ONE WEEK AFTER THE Phone Call

Denver, CO

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BRENDAN SAT IN HIS car in the parking lot of his apartment building and texted Katie to let her know he was on his way. He’d sent her identical texts countless times over the years, but never when the stakes were as high as they were now. He considered the possibility that he was out of his mind.

Of course I’m out of my mind. Sane people don’t win Olympic medals.

He put the car in gear and pulled out onto the street.

***

BRENDAN HAD DONE THIS drive many times, most of them with Katie. Their routes home were basically the same, and carpooling had made the most sense. Together they’d drive down from the mountains and across the endless plain of Nebraska, spend the night in Omaha, and cut northward home through Iowa the next day.

They’d had grown up within spitting distance of each other, at least as far as the great wide parts of the Midwest were concerned. But he’d been a city kid in Minneapolis, and she’d been living a farm life on the other side of the state border. They’d been lucky to find each other. Or rather, he’d been lucky that they’d gone to the same rink and that Katie had decided he was going to be her partner before they’d ever spoken two words to each other.

He wasn’t sure he’d been ambitious before meeting Katie, but he’d never admit that to her. Largely, because she’d shown up, aged nine, and told him how the world was going to be. He’d thought she was hilarious, shrugged, and done as she said. Until he started having ideas of his own.

Denver had been one of them. They’d needed whatever edge they could get once their first Olympics had started to seem possible. Katie was the absolute last of anyone involved to get on board — principally, because she hadn’t trusted his motives in dragging her away from the farm.

At the time Brendan had cared about winning, not about distancing himself from the cows. Yes, the farm had freaked him out whenever he’d visited as a kid. But why Katie thought that was his motive regarding Denver, he’d never understood. But she’d eventually said yes, so he hadn’t needed to.

And then this miserable drive had become a routine.

***

FOR BRENDAN, OMAHA was a place of eternal nothingness and vague dread. Which wasn’t Omaha’s fault in the least.

He had passed through it at least a hundred times over the last decade and a half. Yet he had never stayed in it for longer than twenty-four hours, if he stopped at all. Usually he’d had Katie with him, and it was always where they’d broken the tiniest of rules — sleeping late, eating wildly unhealthy food, skipping workouts. After their failure in Annecy, the stop in Omaha had been the last time they slept together before Katie announced their relationship and their partnership was over.

Once they’d reunited as platonic skating partners, Katie had advocated trading off at the wheel and driving through the night whenever they made the trip home. Brendan hadn’t minded, not really. At least Katie preferred night driving.

***

STAYING AT HIS AND Katie’s usual hotel — or at least, what had been their usual hotel eight years ago — would have been the easiest option. But that was also where they had broken up. It had been a long time ago, but Brendan didn’t want to deal with the place. The memories of being with Katie were more vivid than those of every other relationship attempt he had ever made. Whatever was going to happen at the farm would be hard and confusing enough without muddying his head more.

He kept going on I-80 and found a motel a few exits past the city. Alone in his room, he thought about texting Katie to update her on his progress but decided against it. He didn’t have anything specific to say, and until or unless he did, he didn’t want to risk rupturing whatever fragile peace had allowed her to invite him in the first place.

He found it nearly impossible to sleep. He kept tossing and turning, expecting to open his eyes and see Katie’s dark hair spread over the pillows. When he did finally fall asleep, he slept so soundly the first three alarms he had set, just in case, completely failed to wake him.

He finally jolted awake when a car horn blared outside.

Shit. I wanted to be on the road earlier than this. He pushed back the blackout curtains and looked out at the sun already peeping up above the horizon, bathing the grubby parking lot in warm, golden light. Katie was certainly already awake and would have nothing but judgment for him sleeping in.

He threw what little he’d unpacked back in his bag, grabbed a bagel and a cup of coffee from the lobby, and got in his car. Holding the bagel in his teeth, his coffee in one hand, and his phone in the other, he texted Katie. Leaving Omaha now. See you tonight.

Katie finally replied when he was close to the Nebraska border. Fucking Omaha.

He laughed aloud, feeling strangely unencumbered. They could still say so much to each other with so few words. Maybe that was a bug in their relationship, but it felt delightful.

***

OMAHA SHOULD HAVE BEEN the halfway mark, but stops, traffic jams, construction, and maybe his own nerves meant that what should have been a seven-hour drive turned into twelve hours on the road.

The sun was low in the sky, tinting the green fields with amber as it sank towards the horizon. The land was flat, startlingly so after the mountains of Colorado. Hours of driving across it hadn’t been enough to get used to such an open horizon. As such, Brendan could see the house long before he reached it. It had white siding and a red roof, with gable windows looking east and west across the fields above a wraparound screen porch. Beyond it were the barns and outbuildings.

