Chapter 34

She finds the post-it note at half past five.

Goes to her room to change out of her class clothes and there it is — the hoodie, folded with a neatness that is not hers, sitting at the end of her bed like it was placed there carefully, which it was, and on top of it a small square of pink post-it in handwriting she would know anywhere now:

y/n’s sleepover hoodie 🩷

She stands at the end of her bed and looks at it for a long moment.

Then she sits down beside it.

Picks it up.

Holds it in her lap with both hands and looks at the little heart and feels something move through her chest that is so large and so warm and so completely without edges that she doesn’t try to name it, just lets it be there, just sits with it in the quiet of her room while the evening comes in through the windows.

y/n’s sleepover hoodie.

Like it’s already an established thing.

Like it was always going to have a name and a place.

She puts the hoodie on the pillow on her side of the bed.

Smooths the post-it once with her thumb.

Leaves it exactly where it is.

Phillip arrives at six thirty.

Massimo is already on the phone with someone when he comes through the door and holds up one finger at Alysa in the way of someone who will be with you in a moment and meanwhile Phillip steps inside and stops.

He looks at the kitchen.

At the dish rack, empty and dry. At the counters, clean. At the cookies on the rack — still half a plate of them, covered loosely with a cloth — and at the pasta pot washed and put away and the general quality of the apartment which is, unmistakably and unusually:

Tidy.

He looks at Alysa.

She is standing in her living room with her arms crossed and an expression of great composure.

“It’s neat,” Phillip says.

“I tidied,” she says.

He looks at the kitchen again. At the folded tea towel. At the wiped down table. At the cookies.

“You baked,” he says.

“Someone baked,” she says.

A pause.

Massimo comes through the door, phone call finished, and stops beside Phillip and does the same slow scan of the apaetment with wide eyes.

“It smells like food in here,” Massimo says.

“Someone cooked,” Alysa says.

They both look at her.

She looks back.

“Sit down,” she says. “I’ll make tea.”

The competition folders are on the coffee table — schedules, programme notes, the things Phillip always brings, the things they do before every major event — and they go through them with the thoroughness of people who take this seriously, which they do, which they always have. Alysa’s upcoming competition is bigger than Saturday’s, bigger than most, and the preparation for it is a different kind of careful.

She’s focused.

She’s always focused when it’s this.

But Massimo keeps glancing at the kitchen.

And the cookies.

And back at her.

And finally, after the third time, Phillip sets down his folder and looks at him and then at her and says, with the measured calm of someone who has decided to simply address the thing in the room:

“Tell us.”

Alysa looks at her tea.

“Tell you what,” she says.

“Whatever you’re sitting on,” Phillip says. “You’ve been somewhere else since we got here. Tell us.”

She looks at the coffee table.

At the competition notes.

At the cookies on the counter.

And then she does what she always does with these two, eventually, inevitably, because they have known her too long and too well for anything else — she tells them.

She starts with the afternoon.

Coming home to the smell of garlic and butter. The sound of something on the stove. The sight of you in her clothes at her kitchen counter stirring pasta sauce with her wooden spoon and your hair tied back and the whole flat transformed around you — dishes done, laundry running, groceries put away, and you, just you, standing in the middle of all of it like you’d always been there.

Massimo makes a sound approximately forty five seconds in.

Phillip puts his hand on Massimo’s arm.

She keeps going.

The lunch. Sitting across from you at her table eating food you made in her kitchen. The way you moved through her space like you knew it, like it knew you. The laundry folded on the end of her bed. The post-it note — she pauses here, just for a second — y/n’s sleepover hoodie with its little heart.

“She named the hoodie,” Massimo says softly.

“She named the hoodie,” Alysa confirms.

A silence that is very full.

She looks at her hands.

“And then she left,” she says. “And the apartment was—” she pauses. Finds it. “Quiet again. Like it always is. Except this time it felt different because it had just been — not quiet. It had just been full. And I stood in my kitchen and I could still smell the food and the laundry was still warm in the dryer and there was half a plate of cookies on the counter and I just—”

She stops.

