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I read it again. My thumb hovers over the reply field, the same place it stalled out at midnight, except something’s different now — not resolved, not fixed, but different.

I start typing.

Chapter 31

Margo

The text comes in late, two days after I told him.

I need more time. But are the three of you okay?

I read it four times before I fully process it. Not I forgive you. Not let’s talk. Just — need more time, and then the question underneath it, the one that lands somewhere between my ribs and stays there. The three of you. Not are you okay. The three of us. He’s already counting them. Already thinking of them as real, as present tense, as his, even from wherever he currently is with all of this.

I sit on the edge of my bed with the phone in both hands. Two things fight for the same space in my chest. Relief, because he hasn’t disappeared, hasn’t gone fully dark, is still somewhere circling this even if he’s not ready to land. And a specific new dread, because are the three of you okay assumes something I haven’t actually decided yet.

He thinks I’m not competing.

He assumes it, the way you assume the obvious thing, the responsible thing, the thing that doesn’t put two developing lives at risk for a cheerleading routine. And the assumption sits there in his text like a verdict I haven’t agreed to.

We’re okay, I text back. Which is true, technically, this morning, right now. I don’t say anything else. I don’t correct the assumption, because I haven’t figured out yet whether it needs correcting.

The tension with the girls has been running two full days now, low-grade and constant, the specific exhaustion of an argument nobody’s actually won.

“You almost fell three weeks ago,” Wren says, for what feels like the fortieth time, as we load my bags into my car for the drive to Nationals. “That was a stumble. A real fall, at this level, under these stakes. Margo, I need you to actually hear me.”

“I hear you.”

“I don’t think you do.” Her voice isn’t unkind, just relentless in the specific way Wren gets when she’s decided something matters enough to keep saying it. “I think you hear the words and you’re still going to get up there anyway, because that’s what you’ve done your entire life. Perform through it. Manage it. Prove you can hold it together no matter what it’s actually costing you.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Maybe not. But is it wrong?”

I don’t have an answer for that, which is its own kind of answer.

Priya and Delaney are settling in the back seat, and Kara, in the driver’s seat, catches my eye in the rearview mirror. Not taking sides exactly. Just the specific caught-in-the-middle expression of someone who loves both the person driving the argument and the person losing it. “I just want you safe,” Wren says, quietly. “That’s the whole thing, Margo. Nobody’s trying to take Nationals away from you. We’re trying to make sure you’re here for the rest of it. All of it.”

Kara doesn’t say much during the drive, which is its own tell. Kara, who processes everything by talking it through, has gone quiet in the specific way that means she’s decided arguing further isn’t going to change anything. She’s saving her energy for whatever actually happens today.

I sit in the back seat with my seatbelt tight across my stomach. A stomach that doesn’t look any different yet but feels entirely different to me now. I don’t say what I’m actually thinking. I don’t know yet. I genuinely don’t know yet what I’m going to do.

The arena is enormous.

I’ve competed at qualifiers, at regional invitationals, at plenty of big events over three years on this team. Nothing prepares you for the specific scale of Nationals. The sheer size of the venue. The hundreds of athletes warming up in every direction. The noise and color and stakes of it all compressed into one building that makes everything before this feel like practice for the real thing.

We check in. We find our staging area. I go through the motions of warming up alongside my team. Stretching. Running through the choreography in my head. The whole time there’s a low hum underneath everything — a specific dread I’ve been managing successfully for two days and can no longer manage now that I’m standing in the actual building where the actual thing is about to happen.

I catch pieces of other teams warming up around us — a flyer three lanes over hitting a full twist that gets a ripple of applause from her own squad, a base group running through timing drills with the specific focused intensity of people who have exactly one shot at this. The whole floor hums with adrenaline, thousands of hours of training compressed into the next few hours, and I stand in the middle of it feeling the gap between the version of myself that trained for this all season and the version standing here right now, carrying something none of these other athletes know to account for.

I watch Kara stretch beside me. I think about her hands on my waist three weeks ago, the specific reflex that caught me before a stumble became something worse. I think about the extension, the cradle catch, the exact moment where I’m airborne and weightless and trusting four people I can’t see to be exactly where they’re supposed to be.

I put a hand against my stomach, under my warmup jacket where nobody can see. I feel the full weight of what I’ve been telling myself for six weeks. That I could manage this. That I was being careful. That the risk was small enough to justify one more competition.

Standing here, in this building, with the actual stakes no longer abstract — with the specific enormity of thousands of pounds of trust and momentum and gravity that this sport demands of a body that isn’t only mine anymore — I understand with total clarity that I was wrong.

I can’t do this.

The realization doesn’t arrive gently. It arrives all at once, the way real understanding usually does, cutting through six weeks of careful rationalization in about four seconds. I’ve been telling myself a story about managing risk, and standing here, watching Kara stretch and Delaney run through her tumbling pass and Ethan check the formation one more time, I finally hear how thin that story actually is.