Maddie’s POV
The press briefing is scheduled for ten AM, which gives us exactly forty minutes after the morning skate to look like people who have their situation under control.
We don't discuss how to play it. We just show up at the same time, stand at the same table, and let the optics do their work.
There are six journalists and two federation communications staff. Someone has arranged two chairs behind a podium, which neither of us uses — we stand, which was the right instinct, because chairs say we are here to be interviewed and standing says we are here to speak.
The first question is about the panel review. I answer it. The second is about Victoria's suspension.
Emily answers that one, with the particular precision she uses when she wants a sentence to be unrepeatable out of context. The third question is the one they've been working toward.
"Can you characterize the current state of the team's leadership dynamic?" the reporter asks.
Emily looks at me for exactly one second. Then she looks back at the reporter.
"We're co-captains," Emily says. "We share information, we make decisions together, and we hold each other accountable. That's the dynamic."
"There have been reports suggesting the personal relationship between you two has affected team functioning," the reporter continues.
"There have been reports suggesting a lot of things," I say. "The team's performance record this season speaks to team functioning. You're welcome to evaluate that instead."
The reporter tries once more. "Are you two — "
"Co-captains," Emily says, without inflection. "That's the answer to that question."
A few journalists smile at their notepads. The chemistry in the room is visible even to people looking for something else, and I watch the narrative begin to recalibrate — away from scandal, toward something the press knows how to sell differently.
Resilience. That's the word they'll use. They always find a word. I'll take it. A word that moves the story somewhere better.
The briefing closes at ten twenty. We walk out the same door we came in, and the story has already shifted half a degree in a direction we can work with.
The corridor behind the arena is the one nobody uses during competition week — a service passage running parallel to the main floor, low-ceilinged and fluorescent-lit, smelling of equipment rubber and cold concrete.
We end up there because neither of us wants to walk back through the press zone yet, because the public-facing version of composure takes something out of both of us that needs a few minutes to replenish.
We walk for a moment in the particular quiet of a space that doesn't expect conversation. The corridor has the stripped-down honesty of a place where nobody performs.
"You were good in there," I say, falling into step beside her. "The co-captains answer landed exactly right."
"You answered the panel question better than I would have," she replies. "The framing was clean."
"We've been doing this long enough to know each other's instincts," I say.
"Yes," she says. "We have." She says it without any edge in it, which means something.
"I've been thinking about something," I say. "Something I understood wrong for a long time."
Emily glances at me, her pace slowing slightly. "About what?" she asks.
"About what being with you meant," I say. "I spent a long time believing that loving you made me easier to hurt. That it was a structural weakness — something people could find and use against me."
I stop walking. "My father found it. Victoria found it. And every time someone found it, I believed them. I treated what we had as a liability."
Emily stops a half-step after I do, and she turns to look at me.
"And now?" she asks, looking at me steadily, giving me room to finish it.
"Now I think I had it exactly backward," I say. "Every time I protected myself by pulling away from you, I got smaller. Every time I let them define what we were, I lost more of who I was." I hold her gaze. "You weren't the weakness. You were the only thing that was actually mine."
She doesn't answer immediately, and I don't need her to. She looks at me the way she looked at me on the ice in the exhibition rehearsal — not forgiving, not yet, but present in a way she hasn't been for a long time.
The distance is still there, but she's stopped holding it like a weapon. I notice that. It registers the way small shifts register when you've been paying close attention to someone for a very long time.
"I know you were wrong about it," she says. "I knew it when it was happening and I still couldn't make you see it." Her voice is level, not cold. "I'm not holding that over you. I just want you to know that watching you choose the fear was its own specific kind of loss."
"I know," I say. "I'm sorry for what watching it cost you."
She nods once, slowly, and doesn't reach for anything more — just accepts it and lets it sit.
The corridor is very quiet. The fluorescent light above us hums at a frequency just below conscious hearing.
We are standing close — not arranged that way, just arrived there, the way two people arrive at proximity when they've been moving toward each other across months of resistance.
Her eyes drop to my mouth for half a second. Then back up.
I feel the pull of it like a physical thing — the specific gravity of someone you've already kissed, who you already know, whose breath you can already predict from this distance.
It would be easy. That's almost the problem — how easy it would be, and how much that ease has cost us before when we let it outrun everything else.
Neither of us moves. The tension sits between us, unsettling and exact, the way it does when both people know what's available and neither has decided yet whether to take it.
Then she exhales slowly through her nose, and the moment shifts without breaking — not collapsing, just settling into something that can be held.
"Not yet," she says. It's not a rejection. It's a timeline.
"Okay," I say. Because I understand the difference now in a way I didn't used to, and I can wait. I've already waited through worse than this.
We turn back toward the main arena floor, walking side by side in the low-lit corridor.
At the junction where the service passage meets the main facility hallway, an official is waiting — one of the federation staff from the review panel, holding a small stack of sealed envelopes.
"I've been asked to deliver these directly," he says. "Panel decisions regarding the adjudication review." He distributes them — one to each of several names on his list.
The last envelope he holds out to us is addressed to the co-captains of the Lakeview team.
The word URGENT is stamped across the top in red. Below it: CONFIDENTIAL.