Page 43 of Blade

“Holy shit—now I get it, why she’s a suspect.”

“Right,” I tell her. “And if they show this to a jury, it’ll be hard to get them off the judgments they’ll make about her.”

Kayla hands back the phone and places her palms on the table. She pauses for a moment. And when she looks away, I fix my eyes on her like this might anchor me in the present.

“Why, though, are you here?” Kayla asks. “Like you said—in the middle of a storm and with so little time?”

I open my mouth to speak, then realize I don’t have an answer. Not one I want to say out loud.

“No one else understands that place,” I tell her. “The way we were on our own. The things that happened to us. And Dawn ...”

Kayla looks confused. “Okay . . .”

“But Jolene doesn’t remember it the same way,” I continue. “She saw it as a great opportunity for Grace. To train at The Palace.”

Kayla boards her shoulders. “We all came to it differently,” she says. “I never expected to make the Olympics. Or even get close. I was just grateful to have a place to be where I could skate. And then, really, to be away from home.”

“And it didn’t bother you the way Dawn treated us? And the mothers in the stands? It didn’t make you angry?”

“It was a long time ago, Ana. Shit happens to people,” she says.

I think about Kayla and Jolene, friends all these years. And how I’ve seen this place as a black hole I could never go near again.

Kayla searches for something to give me. “It was totally fucked up,” she says. “That fucking doctor. And Dawn, trying to make us afraid of her. I wish I’d killed her that day.”

Now I look at her curiously. “What day?”

“The day—after what we tried to do to her.”

“Kay—I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“We never told you?” she asks.

“Told me what?”

She pauses, searching for memories.

“Jesus—we never told you.”

“What?” I ask again, my mind scanning images from those first few days after I arrived. There was so much to learn, but I always assumed it was all there. Laid out for me. Like a textbook I just needed to read.

“Fuuuuuck,” she says, shaking her head. “Something happened, Ana. Before we ever knew you. Do you remember how angry I always was?”

I nod. “I thought it was because of your childhood—in New York.”

She laughs in one short burst. “Well, that did cut some rough edges. My grandmother—no wonder my mother ended up in jail. Never got her shit together. But it wasn’t that.”

I see her that night in the field. And then the aftermath. The anger that followed. But she’s right—it was there from the day I arrived.

“What then?” I ask. “What happened before I got there?”

She draws a long breath. Then tells me a part of the story I never knew.

Chapter Sixteen

Excerpt from Testimony of Hugo Aguilar

Ada Olson: Mr. Aguilar—you were a skater at Avery Hall on and off during the time Ana Robbins was there.