Chapter 6: He Doesn’t Give Her Sympathy Points
Nora’s POV
Northstar’s front desk had no record of me.
The receptionist called upstairs twice before printing a visitor badge. I clipped it to my coat and waited until eleven minutes past nine, when an assistant finally came to get me.
Julian Cross’s office was at the end of the second-floor corridor. Through the glass wall, I could see eight skaters working through crossover drills below.
He sat with his back to the ice.
Two pages lay on his desk. I recognized the crease down the middle.
He didn’t stand.
“Sit down, Mrs. Caldwell.”
“Bennett.”
I sat.
“Six years is a long time to use someone else’s name.”
I left my bag beside the chair. He turned the first page toward me.
“Celeste paid you a thousand dollars for this.”
“Yes.”
“She says she’d stake a project on your judgment. In eleven years, I’ve never heard her say that about anyone.”
“She wanted the report.”
“She wanted a reason to call me.”
He laid his pen along the edge of the desk.
“How does this season’s qualifying series work?”
“Sectionals, then the final.”
“That tells me you remember where you wanted to end up. It tells me nothing about how an athlete qualifies this season.”
My hands were on my knees. I kept them there.
I had read Margaret’s list until I knew the order of it. Membership. Background check. Safety training.
I hadn’t read far enough beyond it.
“Tell me what a coach is required to report.”
“A suspected concussion. A withdrawal for medical reasons.”
“And if an athlete tells you she won’t go out?”
“Then she doesn’t go out.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
He leaned back.
“What gets recorded? Who gets notified? You’ve told me what you’d let her do. I asked what you’re responsible for doing.”
I wanted to explain that I knew the difference.
I had just failed to show him.
“I don’t know the current procedure,” I said. “I’d read it before taking responsibility for her.”
“Good.”
Nothing in his voice made it feel like praise.
“You didn’t know. You said so. We can work with that.”
He took a folder from a drawer and put it between us. Ivy’s name was on the tab, her date of birth beneath it.
“Sixteen. Five coaches in three years. Two have told her mother she’s lazy.”
He tapped the folder.
“The night before the biggest competition of her life, she tells you she won’t skate. Are you protecting her, or using her?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do.”
I looked at the folder.
Sophie’s fingers came back to me, caught in Serena’s sleeve. The cup I had put down because my daughter wouldn’t take it from me.
Then Vivienne’s kitchen table. All those words about the woman I used to be, and how badly I needed someone to believe I could still do something.
“I’d have to find out what’s wrong before I could say I was protecting her.”
“And until you do?”
“I don’t send her out to prove I deserve a job.”
Julian watched me for a moment, then closed the folder.
“You’re not being hired as a coach today.”
“I didn’t expect to be.”
“You expected something. Everyone who sits there does.”
He picked up his pen, then put it down.
“You left in March. By June, you weren’t answering calls. Nine people in this building will tell me you had every right to go. None can tell me you’ll stay this time.”
“It could happen again.”
His hand went still.
I hadn’t meant to say it quite that plainly. But I couldn’t promise him that nothing in my life would ever go wrong.
“At least we can stop pretending otherwise,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Twenty minutes on the ice with Ivy Morgan.”
“You’ll get eight, with me at the boards.”
He turned the monitor toward me.
“First, this.”
Greensboro. The short program. I had watched the footage at Celeste’s desk, but I made myself look again.
The entry. The three-turn. That extra stroke at the edge of the frame.
“She isn’t just hesitating,” I said. “She’s giving herself time to bring her left shoulder back into position.”
“Celeste saw an athlete who wouldn’t commit.”
“Celeste was watching the landing.”
I moved the cursor back.
“Here. Before the takeoff. Slow it down another six frames.”
Julian watched.
“What do you do about it?”
I took my hand off the mouse.
“I don’t know yet.”
“You wrote two pages.”
“About what I could see. I haven’t worked with her. I don’t know what she feels there, or what she’ll let me change.”
He said nothing.
“I can show you where the pattern starts. That doesn’t mean I know how to help her change it.”
He switched off the monitor.
“Then that’s where you start.”
He opened the folder again.
“Thirty-day supervised trial. It begins when your membership, background check, safety training, first aid certification and liability coverage are active and on file.”
I nodded.
“Active, Bennett. An application receipt doesn’t count.”
“Understood.”
“Low-risk work. Skating skills, edges, crossovers. The first thirty seconds of a program. Nothing above a double, and nothing outside her medical clearance.”
He pulled a sheet forward.
“She reproduces the sequence twice, on two separate days. That counts as progress.”
“Then we could still fail her.”
His eyes came up.
“If completion is the measure, she’ll find a way to finish. She already knows how to push through.”
“She’s been cleared.”
“That doesn’t tell us what she’ll admit hurts. Or whether she thinks she’s allowed to stop.”
He waited.
“We could give you a clean sequence and never find out she spent the night icing her shoulder.”
“What do you want measured?”
“Whether she can stop without being told. Whether she can start again when it’s safe.”
I put my hand on the edge of the desk.
“And what she tells us the next morning. If she says she feels worse, that has to count as useful information. She can’t think she’s failed because she told the truth.”
Julian looked down at the sheet.
I waited for him to tell me I was making excuses for a girl I hadn’t met.
“Both,” he said.
He drew a line beneath the existing standard.
“Write it in before your first session. We assess the skating and the response.”
“All right.”
“Every attempt goes in the record. The ones that work and the ones that don’t. Dates. What you asked for. What happened. Including anything you’d rather I didn’t see.”
“And if she stops and can’t restart?”
“We record that. We discuss it with her mother and the appropriate clinician. We don’t call it a breakthrough because she cried and you felt useful.”
I took my hand off the desk.
He wrote for a moment, then turned the sheet toward me.
“Two hundred a week during the trial. Six to seven in the morning, far sheet. Supervised work only. No private students. Parent discussions come through my office. You make no medical decisions.”
I read down the page.
“A safety violation, a boundary violation or a dishonest record ends the trial,” he said. “That day.”
Two hundred dollars.
I read it again, though the number hadn’t changed.
It wouldn’t pay for a room near Sophie’s school. There would still be groceries, transport, the cost of the requirements Margaret had handed me.
I had wanted a door to open so badly that I hadn’t let myself think about what might be on the other side.
“I’ll sign.”
“Bring the clearances first. Copies I can verify.”
He closed the folder.
“Mrs. Morgan called at seven this morning. She wanted to know whether the new person would need a month before anything happened.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That her daughter has been examined and cleared for the permitted work. That the trial starts when the requirements are met.”
“And?”
“That Ivy doesn’t need another optimist.”
He stood. I picked up my bag.
My visitor badge caught against the strap. I freed it before following him to the door.
“One more thing.”
I turned.
“Whatever that room is costing you, it doesn’t change what this job requires.”
My fingers tightened around the strap.
“I didn’t ask you to change it.”
“Good. Don’t let needing the work make you promise something you can’t deliver.”
Downstairs, the receptionist held out a folded note.
“This came in for you at eight fifty.”
Before I had gone upstairs. Before Julian had asked me a single question.
My name was on the outside in handwriting I didn’t recognize.
I opened it.
If there’s no result by December, don’t send another one.
I’ve had five.
