Maddie’s POV
Emily shows me the message without preamble — just hands me her phone across the space between us, screen already open to it.
I read it once. The language is professional and warm and the last line is perfectly clear. An initial conversation, individually. Not the co-captains. Not the team.
"He wants to meet with you alone," I say.
"Yes," she says. She's watching my face the way she watches jump landings — with the specific attention of someone who wants to know whether something held.
I hand the phone back. "You should go," I tell her.
"Maddie —" she starts, but her expression gives her away — she's not arguing, she's checking.
"I mean it," I say. "This is what the season was for. This is yours." I hold her gaze steadily, not letting anything show that would make this about me.
"You've been working toward exactly this kind of conversation for two years. You don't pass on it because of the timing."
"I'm not planning to pass on it," she says. "I'm asking what you think."
"I think you should go," I say. "And I think you already know that."
She holds the look for a moment — still checking, still reading. "You're doing the face," she says.
"What face?" I say, even though I know exactly which one she means.
"The one where you're fine," she says. "Which usually means you're not."
"I'm fine," I tell her, and I mean it in the sense that I am not going to be the reason she doesn't walk into that meeting. "Go. I'll be here."
She holds the look for one more second, then nods.
The meeting is scheduled for ten AM in a campus conference room I've walked past a hundred times without reason to go inside.
I know this because Emily tells me on the way out of the dining hall, coffee in hand, bag over her shoulder, moving with the unhurried certainty of someone who has decided not to be rattled by what she's walking toward.
I watch her go until she turns the corner and the hallway is just a hallway again. Then I go to practice.
The rink in the hour before the full team arrives has a particular quality — ice clean, overhead lights fully on, the building quiet except for ambient mechanical hum.
I skate the warm-up alone and I tell myself I am not thinking about the conference room. I am thinking about the entry angle and the rotation and the follow-through. I am absolutely not thinking about a campus conference room twelve minutes from here. I think about the conference room.
By the time the team filters in, I've run the combination entry six times and landed it cleanly four, which in the context of today I count as a win. I move to the next section without editorializing it.
Near the boards, during the water break, I catch two teammates talking in the low-voiced way that means they aren't looking for an audience.
"—trajectory she's on, she's not staying at Lakeview past this season. That scout doesn't come in for a campus conversation unless the conversation is serious."
"She might stay. She and Maddie are — "
"I know what they are. I'm saying the math doesn't always work in favor of staying."
I drink my water and I look at the ice and I let the words move through me without finding a purchase.
I know this fear. I've lived with it in different configurations for most of my life — the fear of being the one who gets left, the one who didn't see it coming, the one holding something that has already been let go from the other end.
I know exactly what it feels like from the inside and I know it is not always trustworthy as a source of information. I know that it has cost me things in the past by making decisions before they needed to be made.
I note it without letting it run, and go back to the ice.
Emily texts at eleven forty-two. Two words: Done. Coming to the rink.
I read it four times anyway, because that's apparently who I am today.
She arrives twenty minutes later, gear bag on her shoulder, expression unreadable in the way that means she's still processing rather than hiding something.
She changes without talking and I give her the space, because I know the difference between silence that needs interrupting and silence that needs to finish.
"What did he say?" I ask, keeping my voice level, giving her nothing to navigate around.
She leans against the wall and looks at me directly, which I know by now means she's going to give me the unedited version.
"He called my performance trajectory elite-level resilient," she says. "He said my technical development over the past season showed accelerated maturity under pressure. He said I was exactly the kind of athlete they look for in long-cycle development."
"And?" I say, because there is always an and in these meetings, and she knows I know that.
"And he raised the question of whether continued public controversy could create instability in that development," she says. "He was careful how he said it — no direct recommendations."
"But the implication was clear. Athletes at this level benefit from clean public profiles." She pauses. "He used the phrase strategic clarity. He meant distance from the current narrative."
The corridor outside the locker room is quiet enough that I can hear the ventilation overhead.
"He meant distance from me," I say. Not a question — just the thing being named.
"He didn't say your name," she says. "But yes. That's what he meant."
The silence stretches between us. I hold it without filling it because she's still looking at me directly and I owe her the same in return.
"Did you tell him anything?" I ask, watching her face the way she watched mine when she handed me the phone.
"I told him I'd need time to think about next steps," she says. "That was all I committed to."
I hold her gaze. The old version of me — the version from six months ago — would have told her to take the meeting seriously and made a calculation. Would have offered to step back before she had to ask.
I don't do that. I stand in the corridor and I wait.
She's still holding eye contact, and the question forming in her expression hasn't been spoken yet, and I'm not going to rush toward it the way I used to rush toward exits.
"Are you considering it?" I ask. "What he suggested."
The silence that follows is the kind that has its own weight.