Chapter Thirty-Six

KATYA

ONE WEEK LATER—JANUARY

I can barely look at him.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know if it’s even real. Not because I’ve fully lost my mind—at least I don’t think I have. That feels like the kind of thing you’d notice, right? Unless Sanjiv was right about those hallucinations.

The thing is, I’ve never heard of this happening. There aren’t supposed to be second chances, not with us. Once Tatyana says no, you’re out for good. At least, that’s what it’s been for the last decade. Is it really possible that she’s breaking her rules for me? That I’ve been taken out of her little black book (she actually has one); that they actually want me back, that I actually….succeeded?

I mean, that was the whole point of this, wasn’t it? To prove to my old team that they made a mistake in kicking me out, to give them a big middle finger by way of succeeding at something out of pure spite? That’s what I had told myself when I agreed to Lian’s proposition. That it would be temporary. A means to an end.

Now, though, I don’t know. And that’s the part that scares me most. Katya from last January wouldn’t have thought twice about it. She would’ve flown back to Moscow in a heartbeat, on the soonest flight she could catch. But here I am, a week since I saw the ticket: walking around like nothing's happening, hiding from my own partner, ducking Mikhail’s calls. All because I don’t know my own mind anymore.

I’ve always known the world moves on from skaters. This is one of the least permanent sports out there. Every time you’re out on the ice, every mistake you make, you can feel it creeping up on you—you know your shelf life is slowly dripping away; that there’s a conveyor belt of younger, skinnier, less injured girls stacking up behind you by the minute.

I was one of them. I was the one who replaced Sokolovskaya after she broke her hip and was out for good—I remember her crying uncontrollably after it finally snapped after her sixth triple axel in a row, just sprawled out on the ice and wailing. I remember Tatyana turning to us, the barely-fifteen-year-old seniors who’d all woken up at dawn to test on our birthdays the second we were eligible.

That was our present. More competitions. More training. More broken bones. More respect —and that was the closest thing to love you could get from Tatyana Zhukova. I remember her turning to us, all looking on in horror as Irina sobbed and screamed; Vanya’s brothers trying to drag her to her feet and off the ice and Mikhail running for the doctor. The comment was for all of us, I think, but she was looking straight at me.

“It’s your turn.”

And it was.

It’s how it works. It’s cruel, but that’s the truth—you make the most of the time you have with the spotlight pointed at you, otherwise you sink into oblivion like all the countless girls and boys who dreamed for something bigger than them, and never felt it in their hands. There’s nothing better than the feeling of gold in your teeth, the weight around your neck. It’s worth the pain, the tears, the nights you’re stuck in your room crushed under something you can’t name. It’s worth all of it. It has to be.

Even if it’s not, I don’t have any choice. The few times you could shake him out of his pragmatic scientist self, Dedushka used to say that everyone’s given this life for a reason—Tatyana somehow managed to be even less philosophical than a physicist; she just called it a hunger. I guess she was right, too. Those nights before the prescriptions, silently gasping for air as I felt myself cracking like a bad egg, it did feel something like starvation.

It's funny. You always know there’s someone right there, itching to replace you. You just never think you’re next. You’re always the exception in your own story, but in the real world, you’re just competing to be the next first —it’s like medicines. It costs billions of dollars to make the first pill. Once you’ve got it, it takes pennies.

How fucking ironic.

My phone lights up in my hand. Speaking of irony. “Misha,” I say, cutting off the rant that’s started the second I hit accept. “Shut up. I needed time to figure it out.”

“What is there to figure out? Either you remain in pairs or you can come back to what you wanted to do this whole time. You either stay there in New York, or you come back home to us.”

He’s right, and I know it. That’s the worst part. This shouldn’t even be a discussion. Something’s wrong with me, I’m not thinking straight.

Mikhail, like always, can tell. “Katenka, do you want this or not?”

Alarmingly enough, tears spring to my eyes, and I wipe at them furiously. God, what is wrong with me? “Does she really want me back?”

“That wasn’t what I asked,” Misha responds, his voice unnervingly soft, and it just makes my heart rate panic even more.

“Just answer the question. Does Tatyana want me back?”

He exhales heavily. “Yes.”

I let out a horrible sound, something close to a laugh. “Oh my god,” I say, voice thick with tears. Somehow, the confirmation doesn’t bring me any kind of relief. It just makes me more confused.

“Yes, but listen, Ekaterina, if you’re not sure—“

And just like that, I am. I force myself to calm down, take a deep breath. “I’m sure,” I tell him. I can hear him waiting tensely on the other end of the line. “I know what I have to do.”