Her jaw moves.

Steadying.

“I’ve lived alone for a long time,” she says quietly. “And I’ve been fine with that. I’ve been good at it. But this afternoon I came home and my apartment felt like a home and then she left and I realised—” her voice goes soft, careful, the way it gets when something is true and large and she’s handling it gently — “I want that. Not just for one day. I want—”

She stops again.

Her eyes are bright.

Unmistakably, undeniably bright.

Massimo makes a sound that is not quite a word but contains everything.

Phillip is very still.

“I love her,” Alysa says. Simply and completely and with the particular quality of something that has been true for long enough to have weight. “I love her so much it—” she shakes her head slightly. “I said it yesterday. At the rink. And I meant it then and I mean it more now somehow. It just keeps—” she laughs, small and slightly undone. “It keeps being more.”

One tear.

The same as last night.

She lets it go the same way — without stopping it, without looking away, just letting it be there because it’s true and she’s not going to pretend it isn’t.

Massimo reaches across the sofa and takes her hand.

Doesn’t say anything.

Just holds it.

Phillip looks at her for a long moment with the expression he saves for the things that matter most — the competitions that mean everything, the falls that really hurt, the mornings when skating is hard and she needs someone to tell her why she does it. That expression. The one that knows her.

“She came home,” he says quietly.

Alysa looks at him.

“You came home,” he says again. “And she was there. And the apartment felt like a home.” He pauses. “That’s not nothing, Alysa. That’s not a small thing.”

“I know,” she says.

“Does she know?” he asks. “How much—”

“She knows,” Alysa says. “I think she knows.”

Phillip nods.

Massimo squeezes her hand.

“She named the hoodie,” Massimo says again, softer this time, like he’s still processing it. Like it’s the detail that got him.

“She named the hoodie,” Alysa says.

And despite everything — the bright eyes and the one tear and the largeness of what she’s just said out loud — she smiles.

They stay for two more hours.

They go through the competition notes properly, all three of them, the way they’ve done before every important thing for years. Programme timing. Entry edges. The combination she’s been refining. Phillip has notes on her free leg and Massimo has feelings about her programme music that he expresses at length and she listens to both with the focus she always brings to this, the part of her that is wholly and completely a skater alongside the part that is wholly and completely in love with a girl who folds laundry and names hoodies and makes pasta from scratch on a Thursday.

Both things true.

Both things entirely her.

They leave around nine.

Massimo hugs her at the door — properly, the kind of hug he saves for the times he knows she needs it — and she lets herself be held for a moment before she straightens up and he cups her face in both hands briefly in that way of his and says nothing but means everything.

Phillip puts his hand on her shoulder.

“Sleep,” he says. “Eat the cookies. Call her if you need to.”

“I will,” she says.

“You’re going to skate beautifully,” he says. “You always do when you’re happy.”

She looks at him.

He looks back with the almost-smile.

“And you’re very happy,” he says.

She is.

She is so completely, entirely, helplessly happy.

“Goodnight Phillip,” she says.

“Goodnight,” he says.

She locks the door.

Stands in the quiet of her apartment.

The competition notes on the coffee table. The half plate of cookies. The clean kitchen and the empty dish rack and all of it, the whole day, settled into the walls of the place like it belongs there.

She goes to her bedroom.

Sits on the end of the bed.

Picks up the hoodie with the post-it note.

y/n’s sleepover hoodie 🩷

She holds it for a moment.

Then she puts it on.

Gets into bed.

Texts you.

alysa 🖤 ⛸️ ✨
9:14pm
the cookies were really good

9:14pm
I ate three more

9:15pm
also I found the post it

9:15pm
I’m wearing the hoodie

She puts her phone on the nightstand.

Turns the lamp off.

Lies in the dark in the hoodie that smells like you now, faintly, and closes her eyes.

It keeps being more, she thinks.

It just keeps being more.