor, the cream wall, the ten-thirty notification on her phone that meant the joint session was in thirty minutes.
She said: "I'm working on trust."
He said: "I know. I can see it from Seoul." He paused. "Call me when the review resolves. I want to know how it goes."
She said: "I will."
She put the phone down.
She sat in the corridor and thought about what he had said.
The counting. She had always counted beats before committing to throws. Five beats on a good day, six or seven when she was uncertain, which was most days in the years before she had learned to trust the mechanics and her own body enough to reduce the count. Counting was not trust , counting was the delay before trust, the check she ran to determine whether trust was warranted.
She had not counted before the lift in Fukuoka. She had counted in week five and week six and had been counting since then at some level. But in the Fukuoka free skate, at full presence, she had not counted. She had been in it.
Jung Seo had seen that from Seoul. The fan account had seen it. Lena had seen it. Veronika had seen it.
She was in the air, he had said. You're already in the air.
She was in the air. The review was still pending. The seven business days were at day four. Management's supplementary filing was in the ISU office. And she was in the air, which was to say: she had committed before the outcome was certain, and the commitment was either going to land or it was not, and the counting would not change which.
She went to the joint session.
The program ran. The lift: she did not count. She gave full weight and the lift completed and he held it and she landed.
She landed.
She was in the air and she landed.
After the session she walked home and thought about what trust was, specifically. She had been doing the thing she thought of as trust , giving full weight, receiving what he said, not managing the wound before it had done anything. She had been doing these things while also monitoring them, which was a version of trust but perhaps not the complete version.
The complete version, as far as she could understand it from what Jung Seo had said: you are already in the air. The certainty comes after, not before. What comes before is the decision to commit.
She had committed.
She was in the air.
She was going to find out how she landed.
She believed she would land.
She was going to find out.
That evening she texted Cas: Jung Seo called.
He replied: How is he?
She: Good. Recovering well. He asked what I was building.
Cas: What did you tell him?
She: Something that matters.
Cas: And?
She: He said I was already in the air. He saw it in the Fukuoka footage.
She waited. The reply came quickly: He's right.
She: I know.
A pause. Then from him: I'm going to talk to my lawyer tomorrow morning. About the statement.
She: You said you'd tell me before you file.
Cas: I will. I'm telling you now that tomorrow is when I'm going to decide the specifics.
She: Okay.
She put the phone down.
She looked at the east-facing window.
Tomorrow he was going to talk to his lawyer about the statement. He was going to tell her before he filed.
She was in the air.
She was going to land.
She was in it.
Both of them.
She was going to find out.
She believed.
She was there.
Both of them.
Already in the air.
Already there.
She went to bed.
She was going to give full weight tomorrow.
She was in it.
She was there.
She woke at five-thirty-two the following morning with the specific quality of a morning after a night of genuine sleep that had contained good dreaming. She did not usually remember her dreams. This morning she remembered the general shape of one: a lift in which she had already committed, was already in the air, and was watching herself from outside , not with anxiety, with the specific attention of someone observing something they had decided to trust.
She made coffee. She looked at the window. Day five of seven.
She ran the solo session with the upper body positioning element she had been developing. It was at Coach Han's target level for the first time , cleanly, consistently, not just a glimpse of the target but the target itself, held through three consecutive runs. She stopped and sat with that. Fourteen days of solo work for a single element. This was what the work looked like: specific, patient, cumulative.
She went to the joint session.
The joint session had a quality that had been building since the early days of the review period. It had been building slowly enough that she could not identify any single session where the change had been marked, but she could identify, looking at the trajectory, that something had been incrementally shifting. The sessions of the first week of the review had the quality of sessions run under held breath. The sessions of the past four days had been releasing the breath gradually , not resolving the held tension, but the quality of the breath changing.
She noted this.
The lift ran at full weight. He held it. The landing was clean.
She landed.
After the session, in the corridor, Coach Mira said to both of them: "I want to start the February lift development sequence next week. If the spring competition timeline holds, we need to begin the more complex entry work before January is out." She looked at both of them. "You're ready for it."
