The cold bites into my skin. I stand at the edge of the rink, fingers gripping the boards so tight my knuckles ache.
A single skater glides across the ice—a woman in her mid-twenties, moving through figures with effortless grace. I watch her trace an arc, and my body feels the ghost of that movement in her own body.
I used to do that. I used to be that.
"Hey." Derek's hand finds mine, warm against my frozen fingers. "It's going to be okay."
I want to believe him. Instead, I watch the skater spin and feel nothing but the vast, hollow space where joy used to live.
"They met on ice," I say, and the words come from somewhere deep and unguarded. "My parents. They were fifteen. Junior nationals tryouts, pairs division. Mom always said she hated him at first—said he was cocky and his crossovers were sloppy and he smiled too much for someone with such mediocre footwork."
Derek laughs quietly. "Sounds like the beginning of a love story."
"It was." My throat tightens. "They were inseparable after that. Did everything together—trained together, competed together, retired together, coached together… Died together."
I go silent, watching the skater execute a layback spin, her body arched against gravity. The movement is beautiful. I feel numb.
"I'm sorry you lost them," he offers sincerly—I can tell by the way his hand tightens around mine.
I blink against the sting in my eyes, and hear myself say: "Is it weird to think I never really had them?"
I brace for Derek's response. But before he can answer, the skater glides to the boards. She steps off the ice, blade guards clicking against the rubber matting, and her face breaks into recognition when she sees Derek.
"Derek McKinney. Slumming it at my practice rink?"
"Sarah." Derek releases my hand to accept a brief hug. "Just showing my stepsister around. Ellie, this is Sarah. We went to high school together. She's training for nationals."
Sarah's eyes find mine with open curiosity. "Stepsister? I didn't know you had one."
"Recent development." Derek's tone is light. "It's a long story."
"Aren't they all." Sarah smiles at me—warm, genuine, uncomplicated by whatever history or expectations the McKinney name carries. "Nice to meet you. Sorry I can't stay—early flight tomorrow. But the rink's all yours if you want it."
She shoulders her bag, waves, and disappears through the same door they entered.
The silence that follows feels heavier. The rink stretches before us, empty now, the ice unmarked and waiting.
"So," Derek says, turning to me with a glint in his eye. "Can you skate?"
I stare at him. The question is so absurd—so completely, laughably absurd—that a sound of disbelief escapes me.
"Can I skate?" I repeat flatly. "You're asking the daughter of Mara and Stephen Harman—Olympic bronze medalists—if I can skate."
Derek holds up his hands in mock surrender. "Just checking. Some skills skip a generation." Derek studies my face for a moment. Then asks: "Want to skate now?"
I should say no. The ice holds too many ghosts.
But my feet are already moving toward the rental counter, and recklessness has taken root in my chest—a desperate need to remember what skating felt like before it became synonymous with abandonment.
The rental skates are stiff. I lace them with muscle memory, and when I step onto the ice, my body knows what to do before my mind catches up.
The first glide is shaky. The second is steadier. By the third, I'm moving—really moving—and the rink blurs around me like a half-remembered dream.
Derek follows onto the ice with significantly less grace. His arms windmill. His ankles wobble. He grabs the boards for support and shoots me a look of exaggerated betrayal.
"You could have warned me you were going to be good at this."
"Keep up, McKinney." I skate backward, showing off, unable to resist.
Derek pushes off from the boards with exaggerated confidence, arms spread wide like he's about to conquer the rink.
He makes it exactly three glides before his left ankle buckles and he goes down hard, landing on his backside with a thud that echoes through the empty arena.
"That didn't happen," he announces from the ice, pointing at me. "You saw nothing."
"I saw everything." I skate a slow circle around him, unable to keep the grin off my face. "Including the part where you flailed like a baby giraffe learning to walk."
He laughs, and the sound bounces off the rafters, filling the space with warmth that has no business existing in a building kept at thirty-two degrees.
I find myself laughing too, the unfamiliar sensation loosening the tight knot that's lived in my chest since the funeral.
We attempt to skate side by side, but Derek's rhythm is nonexistent. His arms swing in opposition to his legs, his blades scrape instead of glide, and every few seconds he lurches sideways like the ice is actively trying to reject him.
"How are you this bad?" I ask, genuinely mystified. "You grew up in California. Don't rich people take their kids to fancy skating lessons?"
"Hockey," he admits, wobbling precariously. "I played hockey for exactly one season when I was—" His blade catches a rut and he pitches forward.
I reach for him instinctively. His arms wrap around my waist to steady himself, my hands grip his shoulders, and for a moment we're frozen there—pressed together, breathing hard, his face inches from mine.
"Hi," he says, grinning down at me.
"Hi yourself." I push against his chest, creating distance, but I'm smiling so hard my cheeks hurt. "You're a disaster on skates."
I spend the next ten minutes trying to teach him basic crossovers while he spends ten minutes falling in increasingly creative ways.
"Okay," he says breathlessly, clutching my arm for balance after his latest spectacular wipeout. "Okay, I concede. You're better than me. I will never question your skating credentials again."
"Good." I grin, my face aching with it. "Now watch this."
I push off before I can second-guess myself. Build speed, feel the rhythm settling into my bones. Then I'm turning—arms in, core tight, the world spinning into a familiar blur.
A triple toe loop. My body remembers. The rotation is clean, my blade catching the ice with a satisfying scrape.
For one perfect moment, I feel like myself.
Then I look up.
The scoreboard hangs above the rink, digital numbers glowing red. My brain sees scoreboard and thinks collapse and thinks screaming and thinks their bodies under the wreckage—
My blade catches wrong. The ice rushes up.
Then I'm down, gasping, but the air won't come. My vision tunnels, black edges creeping inward, and somewhere far away I hear Derek's voice calling my name, but it sounds underwater, muffled.
"Ellie. Ellie, look at me."
Derek's kneeling in front of me, his knees soaking in ice melt. "Breathe with me. In through your nose, out through your mouth. There you go. Again."
I follow his voice like a lifeline. The tunnel vision recedes slowly. The roaring fades.
"I'm sorry." Derek's voice is ragged. "God, Ellie, I'm such an idiot. I didn't think—bringing you here—"
"It's okay." The words scrape out raw. "Derek. It's okay."
"It's not." He runs a hand through his hair. "I just wanted to help, and instead I—"
"You did help." I wrap my arms around myself, letting the shaking continue because fighting it takes energy I don't have.
He moves to sit beside me on the ice, close enough that our shoulders touch. The cold seeps through both of us, but neither moves to stand. We just sit there, in the middle of the empty rink, surrounded by silence and the faint hum of the refrigeration system.
"For the record," Derek says finally, "that triple whatever-it-was? Before you fell? It was incredible."
A wet laugh escapes me. "Triple toe loop."
"Right. That." He bumps my shoulder gently. "You're kind of amazing, you know that?"
I don't know that. Don't feel amazing. I feel broken and cold and embarrassed and strangely grateful for this ridiculous boy who sits with me on ice.
"Thanks for not running away," I say quietly.
"Never." He says it simply, then gets up and offers his hand. "Come on, ghost girl. Let's get you somewhere warm."
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