There were lights on, beckoning warm and inviting. At least, Brendan hoped they were inviting.

He parked his car next to another sedan and two mud-spattered pickup trucks and turned it off. The music he’d been listening to fell suddenly silent. There was only the ticking of his cooling engine, the soft whirr of insects in the grass, and the sound of his own breath.

As he got out of the car, Brendan felt immensely self-conscious. Stepping out onto the ice in front of thousands of spectators was not as bad as walking across the drive with, as far as he knew, no one watching.

He had to open the door to the porch, which screeched horribly on its hinges, to get to the front door. Brendan winced at the sound, convinced anyone within a half mile of the house had heard it. But when he knocked there was no response. He rocked on the balls of his feet, his stomach squirming unpleasantly. Should he knock again? Was he being pointedly ignored?

He had just pulled out his phone to text Katie when he heard footsteps. A moment later the door was yanked opened by Katie’s uncle Rob. He was as sturdily built as ever, his greying hair and faded overalls threatening to converge into a single steely non-color.

“Brendan Reid,” he said in a low, perfectly terrifying voice.

“Mr. Petersen. Hi.”

“I expect you’re here for Katie.” Behind him, Brendan could hear the clatter of dishes

“Um.” Get it together, Reid. Brendan had never, in all his years of competing and performing, experienced what other people called stage fright. But he was pretty sure he was now. His tongue was tied, and his mind was blank. He could think of nothing to say to justify or explain his presence.

Suddenly he heard Katie’s voice from inside the house. “Is that him?”

A second later she was walking towards him down the front hall that led from the kitchen, and then she was standing there in the doorway behind her uncle. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt with fraying cuffs. Her hair, hanging over her shoulder in a messy braid, was longer than Brendan remembered. It was also more noticeably two different colors than when he had last seen her. She must have decided to grow out the dark, almost black color she dyed it once and for all.

Brendan reminded himself to breathe. He’d worked beside her all day, every day, for nearly two decades. He’d always thought she was beautiful. But three months had passed without seeing her at all, and now she was standing right in front of him. She was even more lovely than he remembered.

“Hi,” Brendan said again, because apparently his vocabulary had been reduced to monosyllables.

“You’re staring,” Katie said unhelpfully.

Of course I’m staring. You left me three months ago. That’s the longest I’ve gone without seeing you since I first met you.

“Do you want me to chase him off?” Rob asked Katie.

Brendan was almost sure he was joking. Mostly because if Katie had wanted him chased off, she would have done it herself. Rob knew that as well as anyone.

Brendan really, really hoped he wasn’t about to get chased off. Katie lifted her chin and looked him up and down, clearly evaluating. She wasn’t doing anything to put him at ease, which he knew was deliberate. He found it infuriating, but what could he do? He was on her doorstep and at her mercy.

“Did you bring a bag?” she finally asked.

“Yeah,” Brendan said uneasily.

“Go get it.”

Katie and Rob looked at him expectantly when he hesitated. Since there was nothing else for it, he slunk back to his car and got his suitcase out of the trunk, feeling their eyes on him the entire time. When he was standing on the porch again, Katie nodded at her uncle and they stepped back to let him in.

“He’s here to work.” Katie said, not to Brendan, but to Rob. “As long as he does, he’s fine. He’ll be up at four with everybody else.” Her eyes might have flickered to Brendan, but he couldn’t be sure. “He can stay in the guest room.”

With a twirl of that two-tone braid, she vanished deeper into the house. As far as Brendan was concerned, she took his heart with her. He’d spent the last week and the whole drive trying to figure out what he wanted to happen once he got here. And now he knew. He didn’t care what it took: He was going to figure out what he had to do to have Katie by his side always — on or off the ice.

Brendan was startled out of his new-found clarity by Rob making an exasperated noise after Katie. Apparently, she was as much of a handful here as she could be on the ice.

“Sorry about that,” Rob said as he picked Brendan’s suitcase up. “Follow me.”

“I can get that,” Brendan protested.

“I know you can, but you’re a guest regardless of whatever Katie’s decided.” Rob smiled at Brendan. “Let’s get you settled and fed.”

***

KATIE’S UNCLE’S KINDNESS had assuaged Brendan’s most significant concerns about this adventure until he was jolted out of sleep the next morning by the unholy blare of his alarm.

He fumbled for his phone to silence it. Four a.m. Dear God. He was used to early mornings with skating, but this was next-level. For a moment he reassessed how much he wanted Katie.