Harin said: "Yes."
Cas said: "Yes."
Coach Mira nodded and went to speak with Coach Han.
She and Cas stood in the corridor.
He said: "Mira thinks we're ready."
She said: "Mira doesn't say things she doesn't mean."
He said: "No."
She said: "We're ready."
He looked at her. "I talked to my lawyer this morning."
She said: "About the statement."
He said: "Yes. The lawyer says filing a personal statement now , before the review concludes , is within my rights under ISU regulations. It won't affect the review timeline. But it creates a record of my position that is independent of management's filing."
She said: "What will it say?"
He said: "What I've decided. In the language I would choose rather than management's language."
She said: "When are you filing?"
He said: "Tomorrow. I want to show you the text tonight."
She said: "Yes."
Both of them in the corridor. The joint session complete. The lift clean. Mira ready to start the February lift sequence. His personal statement going to ISU tomorrow.
She was in the air.
She was going to land.
She believed.
She was there.
Both of them.
In it.
She went home. She made tea. She sat at the desk and thought about the statement he was going to show her. She thought about what she hoped it would say.
She hoped it would say what he had told her. Not in the managed language of legal filings , in the words he would choose. She hoped it would be short. She hoped it would be precise. She hoped it would be him.
She believed it would be.
She was going to find out tonight.
She wrote in the notebook: Day 110. Solo session: step sequence target reached, clean, consistent. Joint session: Mira says we're ready for the February lift sequence. He's filing the statement tomorrow. He's showing me tonight.
She wrote: Jung Seo said I'm already in the air. I think he's right. I've been monitoring trust like I monitored throws. But I committed already. The throw is in progress.
She wrote: I'm going to land.
She closed the notebook.
She was going to find out tonight what the statement said.
She was going to find out in seven business days, three remaining, what ISU decided.
She was going to give full weight tomorrow.
She was going to land.
She believed.
She was there.
Both of them.
Already in the air.
Already there.
He showed her the statement that evening at the Saint-Laurent apartment. He had printed it, which was slightly unusual , most of their communications happened on screens. He had printed it and handed it to her across the table.
She read it.
The statement was four paragraphs. It was written in first-person, in the specific register she recognized as his , not press conference Cas, not management-meeting Cas. The person who had sat across from her in the Fukuoka room the morning after and gone through the press schedule with her. The person who had walked her four blocks in the Montreal December.
The first paragraph established his registration status and the basis for the emergency clause registration.
The second paragraph stated his position: he had accepted the emergency clause invitation in good faith and had met the competitive obligations of the arrangement to the best of his ability, and the results were on the public record.
The third paragraph: he had been asked, in the course of the current registration review, to consider returning to the original registration arrangement. He had considered it. His position was unchanged. He wished to continue with the current registration.
The fourth paragraph: he was filing this statement separately from his management's position because he believed the record should reflect his personal decision clearly and without ambiguity.
She read all four paragraphs.
She looked up.
He was watching her read. When she looked up he held her gaze.
She said: "The fourth paragraph."
He said: "Yes."
She said: "You wrote that."
He said: "Yes."
She put the paper down on the table between them.
She said: "Thank you."
He said: "It's what I decided. I wanted it on record in my own words."
She said: "I know." She looked at him. "File it."
He said: "Yes."
She went home at nine. She walked the seven blocks with the specific quality of a walk that is both ordinary and significant at once , ordinary because it was the same seven blocks it always was, significant because of what she was carrying.
She was carrying: the statement in her mind, the fourth paragraph, the record should reflect his personal decision clearly and without ambiguity.
He had decided. He had been deciding since before the review opened. He had said it to management, to ISU, to Lena, to her, and now he was filing it to put it on record in his own words rather than in the language others chose for him.
She was in the air.
She was going to land.
She was already landing.
She could feel the ground coming up.
She walked.
She was in it.
Both of them.
Three more business days.
She was already there.
She was already landing.
Both of them.
There.
