Chapter 55

Chapter 55

“Where have you been?” I demanded.

Heath shrugged. “Walking around.” His suit was sopping wet, dripping onto the faux-wood flooring, and his hair was plastered to his skull.

“You’re shivering.” The same thing he’d said to me, before I snapped at him and told him to leave me alone, to stop trying to take care of me.

He must have walked the whole way from the park.

I led him into the bathroom and turned on the shower. While the water heated up, I took off his wet clothes—slowly and gently, nothing like the practiced passion we acted out on the ice.

Heath wouldn’t look at me. He hung his head as I finished undressing him, cold droplets falling from his hair to sting my bare toes.

I took off my clothes too and joined him in the shower stall. With the steam curling around us, fogging the glass, I could almost pretend we were back by the lake, watching sea smoke roll in with the tide.

Then he pushed me against the wall, gripping my hips hard enough to bruise, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. My nails scraped his shoulders, making new marks on his back, and I thought: finally. After all those months of choreography, something real, some heat to drive away the cold wind that had stolen through the hairline cracks in our connection.

But we both felt the moment it shifted. When we slipped back into the performance, even though our only audience now was each other.

Heath pulled away. The water had begun to cool.

“I’m pretty tired,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “We should get some rest.”

I stepped out of the shower and knelt to gather my clothes.

We would be fine, I told myself. We were just stressed, after the season, after the tour, after the altercation with my brother. We needed some time to decompress, some time at home.

Except I had no idea where home was anymore. Since leaving The Heights after my post-injury idyll in 2006, I’d only seen my childhood house as a backdrop for Lee’s media blitz—for the few seconds I could stand anyway, before I slammed the off button or threw the magazine down in disgust. We couldn’t go back, not while he lived there.

For the past few years, Heath and I had stayed in a patchwork of hotels and short-term rentals spread across multiple continents. The Olympics were in less than a year, and we didn’t have a coach or a guaranteed place to train. We didn’t even have a permanent address.

The shower switched off. I picked up my phone to check the time—a few minutes after midnight, earlier than I’d assumed. But still late for anyone to call, and the screen showed multiple missed within a few minutes of one another, all from a New York number I didn’t have saved in my contacts.

Lee, I thought. Probably drunk-dialing me from some dive bar, or whatever roach-infested hotel he’d found to hole up in. I hadn’t given him my number, but Ellis could have.

The phone started to buzz again in my hand. Same number. I knew I should decline it, but I was so full of unspent energy, I almost wanted to argue with my brother.

I accepted the call.

“Kat.”

It wasn’t Lee after all. It was Ellis Dean. Not calling from his usual number, no doubt to trick me into answering.

“Fuck off, Ellis,” I said, finger poised to hang up.

“Wait! I need—I have to tell you, before someone else—”

“Tell me what?”

Ellis sounded different than I’d ever heard him before—panicky, uncertain, desperate.

And one hundred percent sincere.

“I’m so sorry, Kat,” Ellis said. “This is all my fault.”