The days after I asked for more time did not soften anything.
They sharpened it.
I woke each morning with the same hollow pressure behind my ribs, dressed in the same careful layers, and walked the long route to the rink through snow that had frozen into a crust so hard it sounded like breaking glass under my boots. The campus moved around me in ordinary patterns—students late for lectures, the smell of burnt coffee drifting from the student union, the distant sound of someone laughing too loudly near the bike racks. None of it touched me. I had built a room with no windows and then stepped inside it, and the longer I stayed the more the walls seemed to press inward.
At the rink the distance held.
Damian kept his word with the same precision he brought to everything else. He was there