The following morning his lawyer filed the personal statement with ISU at nine-seventeen. He texted her: Filed. The confirmation number is in Sophie's hands.
She replied: Good.
She was in the solo session when the text arrived. She read it between runs and put the phone down and ran the next repetition of the step sequence element and it was clean again for the fourth consecutive session.
The work was working.
The statement was on record.
Two business days remaining.
She was going to give full weight.
She was going to land.
She was going to find out.
She believed.
She was in it.
Both of them.
Both already in the air.
Both already landing.
Both already there.
She ran the joint session that afternoon with the quality she had been maintaining: full presence, full weight, the program at the level it needed to be at.
The lift completed. He held it.
She landed.
Every time she landed.
She was going to land on the day the review concluded.
She was going to be there when she landed.
She believed.
She was there.
Both of them.
The statement was on record.
Two days.
She was going to find out.
She was already there.
She walked to the rink the next morning in the specific Montreal cold that had become the background temperature of the entire review period: consistent, reliable, the kind of cold that was not dramatic but that required constant accommodation. She had learned to dress for it. She had learned its rhythms. This was December Montreal , she had known it for four years. She was not surprised by it.
She was not surprised by anything anymore in the way she had been surprised at the start of the review period. The ISU notification at five forty-seven had been a surprise , not because she had not known the review was coming but because the body's response to it had been unexpected. The ninety-percent lift weight without conscious awareness. The eight-foot gap at the boards.
She had been working on the surprise since then. The body had been learning, across fourteen days of the original period and now into the extended period, that the surprise of the notification was a one-time thing and that what followed was the work and the deciding and the giving of full weight.
The body was learning.
She arrived at the rink at five-thirty-two.
At five-thirty-four, footsteps behind her.
She was mid-warm-up and did not stop.
He found his lane beside her.
Both of them on the ice.
Two business days remaining.
The statement on record.
The lift at full weight.
The landing clean.
Both of them in it.
She believed.
She was there.
She was already there.
Both of them.
In the air.
Landing.
There.
That evening , the last evening before the final two business days, the evening when the review was nearest and the outcome still unknown , she sat at the east-facing window with the remaining gyokuro tea and thought about Jung Seo's question.
What are you building?
She had told him: something that matters.
She had told Cas, across the Saint-Denis table in week four, that she was someone who skated alone by preference, trained alone, ate dinner alone, and had organized the first twenty-three years of her competitive life around the proposition that alone was sufficient.
What had changed: not the preference for solitude itself , she still skated the solo session first, still needed the five-thirty-two before the five-thirty-four. But the proposition that alone was sufficient had changed. The proposition now was: alone is what I am, and also I have chosen this.
She had chosen. She was in the air. She was landing.
She drank the tea.
Two business days.
She was going to find out.
She believed.
She was there.
She was already there.
Both of them.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Jung Seo called on a Wednesday, which was day four of the seven-day extension. He called at ten-fifteen in the morning, after her solo session but before the joint session, in the specific gap between the two where she typically reviewed notes and ate something and let her body transition between the two different demands.
She saw his name on the phone and answered.
His voice was the voice she had known since they were fifteen years old in the junior circuit, training at the same facility outside Seoul. She had skated with him for three years, which was three years of learning another person's body on ice: the specific quality of his weight, the way he stabilized during throws, the timing of his cues. She had known him through the ice first and through everything else second, which was the particular order of knowledge that pairs skating produced.
He said: "I've been following the review."
She said: "I know."
He said: "How are you?"
She said: "In it."
He said: "That's not an answer."
She said: "It's the accurate one."
He was quiet for a moment. She heard the specific quality of his quiet , she had known his silences for eight years and could read them. This one was the silence of someone who wanted to ask a question and was deciding whether to.
He asked: "What are you building?"
The question arrived and she held it. Jung Seo asking: what are you building. Not what are you skating, not how is the review, not what are the technical development goals for the spring program. What are you building.
She said: "What do you mean?"
He said: "With him. Harin-ah. What are you building?"