He stumbled around in the dark getting dressed; he didn’t think his retinas could take the glare of a lamp this early. Even the muted glow of the very charming hurricane lamp on the bedside table was too much. He tried to guess what would be useful to wear for farmwork. At least he didn’t have to worry about whether his clothes matched. Katie had seen him in far worse shape.

She was in the kitchen when he arrived downstairs, holding two coffee mugs. “You’re up,” she said.

“You sound surprised.”

“It’s really early.” She gave him the hint of a grin. Brendan’s sour mood evaporated faster than he would have thought possible. He would have gotten up a lot earlier than this for that smile.

“Here,” she said, pushing one of the mugs at him. “Coffee. Now come on, we’ve got work to do.”

The morning passed in a semi-delirium of cold, caffeine, and cows. Brendan was relieved that Katie’s mom, Samantha, and her other uncle, Jesse, were as unphased by his presence as Rob seemed to be. Not that it made the work easier. First, they had to prepare the cows’ food, although they wouldn’t get that until later. Then milking happened and was a process which involved a great deal of science fiction technology and way more cow interaction than Brendan was strictly comfortable with. And, despite Katie’s warning, Brendan somehow managed to get iodine all over his hands.

“That’ll stain,” Katie said from where she was crouched next to him, showing him how to disinfect a cow’s udder.

Brendan did his level best not to give away how worried he was about being stepped on. “Can’t be worse than a black eye, yeah?” he said.

Katie cracked a faint smile. “Just don’t get it on me.”

Which was as close to a dare as anything he’d heard from her in ages, but he wasn’t about to start roughhousing around farm animals.

There were so many cows. Every time Brendan thought they had definitely milked every cow on the planet by now, another group would appear, lined up by Katie’s mom, ready to go. Outside it was slowly growing light, the landscape turning from black to grey to pale green and bright gold.

There was something to be said for glancing up and seeing the sunrise in between tasks. The experience of morning here was different from being at their home rink — aside from the cows, of course. There you never knew what time of day it was; everything was lit with ghastly overhead lights and windows were few and far between. But here, Brendan could never forget that a world beyond what was right in front of him existed.

After the milking was done, it was finally feeding time. Once that was finished, Brendan was ready to collapse in a heap in any corner of the barn. He was more than a little relieved when Katie tilted her head at him and asked if he was ready for breakfast.

“You mean it’s not noon already?” He was joking. Mostly.

“Seven-thirty. Come on. Once the cows eat, we eat. Rob makes some killer pancakes.”

They walked side-by-side back to the house, not touching or speaking. Brendan was exhausted, sore, and more freaked out by cows than he had been yesterday. But he’d survived the morning, and he was always proud of himself when there was work to do and he could do it.

That said, he had no idea when he’d finally have a chance to talk to Katie about the issues that loomed between them. The chores were obviously intense and continuous. And Katie’s mother and uncles were always around. Brendan liked them fine, but he wasn’t prepared to have any sort of conversation that might turn into a shouting match in front of them.

“How are your folks, Brendan?” Samantha asked, startling him out of his reverie as they all sat around the dining room table for breakfast.

“They’re good.” He knew he should say more, but he was no more able to speak fluidly this morning than he had been last night.

“Did you see them on your way here?”

Brendan was sure it wasn’t appropriate to say no, I almost drove all night just to see your daughter, I didn’t want to stop and see my parents. “I didn’t get a chance, yet. On my way back, maybe.”

“We talked to them the night you and Katie won,” Samantha said, with a smile for both him and Katie. “They’re very proud of you, you know.”

Brendan glanced sideways at Katie, who looked as surprised as he felt. He hadn’t known that, actually. His parents had talked about coming to Harbin to watch them, but had never followed through. They’d congratulated him on the win in a series of enthusiastic voicemails, but Brendan always felt uneasy about the way they sometimes ignored everyone else who helped make it possible — very much including Katie.

He hadn’t known that their families were on any kind of current speaking terms. His parents had been cordial with Katie’s family when they were children. But after their breakup a gulf had opened he’d assumed would never close for so many reasons, matters of class and culture among them.

For the last year Brendan had been so wrapped up in skating, and in the all-consuming issue of him and Katie, that he’d never thought about how the two of them would navigate existence in the world outside the ice. For the first time, he began to understand a fraction of what had terrified Katie so badly back on the tour.

“We’re very proud of you, too,” Samantha said. “Both of you.”

