Chapter Twenty-One

Once they had been in the air for an hour, Darcy took out a book and her neck pillow. She didn’t expect to sleep, she was far too excited. Three years of working diligently behind the scenes finally paid off. She was going to be on TV. She was in first class, on her way to the Olympics. She felt like a shaken bottle of seltzer. She rested her head against the seat and stared out the window.

She couldn’t help feeling a sense of déjà vu. Natalie waltzing in—fresh-faced and full of energy—and Darcy the more experienced one left feeling all the pressure of success. She looked at Natalie, asleep with her head against the wall. Clearly the pressure wasn’t getting to her. No, that was wrong. Darcy was still trying to understand how Natalie had fooled her all those years ago. She’d been so sure that Natalie walked onto campus genuinely feeling like she owned the place. Finding out it was all an act threw Darcy more than she wanted to admit. What else had she gotten wrong about Natalie?

Rather than think about it, she pulled out a notebook and pen. Preparation always helped calm her down. She couldn’t do a thing about the people who thought she got where she was on the power of her last name, but she could outwork them. She could train harder, study more, and outwork every single person on the ice or in the office. She could control that. If she worked her hardest and people still thought she didn’t deserve her success, screw them. The work was what mattered.

Kit’s voice floated into her head. “When anything gets hard you retreat into your work. That’s why you’re single.”

Darcy’s jaw clenched. She shoved the thought aside and went back to work.

She started with a list of all the sports in the Winter Olympics. She’d tried skiing when she was a kid, before hockey took over her life and it became stupid to risk an injury. Her mom loved skiing but her dad never joined them on the slopes because if he got hurt he was in trouble with his team.

Once Darcy got serious about hockey they would hang out in the lodge. It had been their own time to sit and talk. Sometimes they talked about hockey but as much as she and her dad loved the sport, they didn’t want to spend all their time together talking about it. Not when they could relax together. Sometimes the lodges had a puzzle set out for guests and they’d hover around that, racing each other to see who could put in the most pieces. They might not be talking about hockey but they never shut off their competitiveness. Once they played Sorry and she got so mad that her dad had sent her pieces back to the start she flipped the game board. At first, her dad was angry but then he busted out laughing and couldn’t stop.

When she asked why he was laughing, he wiped his face. “Because when I was your age we had to stop playing checkers because your aunt beat me and I threw the board across the room. Your grandparents tried to discipline me but they couldn’t stop laughing long enough to yell.”

Darcy hadn’t thought of that trip in a long time. It had been ages since she’d played a game for fun. She looked over at Natalie and hoped this trip, this job, would be fun like that.

Looking at the list of sports, she didn’t see anything that they could do where they wouldn’t end up looking like fools. Yes, they could both skate but figure skating was a whole other thing. The skates alone were weird enough to make her fall on her face. That’s probably what Raquel was hoping for. What’s funnier than a couple of gold medalists looking like mortals on the morning show?

Next, she moved on to compiling the sorts of questions she might want to ask all of the athletes, regardless of the sport. How did they get into it? Who in their lives helped them master the sport—coaches, parents, friends? What tips do they have for people wanting to try it? And most of all she wanted to know if any of them had tips to keep them from making fools of themselves on TV.

When she’d asked for a chance to cover the Olympics, this wasn’t what she had in mind. Maybe if she wanted to be a sports reporter she should have gone to ESPN or one of the other networks that were dedicated to sports. But if she’d called up Hockey Night in Canada she wouldn’t have known if they were giving her the job because they thought she’d be good at it or because they felt like they owed it to her dad.

She wanted to do it all on her own, which was why she was working in the U.S. for a show that had nothing to do with sports except for once every two years when it became Olympics central.

Three years she’d been working for this chance and the fizzing in her chest reminded her of the way she felt on game day. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she missed this part of her. She looked over at Natalie. She wasn’t going to admit it, but Natalie made her feel fizzy like that, too.