She sat with this.
She said: "The spring program. The ISU continued partnership. The next competitive season."
He said: "That's the professional answer."
She said: "Yes."
He said: "What's the other answer?"
She put the phone against her ear and looked at the wall of the practice facility corridor. Cream-colored, institutional, the same wall it had been every other day she had sat in this corridor.
She said: "Something that matters. Something I didn't have before this season."
He said: "Then you know what you're building."
She said: "Knowing what it is doesn't mean I know how it holds up when external things push against it."
He said: "External things like the review."
She said: "External things like the review."
He was quiet again. Then: "You were always the person on our team who wanted certainty before you committed. Do you remember? I had to count five beats with you on throws before you'd actually launch. Always waiting to know it was safe."
She said: "I remember."
He said: "The counting never made the throw safe. The throw made the throw safe. You committing to it made it safe." He paused. "I don't know this person you're building with. But what I see in the Fukuoka footage is you not counting. You're already in the air. That's different from everything I've seen from you before."
She said: "I know."
He said: "So you already know whether it holds up."
She said: "That's not how certainty works."
He said: "You're right. That's not certainty. That's trust. They're different things."
She sat with this for a long time. The corridor, the cream wall, the ten-thirty notification on her phone that meant the joint session was in thirty minutes.
She said: "I'm working on trust."
He said: "I know. I can see it from Seoul." He paused. "Call me when the review resolves. I want to know how it goes."
She said: "I will."
She put the phone down.
She sat in the corridor and thought about what he had said.
The counting. She had always counted beats before committing to throws. Five beats on a good day, six or seven when she was uncertain, which was most days in the years before she had learned to trust the mechanics and her own body enough to reduce the count. Counting was not trust , counting was the delay before trust, the check she ran to determine whether trust was warranted.
She had not counted before the lift in Fukuoka. She had counted in week five and week six and had been counting since then at some level. But in the Fukuoka free skate, at full presence, she had not counted. She had been in it.
Jung Seo had seen that from Seoul. The fan account had seen it. Lena had seen it. Veronika had seen it.
She was in the air, he had said. You're already in the air.
She was in the air. The review was still pending. The seven business days were at day four. Management's supplementary filing was in the ISU office. And she was in the air, which was to say: she had committed before the outcome was certain, and the commitment was either going to land or it was not, and the counting would not change which.
She went to the joint session.
The program ran. The lift: she did not count. She gave full weight and the lift completed and he held it and she landed.
She landed.
She was in the air and she landed.
After the session she walked home and thought about what trust was, specifically. She had been doing the thing she thought of as trust , giving full weight, receiving what he said, not managing the wound before it had done anything. She had been doing these things while also monitoring them, which was a version of trust but perhaps not the complete version.
The complete version, as far as she could understand it from what Jung Seo had said: you are already in the air. The certainty comes after, not before. What comes before is the decision to commit.
She had committed.
She was in the air.
She was going to find out how she landed.
She believed she would land.
She was going to find out.
That evening she texted Cas: Jung Seo called.
He replied: How is he?
She: Good. Recovering well. He asked what I was building.
Cas: What did you tell him?
She: Something that matters.
Cas: And?
She: He said I was already in the air. He saw it in the Fukuoka footage.
She waited. The reply came quickly: He's right.
She: I know.
A pause. Then from him: I'm going to talk to my lawyer tomorrow morning. About the statement.
She: You said you'd tell me before you file.
Cas: I will. I'm telling you now that tomorrow is when I'm going to decide the specifics.
She: Okay.
She put the phone down.
She looked at the east-facing window.
Tomorrow he was going to talk to his lawyer about the statement. He was going to tell her before he filed.
She was in the air.
She was going to land.
She was in it.
Both of them.
She was going to find out.
She believed.
She was there.
Both of them.
Already in the air.
Already there.
She went to bed.
She was going to give full weight tomorrow.
She was in it.
She was there.