“Thank you.” Brendan was too touched to be any more articulate than that.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t make it out for one of your tour stops,” Samantha went on. “We tried, but none of the cities were close enough — taking days off is hard around here.”

“We watched all the videos we could find online, though,” Jesse put in.

“Yep,” Rob added. “Had all the neighbors over. Got the projector up and everything.”

“We had some questions about those lifts.” Jesse teased. “And not about the physics of them.”

“Oh my God.” Katie put her elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

Is she blushing? The idea of video of the two of them playing out jumbotron-style over the living room wall was enough to make his cheeks go red too.

“Of course we did.” Samantha was smiling broadly now. “Hometown girl and boy make good. Everybody wanted to see.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this before?” Katie demanded, her voice muffled by her hands.

“You didn’t seem to want to talk about skating,” Samantha said.

“And I do now?!”

“Brendan’s here,” her mother said simply.

Katie dropped her hands to the table and looked helplessly at him. He looked as helplessly back. She was feeling the same thing he was, Brendan was sure. Which was less embarrassment over their lifts than surprise that the world had continued spinning while they’d been lost in their drama. That their families had, somehow, at some point, returned to being on speaking terms with each other was even more confusing. How had he not known? How had he never thought to ask Katie or his own parents whether their families were in touch?

“Okay. Brendan and I are going now.” Katie stood up from the table and tugged his shoulder.

It was the first time she’d touched him since they’d held hands in New York the night before she left. And it was the first time she’d wanted to be alone with him since he’d arrived. Brendan’s heart sped up.

She led him into the kitchen, where she turned her back on him to fidget with the coffeemaker. Brendan leaned against the counter, uncertain. What am I supposed to do?

If they were on the ice, he would have known how to draw the answer out of her. But they weren’t in their shared world, they were in hers. Because Brendan had wanted to come here, and he wanted to make things work. Right now, that meant being in Katie’s world with her. Not just tolerating it, but being here. Like she’d asked him to in a hotel back in Sacramento, he needed to not focus on the future. With patience and contentment, he needed to stand with her in this kitchen with the worn countertop, the loudly whirring refrigerator, and the cheery yellow curtains that stirred in the summer breeze coming in the open windows.

Katie grabbed the carafe from the coffeemaker, spun sharply as she turned to the sink, and winced. The movement was a tiny one, but Brendan was instantly on alert. He hadn’t asked for an update on her knee, hadn’t dared. But now he studied her leg carefully while she had her back to him and couldn’t see him do so. Would she ever tell him what was going on in any detail?

“Not a word about skating,” she said as she rinsed out the carafe. “Not a word.”

“They started it, not me.”

“Did you know our parents still talk to each other? And that it’s still a mess?”

Brendan shook his head. “No. I didn’t know either of those things.” At least if he’d been in the dark on that, he’d been in the dark with her.

“Oh my God,” Katie said, shaking her head.

“Are you embarrassed?” Brendan said, in lieu of knowing how to ask her anything useful.

“I don’t have anything to be embarrassed about,” she grit out.

“You’re right,” he said. “You don’t. Neither do I. I mean, other than the stuff with the lifts.”

Katie groaned.

“I think it’s sweet that they tease you about it,” Brendan said. “And that they care so much.”

“Of course you would,” Katie said scornfully. She carried the carafe, now full of water, back to the coffeemaker and poured it in.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Brendan tried not to feel hurt. They had been on the same side for five whole minutes, and now they were back to wherever they’d been before.

“It means you didn’t grow up where there had to be family meetings about who was going to drive me to skating practice and who was going to travel with me to competitions,” she hissed. “Any time off the farm meant more work for everyone else.”

“Do you feel guilty?” Brendan was sure she did, but they’d never talked about it.

Katie glanced at the clock over the stove. “It’s almost eight-thirty. What do you want to do next, chickens or baby cows?”

She was changing the subject. As much as Brendan wanted the rest of this conversation to happen, he knew the kindest thing to do was to follow Katie’s lead. “Uh. Baby cows?” At least he was already familiar with cows after the morning. Chickens would likely be a whole new sort of horror.

***

THE BABY COWS, BRENDAN had to admit, were pretty cute, and they were as excited to see Katie as particularly large and gangly puppies. But that was a brief respite in a day of otherwise overwhelming work. The chores didn’t even have the advantage of monotony yet, at least for him.

Living creatures were unpredictable, and Brendan had no idea what he was doing. Katie or her uncles or her mom had to keep answering his questions. Katie might have said he was here to work, but he sure didn’t feel like he was being of much help or passing whatever tests she had set for him.

