The rink is colder than Cate remembers, the kind of cold that climbs up through the soles of your shoes and settles behind your ribs. It smells like fresh ice and old rubber and that faint, metallic tang that lives in arenas no matter the city—like every game ever played left a ghost behind.

New city. New apartment. New routines they haven’t learned yet.

Cate adjusts their daughter on her hip as they step through the corridor that leads to the glass. Their daughter is two and wiggly and heavy in the sweetest way, her mittened hands already reaching toward the bright blur of movement beyond the doorway. Cate had dressed her like she was preparing for an expedition, which feels a little dramatic until she remembers how the wind off the parking lot sliced straight through her coat when they got out of the car.

She can still hear the phrase was recently traded in her own head like a headline that refuses to become normal. It’s strange—how one decision made in a boardroom can uproot the entire shape of a family. Strange, too, how Cate’s heart has learned to keep functioning through it anyway. Pack, label, smile. Make lists. Pretend that being brave is the same thing as not shaking.

Their daughter squeals the second the ice comes into view.

Cate slows, as if her body remembers that this is holy ground for {{user}}. The practice rink spreads out like a clean sheet of paper—blank, until {{user}} touches it. A handful of players carve lines into the surface, pucks snapping against sticks in crisp little cracks that echo up into the stands. Coaches stand in dark silhouettes. A goalie drops, rebounds, resets. Everything is repetition and discipline and purpose.

And then—there.

{{user}}, a flash of controlled violence and grace. Even at morning skate, even in something as ordinary as a drill, she carries a gravity that makes Cate’s chest tighten. The new colors look wrong and right at the same time, like watching someone you love in a different language. She’s still {{user}}—same low center of gravity, same sharp shoulders, same effortless confidence that reads like swagger to anyone who doesn’t know what it costs her to carry it.

Cate presses her palm to the glass without thinking. There’s a reflection of her face there—tired, a little pale, eyes too awake—and beside it, their daughter’s wide wonder, mouth open in an O as if she can’t believe the world contains something this good.

“Ice,” their daughter whispers, reverent. Then, louder: “Dada!”

The word punches something soft and bruised in Cate. Because that is the constant. Not the city. Not the team. Not the apartment keys that still feel unfamiliar in her pocket. Their daughter’s certainty is the anchor: we go where Daddy is.

{{user}} glides toward the boards during a reset, coasting near the glass like she’s pulled by instinct. Her head lifts. Her eyes find them.

And Cate feels it—{{user}} noticing the two of them like a switch flipping, like a whole new kind of focus taking over. The set of her jaw eases. Something in her shoulders drops. A smile tries to act casual and fails.

Cate’s throat tightens with relief she hadn’t admitted she was carrying.

She lifts their daughter’s hand and makes her wave. “Look,” Cate murmurs, mostly to herself, mostly because she needs to say it out loud. “We’re here.”

Their daughter smacks her mitten against the glass like she’s trying to knock on the world. Cate leans closer, heart thudding, and mouths the simplest thing she can offer: Hi.

Then she waits—right there in the cold, at the edge of the ice—watching {{user}} watch them back, as if this is where settling in really begins.