She woke at five-thirty-two the following morning with the specific quality of a morning after a night of genuine sleep that had contained good dreaming. She did not usually remember her dreams. This morning she remembered the general shape of one: a lift in which she had already committed, was already in the air, and was watching herself from outside , not with anxiety, with the specific attention of someone observing something they had decided to trust.
She made coffee. She looked at the window. Day five of seven.
She ran the solo session with the upper body positioning element she had been developing. It was at Coach Han's target level for the first time , cleanly, consistently, not just a glimpse of the target but the target itself, held through three consecutive runs. She stopped and sat with that. Fourteen days of solo work for a single element. This was what the work looked like: specific, patient, cumulative.
She went to the joint session.
The joint session had a quality that had been building since the early days of the review period. It had been building slowly enough that she could not identify any single session where the change had been marked, but she could identify, looking at the trajectory, that something had been incrementally shifting. The sessions of the first week of the review had the quality of sessions run under held breath. The sessions of the past four days had been releasing the breath gradually , not resolving the held tension, but the quality of the breath changing.
She noted this.
The lift ran at full weight. He held it. The landing was clean.
She landed.
After the session, in the corridor, Coach Mira said to both of them: "I want to start the February lift development sequence next week. If the spring competition timeline holds, we need to begin the more complex entry work before January is out." She looked at both of them. "You're ready for it."
Harin said: "Yes."
Cas said: "Yes."
Coach Mira nodded and went to speak with Coach Han.
She and Cas stood in the corridor.
He said: "Mira thinks we're ready."
She said: "Mira doesn't say things she doesn't mean."
He said: "No."
She said: "We're ready."
He looked at her. "I talked to my lawyer this morning."
She said: "About the statement."
He said: "Yes. The lawyer says filing a personal statement now , before the review concludes , is within my rights under ISU regulations. It won't affect the review timeline. But it creates a record of my position that is independent of management's filing."
She said: "What will it say?"
He said: "What I've decided. In the language I would choose rather than management's language."
She said: "When are you filing?"
He said: "Tomorrow. I want to show you the text tonight."
She said: "Yes."
Both of them in the corridor. The joint session complete. The lift clean. Mira ready to start the February lift sequence. His personal statement going to ISU tomorrow.
She was in the air.
She was going to land.
She believed.
She was there.
Both of them.
In it.
She went home. She made tea. She sat at the desk and thought about the statement he was going to show her. She thought about what she hoped it would say.
She hoped it would say what he had told her. Not in the managed language of legal filings , in the words he would choose. She hoped it would be short. She hoped it would be precise. She hoped it would be him.
She believed it would be.
She was going to find out tonight.
She wrote in the notebook: Day 110. Solo session: step sequence target reached, clean, consistent. Joint session: Mira says we're ready for the February lift sequence. He's filing the statement tomorrow. He's showing me tonight.
She wrote: Jung Seo said I'm already in the air. I think he's right. I've been monitoring trust like I monitored throws. But I committed already. The throw is in progress.
She wrote: I'm going to land.
She closed the notebook.
She was going to find out tonight what the statement said.
She was going to find out in seven business days, three remaining, what ISU decided.
She was going to give full weight tomorrow.
She was going to land.
She believed.
She was there.
Both of them.
Already in the air.
Already there.
He showed her the statement that evening at the Saint-Laurent apartment. He had printed it, which was slightly unusual , most of their communications happened on screens. He had printed it and handed it to her across the table.
She read it.
The statement was four paragraphs. It was written in first-person, in the specific register she recognized as his , not press conference Cas, not management-meeting Cas. The person who had sat across from her in the Fukuoka room the morning after and gone through the press schedule with her. The person who had walked her four blocks in the Montreal December.
The first paragraph established his registration status and the basis for the emergency clause registration.
The second paragraph stated his position: he had accepted the emergency clause invitation in good faith and had met the competitive obligations of the arrangement to the best of his ability, and the results were on the public record.
The third paragraph: he had been asked, in the course of the current registration review, to consider returning to the original registration arrangement. He had considered it. His position was unchanged. He wished to continue with the current registration.
