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“I—just had to get away. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“Or at all, apparently. For seven days!” There, the fury began to return. Fury, Dillon could handle. Disappointment, she could not.

Not from Seren.

“Look, I’m sorry. I screwed up. I just wanted to hide for a little while. To have some time to wrap my head around things—”

“—a fucking text, Dillon! A bloody fucking text would have sufficed. ‘Hey! I’m going to turn off my phone and disappear for a week. Don’t worry about me. I’m not dead.’ You don’t think you owed us that at the very least?”

“Like I said, I wasn’t thinking! I just needed—I needed some space.”

She could hear Seren suck in a breath on the other end of the line—holding it as she deliberated whether or not to unleash how she really felt. Dillon braced herself, but finally Serenexhaled, curbing whatever tongue-lashing she’d prepared. They both knew how this conversation went. It wasn’t the first time. It had just been a long time.

Dillon didn’t know how to explain the mistakes she made. The way her panic took control. She didn’t know how to tell Seren that three days had passed before she even realized she’d not told anyone where she was going. And that it had taken her three more days to find the courage to come home—to face the music she knew she was due.

To everyone else, she knew Yokohama was just a race. The second in a series of seven. A DNF wasn’t the end of the world. With five more races, she was still in the running for the world title.

But it wasn’t concern over the championship Dillon had found crippling.

She’dneededthe win in Japan. She’d needed it more than any win in her career.

You won’t even make top ten, Henrik had told her.

You ran like a weakling.

It was embarrassing to watch.

Drückeberger, he’d called her.

She’dhadto beat Elyna. To prove Henrik wrong. And she’d known she could do it. All she had to do was outmaneuver her, and set an unrecoverable distance between them once they started the run.

And she’d done just that.

But it had been unusually hot in Yokohama, and Dillon had come out too strong. She ignored her body’s warning signs as she powered through the swim and cycle, and then pushed even harder on the run.

A hundred meters from the finish line, however, Dillon’s body had had enough.

She collapsed on the course.

She didn’t remember much, but she knew she’d been crawling on her hands and knees when Elyna Laurent had run past.

“You were almost two minutes ahead of her,” Kyle said when he visited her in the emergency room that afternoon. “Three hundred more feet and you’d have set a new course record.”

After he’d gone, Dillon signed herself out of the hospital, left a note at the hotel asking Kyle to handle her gear, and jumped on a plane to Heathrow. But by the time she landed, she’d decided she wasn’t ready to go home.

“Where’d you go?” Seren asked, after a long silence.

“Holyhead.”

Seren didn’t respond. Dillon didn’t expect her to. Holyhead was where their dad used to take her camping every spring, just off the Isle of Anglesey. It had been a place that was just theirs. Her sanctuary.

“It’s not fair, you know.” Seren finally said. “What you put us through.”

“I know.” Dillon stared at the glistening pavement a hundred feet below. The rain had tapered to a drizzle. She cleared her throat. “You’ll tell mam I’m sorry?”

“You’ll have to tell her yourself. You might want to wait a day or two for her to simmer down.” Seren sighed. “I met Kameryn Kingsbury.”

“You called her?” Dillon didn’t know why she was surprised. Seren would have called every person she could think of. Just like last time.