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“Might as well, you’re already here.”
If she had to guess, Kam was clinging to her bitterness as a form of self-preservation. Her body language didn’t match her tone. Beneath her anger, she looked like she was going to cry.
“I can come back tomorrow, Kam, if you’d rather. Or not at all. I promise I came here with no expectations.”
“Oh no?” Kam crossed her arms, defensive. “Didn’t just swing by for a midnight booty call before hopping another flight back home?”
Leaning against the edge of the table, Dillon released a slow exhale. She deserved Kam’s resentment, but it didn’t make it easier to face.
“I know I handled things poorly. It was unfair for me to leave the way I did.”
“Unfair?” Kam’s laugh was derisive. “You said less than a dozen words to me on a six-hour drive home. You got out of my car, grabbed your stuff, and told me ‘I’m sorry, I’ll call you this week. I have to go.’ Andleft.” She tapped the envelope with her script in it against her calf, before tossing it back to the coffee table. “I think the worst part is, I don’t even know why I cared so much. We spent a fun night together—so what? You don’t owe me an explanation—”
“Idoowe you an explanation, and I hope you’ll hear me out.”
She took Kam’s silence as permission to proceed.
Lacing her hands behind her head, she stared up at the ceiling. “I panicked when your movie was announced. I know I should have been happy for you—it’s amazing,you’reamazing—but I…” She trailed off. She wasn’t certain where to start. The hardest part, she decided. Just once more, she could do this. And then Seren was right—it was time to let it go.
“I told you my dad passed away when I was nineteen. That he’d been sick. What I didn’t say is that he died by suicide… because of me.”
Her mouth felt chalky. It didn’t matter what Seren said. They all knew the truth.
None of them more so than Dillon.
She continued. “When I was fourteen, I began training with a man named Henrik. Up to that point, my dad had been coaching me, but he’d heard a rumor that Henrik Fischer—a two-time Olympic gold medalist—was beginning to accept students for his new training program. We met with him. Henrik didn’t have a facility yet, but said—since he was currently living in London, and I was still in school—he could come to Swansea and coach me on the weekends.
“It cost my parents a fortune, but my dad was elated. Henrik was world-class. I immediately hated him—he was very strict and very demanding—but my dad was so certain he was the answer to achieving my dreams, I stuck it out. I didn’t want to fail my dad or the faith he had in me. And there was no denying the results.
“Within the first six months, I was placing higher on the podium, breaking all my personal bests. But the more success I had, the more dependent I became on Henrik. I no longer felt I could compete without his guidance. I grew terrified of disappointing him. Terrified he would quit coaching me. I wascertain the only way I’d ever become a world champion—the only way I’d ever make the Olympic team—was with his help. So I did anything to please him.” Dillon shifted against the edge of the table, dropping her gaze from the ceiling, but instead of looking at Kam, refocused on the ticking clock on the mantel. “Which, um,” she swallowed, forcing herself to continue, “meant that by the time he wanted more from me—I didn’t know how to say no.”
She risked a glance at Kam, making certain she’d understood, and then quickly continued. “Bear with me, I promise, there’s a reason I’m telling you this, and I will come full circle to your question.”
Outside, a shadow moved across the drawn window blinds as a group of laughing revelers passed along the sidewalk.
“Eventually, Henrik announced his retirement as a competitor and turned his full focus to coaching. He’d taken on several students at the time, and was opening a training center in his hometown of Hamburg. The only way I could stay in his program was if I moved to Germany.
“My mam didn’t like it. She’d begun to feel I was under too much pressure. She wanted me to finish school, insisting there were other coaches—and if none of them were good enough, Henrik’s training center would still be there when I turned eighteen.
“I freaked out. Ihadto stay in training. So I enlisted my dad’s help to convince her. I’d just won the super sprint at Sunderland, which qualified me to compete at the junior world championships in six months when I turned sixteen. I knew I couldn’t do it without Henrik. I begged my dad and he helped persuade her. Neither he nor my mam, of course, realized at the time just how much trouble I’d gotten myself in…”
Dillon paused as the red and blue lights of a cop car filtered through the blinds, sirens blaring off into the distance.
“It was finally my sister who became suspicious. For months after I’d moved to Germany, she and my dad made the fourteen-hour train ride every weekend to see me. But eventually, Henrik monopolized my time, and made their visits impossible. I’m sure he knew Seren was on to him. And when she finally called me out, I didn’t do a very good job of lying. She immediately went to our parents. And things…” Dillon pressed her lips together, “fell apart quickly.
“They immediately demanded I come home, confronting Henrik and threatening to press charges. But I’d just turned sixteen. A week earlier I’d won the championship in Japan. There was nothing that was going to convince me to leave him. I, of course, denied it all—as did Henrik. My mam’s a solicitor—she knew they were fighting a losing battle. The age of consent in the UK is sixteen. Fourteen in Germany. I’d already sat for my GCSEs and was of a legal age to leave school. There was nothing they could do.”
Dillon grew quiet, her thoughts drifting to the last time she’d seen her dad—the last conversation they’d ever had.
He turned up in Hamburg in the middle of the night, pounding on Henrik’s door. Outraged at the disturbance and fearful of the potential for scandal, Henrik told her she had to choose between them. If her father showed up again, he was going to cut her from his program.
She led her dad away from the house, down to the river. It was the first time she’d ever seen him unshaven. The first time she’d smelled whisky through his pores.
“I’m struggling to understand, Dillon!” he’d yelled on the bank of the Elbe, his composure collapsing. “This isn’t what you want! I know you’re not in love with—with…” he gestured toward the house, “with that man!” His anger turned to pleading. “This isn’t who you are!”
Love? The word blindsided her. Did he really think love had anything to do with it?
“You have no idea who I am,” she spat, her mind stuck on Henrik’s threat to drop her as a student.