The fourth paragraph: he was filing this statement separately from his management's position because he believed the record should reflect his personal decision clearly and without ambiguity.
She read all four paragraphs.
She looked up.
He was watching her read. When she looked up he held her gaze.
She said: "The fourth paragraph."
He said: "Yes."
She said: "You wrote that."
He said: "Yes."
She put the paper down on the table between them.
She said: "Thank you."
He said: "It's what I decided. I wanted it on record in my own words."
She said: "I know." She looked at him. "File it."
He said: "Yes."
She went home at nine. She walked the seven blocks with the specific quality of a walk that is both ordinary and significant at once , ordinary because it was the same seven blocks it always was, significant because of what she was carrying.
She was carrying: the statement in her mind, the fourth paragraph, the record should reflect his personal decision clearly and without ambiguity.
He had decided. He had been deciding since before the review opened. He had said it to management, to ISU, to Lena, to her, and now he was filing it to put it on record in his own words rather than in the language others chose for him.
She was in the air.
She was going to land.
She was already landing.
She could feel the ground coming up.
She walked.
She was in it.
Both of them.
Three more business days.
She was already there.
She was already landing.
Both of them.
There.
The following morning his lawyer filed the personal statement with ISU at nine-seventeen. He texted her: Filed. The confirmation number is in Sophie's hands.
She replied: Good.
She was in the solo session when the text arrived. She read it between runs and put the phone down and ran the next repetition of the step sequence element and it was clean again for the fourth consecutive session.
The work was working.
The statement was on record.
Two business days remaining.
She was going to give full weight.
She was going to land.
She was going to find out.
She believed.
She was in it.
Both of them.
Both already in the air.
Both already landing.
Both already there.
She ran the joint session that afternoon with the quality she had been maintaining: full presence, full weight, the program at the level it needed to be at.
The lift completed. He held it.
She landed.
Every time she landed.
She was going to land on the day the review concluded.
She was going to be there when she landed.
She believed.
She was there.
Both of them.
The statement was on record.
Two days.
She was going to find out.
She was already there.
She walked to the rink the next morning in the specific Montreal cold that had become the background temperature of the entire review period: consistent, reliable, the kind of cold that was not dramatic but that required constant accommodation. She had learned to dress for it. She had learned its rhythms. This was December Montreal , she had known it for four years. She was not surprised by it.
She was not surprised by anything anymore in the way she had been surprised at the start of the review period. The ISU notification at five forty-seven had been a surprise , not because she had not known the review was coming but because the body's response to it had been unexpected. The ninety-percent lift weight without conscious awareness. The eight-foot gap at the boards.
She had been working on the surprise since then. The body had been learning, across fourteen days of the original period and now into the extended period, that the surprise of the notification was a one-time thing and that what followed was the work and the deciding and the giving of full weight.
The body was learning.
She arrived at the rink at five-thirty-two.
At five-thirty-four, footsteps behind her.
She was mid-warm-up and did not stop.
He found his lane beside her.
Both of them on the ice.
Two business days remaining.
The statement on record.
The lift at full weight.
The landing clean.
Both of them in it.
She believed.
She was there.
She was already there.
Both of them.
In the air.
Landing.
There.
That evening , the last evening before the final two business days, the evening when the review was nearest and the outcome still unknown , she sat at the east-facing window with the remaining gyokuro tea and thought about Jung Seo's question.
What are you building?
She had told him: something that matters.
She had told Cas, across the Saint-Denis table in week four, that she was someone who skated alone by preference, trained alone, ate dinner alone, and had organized the first twenty-three years of her competitive life around the proposition that alone was sufficient.
What had changed: not the preference for solitude itself , she still skated the solo session first, still needed the five-thirty-two before the five-thirty-four. But the proposition that alone was sufficient had changed. The proposition now was: alone is what I am, and also I have chosen this.
She had chosen. She was in the air. She was landing.
She drank the tea.
Two business days.
She was going to find out.
She believed.
She was there.
She was already there.
Both of them.
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