Page 29 of Love Worth Gold
She watched his hands. They were weathered and scarred from decades of pole straps and frostbite. Hands that had held gold and yet still carried regret.
“Medals tarnish,” he said. “What stays is who you were when you kept showing up. The mornings you got back on snow after crashes. The nights you called home from some far away place and pretended you were fine. The races where you gave everything, and it still wasn’t enough on the clock.”
He leaned forward and met her gaze square.
“I have watched you fight your way back twice. I watched you stand in that start house today knowing our entire country was expecting magic from you. You gave them a committed run. You skied your own race. That’s what matters, Isa.”
“It doesn’t feel like enough.”
“I know,” he said again. “But, you are enough. I am proud of you.”
No conditions. No “but if you’d just.” No attachment to placement or time differential.
Her dad was just proud.
The flood of tears she’d been holding off in public finally broke free, quiet and hot. He didn’t try to stop them. He just handed her a towel and let her cry without commentary.
When she finally caught her breath, voice rough, she asked, “What if the downhill goes the same way?”
“Then you’ll be fourth twice,” he said simply. “And you’ll still be the woman who skied two Olympic races at speeds most people will never touch. You’ll still be someone I’m proud to call my daughter.”
She wiped her face. “That’s not a very goodgo-win-goldpep talk.”
A rare smile ghosted across his mouth. “I’m not trying to fix you. I’m trying to remind you that you’re not broken.”
Later, alone in her room with the door locked and the village noise reduced to a distant hum, Isaline opened her tablet and pulled up the Super-G replay. The screen glowed pale blue in the dim light.
Her finger hovered over the play button. Every instinct screamed to dissect the run frame by frame to find the exact moment she’d lost those precious hundredths. To prove to herself that she’d failed.
She pressed play.
The first viewing was exactly what she expected: ruthless self-criticism. Too cautious in entering the compression. Lost speed on the transition. Should have trusted the inside line through the final gates. Her jaw clenched watching herself cross the finish, believing for three perfect seconds that bronze was hers.
Then she stopped the video and started again.
This time, Matthias’s voice threaded through the images. The arena isn’t just the podium. It’s the start gate.
She watched herself commit to the top section with clean aggression. Saw the way she’d managed the blind roll that had eaten two other racers. Recognized the moment mid-course where she’d chosen control over recklessness, trusting her body’s memory of what happened when she pushed too hard too soon.
She hadn’t skied scared. She’d skied smart. That was a win.
That realization didn’t erase fourth place. It didn’t magic a medal onto her neck. But it shifted something fundamental in her. She had skied as the woman she is today: strong, disciplined, shaped by every crash and comeback. Not the reckless twenty-two-year-old desperate to prove herself. Not her father’s daughter trying to fill impossible boots.
Simply Isaline Senn, choosing her race and committing to it.
She scrolled forward in the replay queue and found Blaire’s run. Her thumb hesitated before pressing play.
Watching hurt in a different way now. Not because Blaire had beaten her, but because seeing the way Blaire skied made her chest ache with something more complicated than rivalry. The way Blaire attacked the course with surgical confidence was mesmerizing. The tiny adjustments, which came from two decades of muscle memory, were executed perfectly. The nerve to hold the tuck past comfort fell into the realm of art.
Admiration washed through her where bitterness could have lived instead.
She closed the tablet and set it on the narrow desk.
One race left. The downhill. The discipline she’d loved longest, the one that had broken her twice and still called her back.
Isaline stood and crossed to her gear that was already laid out with the obsessive order of someone who’d learned preparation was half the battle. Her downhill suit hung on the closet door. Skis rested against the wall, edges sharp, bases waxed to perfection.
She ran her fingers along the suit’s sleeve, feeling the slick texture that would cut wind at a hundred-twenty kilometers per hour.