And, as was becoming rampantly clear, those tests weren’t just about cows and farm work. He couldn’t stop churning over the conversation during breakfast. There was so much that he was finally starting to understand about Katie and the massive wounds she’d been carrying around — without him even noticing them — since they were children. About his city existence versus her farm life. About the coldness of his parents towards her. About her anxiety. About her need to be the best, always, which Brendan had thought was about the sport and now was realizing was maybe about everything but the sport. He was starting to see how all of that had collided in the most spectacular and disastrous way the morning she’d decided to leave him in New York.

But understanding didn’t make him less hurt — or less furious — about that. Katie effectively trusted him with her health, not to mention her life, every time they got on the ice together. Why hadn’t she talked to him?

By the end of the day Brendan was absolutely beat, physically and mentally. There was no way skating was harder than this. And skating was hard — falls, and bruises, and bleeding feet hard. But it came with music, and most days, one sort of victory or another. He couldn’t see that in farming. Not now, not yet, and, he suspected, maybe never. With all the data he was finally getting from Katie, he was starting to realize that might be the fatal deal breaker between them. At least when the end came, he would understand what had happened.

He was climbing the stairs to go take a shower when he heard Rob ask Katie, “Aren’t you being too hard on him?”

Brendan stopped with one hand on the railing. Eavesdropping was bad form, but after the day he’d had, he wasn’t in the mood to be scrupulously polite.

He could imagine Katie shaking her head when he heard her reply. “He knew what he was getting into.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Give him a few days at least. He’ll come around or he’ll leave.”

Katie, I love you, and I have fucked up more than once when it comes to you, Brendan thought as he resumed climbing the stairs. But I am not the only problem around here.

***

THE NEXT THREE DAYS were more of the same: Chores, meals, sleep, repeat. Katie was no more forthcoming than she had been, and while Rob, Jesse, and Samantha were all friendly with him, he knew Katie still viewed him with suspicion and distrust. Which, as the days went on, Brendan was getting increasingly tired of. He wanted to work things out with her more than anything, but he wasn’t going to be able to do that if she never gave him a chance.

After dinner on the fourth day Brendan wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed, sleep for twelve hours, and wake up somewhere else. But Katie asked, with that look of cool challenge in her eyes, if he wanted to have a beer and watch the sunset with her. Brendan couldn’t say no.

For the first time since that brief conversation in the kitchen, they were alone. The entire situation felt too much like the first awkward months when they had started skating together again after their separation. Whatever he said, Katie would surely take it the wrong way. He couldn’t entirely blame her.

The sunset was lovely, probably, but Brendan was too tired to appreciate it. His gaze kept wandering to Katie, sitting on the porch steps next to him, her legs stretched out, tendrils of her hair escaping its braid.

Katie took a sip of beer. “It looks like trash, doesn’t it?” She didn’t turn to him as she spoke.

“What?”

“My hair. Growing out. Like I can’t afford to keep up the dye.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that.” He hadn’t been at any rate, but he filed it away with the growing list of Katie’s hurts that maybe he had never noticed because they’d both been so focused on just one thing.

“I tried to color correct it, so it wouldn’t be all chunky, but then it streaked and the ends didn’t take.” She shrugged. “I gave up worrying about it. But I’ve seen you looking at it.”

Because I like looking at you. Because you’re always beautiful. “You want to know what I was thinking about?”

“Enlighten me.” She was sharp for being the one who had offered to sit with him and share a drink.

“I was thinking that you were the one who left me high and dry in New York. Yet, here I am, busting my ass, like I’m the one who fucked up.”

“It’s only been four days.”

“Well it’s been a really long four days. The question stands. What am I doing here?”

“I don’t know, Bren. You’re the one who called me. We’ve both done an awful lot of fucking up over the years.”

“I don’t disagree. But I was really, really pissed at you.”

“I know. I said I was sorry.”

“Jesus.” Brendan sank backwards to lean on his elbows.

“If you came to try to talk me into anything, you can leave right now,” Katie said sharply.

“Who says I came to talk you into anything?”

Katie didn’t bother to respond, fixing him instead with a sharp gaze and an arched eyebrow.

“The only thing I came for was closure, and I’m starting to feel like you won’t even give me that, on the phone or in person.” When she continued to say nothing, he went on. “I’m making a life. Without you, thanks very much.” A life he’d maybe been a fool to leave behind.

“Then why did you bother coming?” Katie demanded.

“I don’t think you want me to answer that right now.” He was tired. Physically. Mentally. Of Katie’s ongoing inability to say anything that mattered or give him the least chance.

“Fine.” Katie tucked her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

“Fine,” Brendan echoed.