Maddie’s POV
Ava finds me between classes, pulling me into a side corridor near the registrar's office with the urgency of someone who has been sitting on information long enough that it's starting to burn.
"Victoria has requested closed-door meetings with two of the other judges before placements are officially confirmed," she says, keeping her voice low.
"I heard it from someone in the administrative office. Technically it's allowed under federation guidelines, but the timing — it's the day before results post."
I absorb that for a moment. "She's not leaving anything to chance," I say. "She already filed the character review, she already seeded the press. Now she's consolidating the panel before anyone can challenge the scores formally."
"It could be routine," Ava says carefully. "It almost certainly isn't. But we need to be clear about what we can prove versus what we suspect."
"She doesn't need us to prove it," I say. "She just needs to move faster than the oversight timeline. That's the whole strategy — not to win the argument, but to make sure it's already over by the time someone formally asks the question."
Ava is quiet for a moment, turning that over. "What are you going to do?" she asks.
"Find her," I say. "She moves through this building every afternoon. I'd rather have this conversation where there are witnesses."
Ava looks at me for a moment. "Be careful," she says. "She's better at this than we are. At least for now."
"I know," I say. "I'm not trying to win. I'm trying to document."
Victoria is crossing the administrative hall when I locate her twenty minutes later — not a planned location, but the building where the oversight committee is based, and she moves through it like she belongs to the architecture.
There are other people in the corridor. That's why I chose it.
"Maddie," she says, with the same pleasant composure as every other time, as if the last ten days haven't happened.
"I'd like to understand the purpose of the closed-door meetings you've requested with the judging panel before placements are confirmed," I say.
She tilts her head slightly. "Judicial consultation is a standard part of the adjudication process," she says. "I'd encourage you not to assign significance to procedural practice."
"Standard consultation doesn't typically happen twenty-four hours before placement confirmation, after a formal complaint has been filed against the head judge," I say. "That's a specific combination of facts."
"You've become very focused on facts," she says, and something in the phrase is designed to sound like a compliment while landing as something else entirely.
"It's an understandable response to stress. Some athletes struggle with the interpretive pressures of competition week in ways that affect their judgment."
I hold her gaze. "I'd like you to say clearly what you mean by that," I say.
"I mean," Victoria says, still pleasant, "that I'm aware of the complete picture. Not just your performance record. Not just your complaint filing."
She pauses for one beat, deliberate and measured. "Injury reports are thorough documents. Rehabilitation assessments cover a great deal of ground. The kind of ground that, in certain contexts, might raise questions about an athlete's stability and professional fitness."
The sentence is constructed so carefully that there is no single word I could object to. There doesn't need to be. I understand every syllable of it and she knows I do.
"You're talking about my mental health evaluations," I say, keeping my voice absolutely level.
"I'm talking about the complete picture," she repeats, in the same tone. "I'd simply hate for anything on the record to be taken out of context. Especially now, when so much attention is being directed at Lakeview's team dynamics."
There are three other people in the hallway. Nobody is listening. Nobody needs to be.
"I want to be clear about what's happening here," I say. "You are threatening to use confidential medical information to publicly undermine me if I don't withdraw the complaint."
Victoria's expression doesn't change. "I'm offering perspective on the complexities of professional sport," she says.
"I've always found it useful to understand the full scope of what's at stake before making consequential decisions."
She holds my gaze for exactly long enough to confirm that I've understood her, and then she continues down the hallway with the unhurried step of someone who has never once been held accountable for anything.
I watch her until she turns the corner, and then I stand very still in the corridor, listening to the building settle around me, and I make myself breathe until the shaking in my chest doesn't show in my hands.
Back in my room, I sit on the edge of the bed and open the voice memo app. My hands are not quite steady, which I notice with a kind of detached observation — the way you notice weather through a window.
I press record.
"This is a documentation of a conversation in the administrative hallway of the Lakeview athletic complex on" — I check the date — "the fourteenth. Victoria Hughes implied that she has access to confidential mental health and rehabilitation evaluations from my injury record. She indicated these could be brought into public contexts if I continued pursuing the formal complaint. She did not make an explicit threat. She didn't need to." I pause for a moment.
"The exact phrasing was: 'I'm aware of the complete picture.' And: 'Injury reports are thorough documents.' And: 'I'd hate for anything on the record to be taken out of context.'"
I stop the recording, save it with a timestamp, and immediately forward it to two places: my email and Ava.
Then I sit with the phone in my hands and look at the wall for a moment, because the memo exists now, and existence is the thing that changes the weight of it.
The evaluations she's referencing are from two years ago — after the stress fracture in my right ankle and the three months off the ice that followed.
They cover pain management, sleep disruption, and a period of documented low mood that the team physician flagged as clinically significant.
None of it is shameful. None of it would be, if read in context. But context is exactly the thing Victoria is threatening to remove, and removing context is how she operates.
I close the app and sit with the room quiet around me, letting my resolve settle back into something solid underneath the fear, which is real and I'm not pretending otherwise.
My phone buzzes with a forwarded email from the faculty athletics liaison.
Coach Marquette has submitted a formal request to the safety review committee asking for an audit of Emily Harper's jump sequence protocols, citing concerns about recklessness in training sessions.
I read it twice, then set the phone down on the mattress beside me.
Victoria didn't just threaten me in that hallway. She's already moved her next piece. And Emily doesn't know yet.