I knew something was wrong the moment Lily said it. “Mom, I feel kind of weird.”
She was standing in the kitchen in her skating jacket, one hand pressed flat against her stomach. My husband Mike was at the table with his phone in his hand, scrolling through something that had apparently absorbed all of his attention.
“Weird how?” I asked. Before Lily could answer, Mike spoke without looking up. “She’s a teenager.
Probably skipped breakfast again.”
I looked at him. It wasn’t what he said that caught me, exactly. It was the speed of it.
The certainty. The complete absence of any pause to actually consider her. Mike wasn’t Lily’s biological father.
Her dad had left when she was four, a slow disappearance that became a permanent one, and Mike had come into our lives when Lily was nine. They had built something real together over those seven years. He came to every competition.
He drove her to early morning practice without complaining. He learned the difference between a lutz and a loop because she wanted him to understand. For him to brush her off like that, without even glancing up from his phone, felt like a wrong note in a song I thought I knew by heart.
“It’s not that,” Lily said softly. “I’ve been feeling dizzy.”
Mike finally looked up. “You’ve been training harder than usual.
Your body’s still adjusting.”
He wasn’t wrong that she had been training hard. Figure skating season was starting, and this year was different from any year before it. Lily had qualified for state, the biggest competition she had ever reached, the thing she had been working toward since she was eleven years old and first stepped onto real competitive ice.
She had been living and breathing it. Early mornings, late practices, weekends at the rink when other sixteen-year-olds were sleeping in or going to movies. A couple of weeks before that morning, she had mentioned she had put on a little weight over the off-season.
“I just want to feel lighter when I get back on the ice,” she told me. “At state, every little thing shows.”
“You look perfect,” I said, because she did, because she always had, because she was my daughter and I meant it. Mike had been passing through the kitchen when she said it.
He paused. “Nothing wrong with tightening things up before competition. It’s part of the sport.”
At the time I let it pass.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
