Maddie’s POV
The media prep room is bright and slightly too warm, the way these rooms always are — fluorescent overhead lights, folding tables arranged in a horseshoe, two federation communications staff at the far end with clipboards.
Emily and I sit next to each other. We don't discuss the seating arrangement. We just arrive at it.
The session runs through standard talking points for the first fifteen minutes — tone guidance, anticipated question categories, language for discussing the review process without prejudicing the panel's final determination.
I've been through versions of this before. I know how to hold the register.
Then one of the journalists in the pre-briefing pool — present, apparently, to test the protocol — raises his hand.
"There's a question circulating in the press," he says, reading from a card. "Whether the personal relationship between the co-captains may have influenced the motivation behind filing the complaint. Whether it was about scoring integrity, or about protecting a partner."
The room goes still in the particular way of people who knew this question was coming and didn't know how to preempt it.
I reach across and take Emily's hand, and I feel the shift in the room the moment I do it.
I don't plan it. My hand simply moves, and hers is there, and in front of everyone in the room — the communications staff, the journalist, the two federation reps near the window — our hands are joined on the table and visible.
"The complaint was filed because the scoring data showed a consistent, documentable pattern of discrimination against LGBTQ+ athletes across three seasons," I say.
"That's the answer to that question. Everything else is a different question."
Emily doesn't pull her hand away. She also doesn't squeeze back. Her hand stays in mine, present and still, and I register both things clearly — the choice to remain and the choice not to confirm — and I hold them both.
I don't ask for more than she's ready to give.
The image is out within the hour. Someone in the room had a phone. The frame is clear: both co-captains, the question still hanging in the air, my hand over hers. The caption writes itself and the internet provides several versions of it simultaneously.
By mid-afternoon, Dad has delivered the archived footage to both the oversight panel and two national sports media outlets. The timing is exact — mid-news cycle, maximum reach.
The footage is eight minutes of Victoria in a closed-door panel discussion from four years ago, describing what she called a cultural softening of elite sport, using language about LGBTQ+ athletes that doesn't require interpretation.
Within two hours of the release, three former competitive skaters have posted public statements. Within four, the coverage has shifted entirely.
The story is no longer about whether our complaint was personal. The story is about what Victoria believed and documented herself saying.
I sit in my room that evening and watched the coverage shift in real time. I feel something I didn't expect — not relief, exactly. Something more complicated.
The exposure is doing what it was supposed to do, and I'm the reason it's happening, and the weight of that doesn't lift just because the momentum is moving in the right direction.
What if the footage had surfaced differently. What if the timing had been wrong. What if David had held it a week longer, or released it too early, or the coverage had gone the other way.
Everything that has happened this season could have gone another way. It nearly did, multiple times.
The difference between the version of this story where things land right and the version where they don't is thinner than I can stand to look at directly.
I keep coming back to the hand on the table. The moment held in a photograph, already shared forty thousand times. Emily didn't pull away. She also didn't confirm. I understand both. I'm not sure I deserve the first one yet.
Ava finds me sitting on the hallway floor outside my room, back against the wall, phone face-down beside me.
"You're spiraling," she says, sitting down next to me without a preamble.
"I'm processing," I tell her, keeping my eyes on the far end of the hallway.
"You're catastrophizing," she says. "Which is different from processing. Processing goes somewhere. Catastrophizing just loops."
I look at her. "What if I'm not equipped for this," I say. "The exposure, the coverage, the fact that every time I think I've stabilized something else opens up. What if I keep damaging the people around me and calling it trying?"
"Then you'd be doing exactly what you've always done," she says. "But here's the thing — you're not disappearing right now. You're sitting in a hallway being anxious about the possibility that you might disappear. That's different."
"Is it?" I say, and I hear the question for what it is — not rhetoric, but actual uncertainty.
"Completely," she says, with the firmness of someone who has thought about this carefully.
"Redemption isn't feeling like you've got it handled. It's staying when it's ugly and you want to fold. You're here. You've been here. Stop waiting for a version of yourself that feels certain before you let yourself count it."
I don't have a clean answer for that. But it lands somewhere real, and I let it stay there instead of arguing it away.
Rehearsal is at seven. The duet is sixty percent there — the transitions are clean, the timing is consistent, but the lift in the second section still needs work.
Tonight I'm in my head and I know it. The approach to the lift is correct — technique fine, positioning fine — but at the moment of the catch my focus fractures and my grip slips a half-inch on the left side.
Emily adjusts before I complete the mistake. Her weight shifts, her core locks, and the lift holds — off-center but intact. We come down clean.
We stop. We face each other on the ice, both of us slightly winded, close enough that I can see the exact line of her jaw and the look she has when she's deciding whether to say something.
Neither of us moves. The rink is quiet around us, the overhead lights steady, the ice unmarked except for our track marks.
She speaks first, voice low enough that it stays between us and the ice.
"If it gets worse," she says. "And it might. If the deliberation takes longer, or the coverage turns, or something else opens up — are you going to stay?"
I look at her. The question is not angry. It is the most honest thing she's asked me, which means it deserves the most honest answer I can give.
"Yes," I tell her. "I'm not leaving. Whatever comes — I'm staying."
The words are true in the moment I say them. They are also more than I can fully guarantee, and she knows it, and I know she knows it, and neither of us says so.
She nods once, holding my gaze, and I understand the nod is not agreement — it's acknowledgment. She received it and she's holding it.
That is what we have right now. It is not everything. But it is the truest thing I've said to her in a long time, and she receives it without asking for more than that.