CHAPTER 8 Skating on Thin Ice

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"I cannot skate," said Elodie, for the fourth time.

"So you've said." Julian knelt at her feet on the frozen edge of the pond and laced her second skate with the unhurried care of a man defusing something. "The first three times, I was inclined to believe you. This time I've lost faith in the claim."

"I'm from Chicago. We're indoor people. We have a very good system for getting from the car to the building."

"It's eight minutes of terror, followed by joy. The fall is the hard part." He tugged the lace tight, tested it, and looked up. "You will fall. I will not let it be a bad one."

She looked down at him, kneeling in the snow with his dark head bent and his gloved hands at her ankle, and felt something that was not terror at all. She looked away quickly.

It was the morning of the twenty-fourth, and the whole Hale clan had come down to the pond, a long oval of black ice set in a bowl of birches, the trees silver against a sky the color of pearl. Children raced in swooping circles. Tobias, enormously, was skating backward, to everyone's fear. Cordelia glided across the far end with such effortless elegance that the teenagers had stopped to watch. Rafe was building a snow fort. Odalys sat in a chair at the shore, wrapped in a fur rug, with a thermos of something that was not tea.

"It is a tradition," said Winifred, pressing a hot chocolate into Elodie's hands. "All of us, once a year, on the ice. My mother-in-law says the pond keeps the family honest."

A pair of blades hissed to a stop at the edge of the ice. Cordelia, flushed and windblown, looked down at the kneeling man and the laced skate, and for a moment her face did something unguarded.

"He taught me on this pond," she said, to no one in particular. "He held my hands exactly like that. He told me the fall was the hard part." She smiled, brave and brief. "It is. Don't let him tell you it gets easier."

She pushed off and was gone before Elodie could answer, a long clean line across the black ice. Julian tied the knot of the second skate again, though it did not need it.

"How?"

"No one can lie while they're falling down," said Winifred, and went off to her husband, smiling.

Julian stood. He held out both hands. "Come."

She took them. He drew her carefully onto the ice, and the world immediately went to pieces. Her ankles wobbled. Her arms flapped. She shrieked, once, and clung to him with both fists, and heard, to her astonishment, a low, rusty sound that was Julian Hale laughing out loud on a frozen pond.

"Don't laugh!"

"I'm not."

"You are!"

"I am emotionally supportive," said Julian, "with a fault in my face." His hands closed around her forearms. "Bend your knees. Look at me, not at the ice. Good. Now push, gently, with the left. And glide."

She pushed. And glided. A slow, wobbling, miraculous foot of movement, then another, with his hands steady on her arms and his face a few inches from hers, serious, absorbed, his breath making small clouds in the cold. They moved in a clumsy circle. The cold stung her cheeks and the sky tilted over the birches and she heard herself laughing, really laughing, loud and unself-conscious, a sound she had not made in years.

"I'm doing it!" she cried. "Julian, look, I'm doing it!"

"You're doing it."

"Let go. Let go of me, I'm ready."

"You're not."

"I am a Marchetti. We cry at bread and we skate at will." She pulled her hands free.

She made it four whole seconds. Then the left skate went one way, the right skate the other, and the pond rose up to meet her. She had a long, wild, floating instant to think, this is going to hurt, and then an arm hooked around her waist and she was yanked sideways against a warm, solid chest. They went down together. He twisted at the last second, taking the fall on his own back, and she landed on top of him in a flurry of limbs and scarves.

For a moment nothing moved.

She lay with her hands braced on his chest, her face above his, her breath in short, hard gasps. His arm was still around her. His hair had fallen into his eyes, and there was ice in it, and he was looking up at her with an expression she had no name for. No guard. No performance. Nothing between them at all but a few inches of cold air.

"You said you wouldn't let it be a bad one," she whispered.

"Was it?"

"No." Her heart was pounding against her palms. His, under her hands, was pounding too, hard and fast. "It wasn't bad at all."

Somewhere across the pond, a cheer went up. Scattered applause, a long, unmistakable whistle from Rafe. Elodie flushed to the roots of her hair, and Julian blinked, and she watched the guard come back down over his face like a shutter. Not completely. A slow lowering, reluctant, as if it weighed a great deal.

"The audience," he said hoarsely.

"Right. Yes. The audience."

Neither of them moved for a full three seconds. Then they both scrambled up, and he caught her elbow when she wobbled, and she said "thank you" in a voice that did not sound like hers.

From the shore, she felt a gaze. She turned her head. Odalys had not moved from her chair. She had set down her thermos. And for the first time since Elodie had met her, the stern, white-haired face was not stern. It was soft. It was the face of a woman looking at a ship she had thought lost for years, coming home over the horizon.

Then Odalys saw Elodie watching, and the mask slid smoothly back into place. She picked up her thermos. She lifted it, a tiny, dry salute, and looked away.

On the other side of the pond, Cordelia had stopped skating.

She stood alone at the far end, motionless on the ice, with her red hair blown across her face. Her hands hung at her sides. She was watching Julian, and there was no hatred in it, and no triumph, and that was the strangest part. It was only a long, quiet, weary look, like a person looking at a house where she used to live.

Then she turned and skated slowly toward the shore, her blades whispering, and did not look back once.

"Don't," said Julian, quietly, beside Elodie. He had followed her gaze, and his voice was heavy. "Don't pity her. It's the one thing she can't stand."

"I wasn't pitying her."

"What were you doing?"

"Wondering," said Elodie, honestly, "how many people have loved you in this house and had to do it from the other side of a pond."

He stared at her. The snow began to fall again, very light, a fine silver dust drifting between them. And Julian Hale, who had told her at the beginning that this was a contract about not needing love, opened his mouth to answer, and found that he did not have a clause for it.