Page 163 of Sweet Nightmare

No photograph could truly capture the beauty before me. No painting could hold it. I don’t think I could even form proper words to explain it. This place isn’t just beautiful. It’s something beyond beautiful in the kind of way that feels almost sacred.

The quiet ache, the one skating has always awakened in me, settles inside my chest.

I smile.

A real smile.

And then I set my skate case down in the snow, sit near the edge of the lake and remove my boots. The cold immediately finds my socks, but I barely notice as I pull on my skates.

The ritual is automatic.

I know it by heart since I was a little girl.

The leather.

The laces.

The pressure around my ankles.

Some people found comfort in churches and their therapists. Some found it in family traditions or in the arms of another person.

I have always found mine here.

On ice.

Always on ice.

Once my skates are on, I stand and place one blade, then the other, against the ice. The moment I push off, everything inside me settles. For the first time in days, nothing feels wrong. The world loosens its grip on my throat, and I glide.

That first movement is always my favorite—the moment gravity stops holding me down and starts making me feel like I can fly.

I push harder, picking up speed as snow drifts around me like tiny feathers. A laugh escapes me when I notice the moon following me across the ice.

The moon guides him through the coldest winter. Mrs. Han’s words return to me as I skate, Stephen’s melody lingering somewhere in the back of my mind.

I also hear the piano beneath the wind.

His voice beneath the piano.

I close my eyes for a tiny second and then I open them and somehow everything seems even more magical.

I turn.

Spin.

Glide.

Fly.

His melody seems to follow my every move—a note as I lean into a curve, his voice rising as I pick up speed, softening as I slow. I honestly can’t tell if I’m remembering the music or simply imagining it.

It’s just me, the ice, the snow and a man’s voice haunting every corner of my soul.

A joyful laugh escapes me. One that comes from somewhere beneath the carefully constructed version of me everyone else knows.

I spin once more and then I feel like I’m flying. Suddenly, I’m not twenty-seven. I’m a little girl again. One whose first love was the ice.

The memory hits me like an avalanche.