Deep End(75)

“Three years?”

“Your boyfriend of three years broke up with you out of the blue, right before the NCAA finals?”

I swallow. Lukas seems angry, and I—I know, instinctively, he’s not mad at me, but his displeasure is nonetheless unsettling. “He . . . I think things with this new girl he’d met had been heating up, and . . .”

“Right,” he says. His tone is so deceptively mild, I shiver. “What I’m hearing is that you had a near-perfect history when it came to diving. Within twenty-four hours you got dumped by your boyfriend and contacted by your abusive father. When the final of the most important competition of your college career came around, despite your state of mind, you went ahead and tried to focus. Under those conditions you failed a dive for the first time in your career, and that’s when you became a failure?”

He says the last word like—like it’s all in my head. Like I’ve been misusing it. Like I don’t know what it means. So I retreat into myself, trying to poke holes in Lukas’s story, in his retelling of the worst day of my life that surely cannot be an accurate summary of what happened.

Can it?

“Why are you so reluctant to talk about that day?” he asks.

“I’m not.”

“And yet I had to pry the story out of you. We’ve discussed your injury, your relationship, your father. But you never told me, ‘My pieces of shit of a boyfriend and father and their piece of shit timing upset me so much, I severely injured myself to the point that I could barely move for weeks,’ and—did he visit you?”

“My father?”

“Josh. Did you see him after your injury?”

“We haven’t really talked since the breakup. He’s in Missouri, and—”

“Scarlett.”

I give up and admit, “No, he didn’t,” even though the tears once again streaking down my face would have been answer enough for Lukas—who cradles both my cheeks and presses the top of his forehead against mine.

“Scarlett,” he says again, his voice completely different—kind and caring and full of all the things, all the redos, all the truths I know he’d give me if only it were in his power. “I’m going to tell you something, okay? Something I don’t talk about. And after I do . . . we don’t have to bring this up ever again. But I need you to understand. Okay?”

I nod. My head rubs against his, bone under skin under skin under bone. His freckles blur together, pretty on the bridge of his nose.

“My mom died when I was fourteen. We all knew it was coming, but we thought we had more time. The doctor said . . . What matters is, it happened while I was gone. When the phone call came, I was in Denmark, not close enough to make it home in time. It was devastating for all the reasons you can imagine, but it also messed up my relationship with swimming. By that point I was good enough that the Olympics seemed like a guarantee, but after my mom died . . . I didn’t want to win, I had to. It went from dream to necessity. Because if I’d done something as egregious as being absent on my mom’s last day, for something as trivial as a swimming competition, then swimming had to be the most important thing in my life, right? It was the only way I could make it make sense. The only way I could forgive myself.”

He holds my face and my eyes, and the way he says this, it’s so . . . so Lukas—at once earnest and measured, sad but patient, head and heart. Unfazed, Pen had called him, but the truth is altogether different: Lukas works hard to hide what’s underneath the surface, and not acknowledging his efforts seems like a terrible disservice.

“I had to win, and suddenly, I couldn’t. In the span of a few weeks, I gained seconds on every single race. There was no physical reason for me to be so slow. I told myself that I just needed to get through the first few practices, the first few meets. But it never got better. I messed up the Olympic trials. And everyone in my family—they meant well, but their advice was ‘Don’t give up.’ ‘Stick to your routine.’ ‘Fake it till you make it.’ Even my dad, even Jan . . . they were kind and patient, but I needed to take a step back and they didn’t get it .

“The only person who truly understood was an American girl I’d met at a competition a few months earlier. We’d kissed once, stayed in touch. She wanted to be my girlfriend, and I liked her, but I didn’t get the point of a long-distance relationship, especially at our age. But there I was, needing to take a step back from the pool, and the only person validating that was Pen. She’d call me and text me and was so easy to talk to, before I knew it she was giving me the tools to communicate to my trainer and my family that I needed to stop swimming for a while. That I might never go back. I didn’t have the words, but she helped me find them.

“And I did step back. The Olympics happened, and I didn’t watch them. I traveled. Spent time with friends. Visited Pen and decided that after what she’d done for me, I never wanted to not have her as my girlfriend. Above all, I let myself mourn my mom, and acknowledged how fucked up it was that for some twist of fate I hadn’t been able to say goodbye. And when I felt ready, I went back to the pool. But only after I’d proven to myself that I didn’t need to swim to be whole.” His thumbs wipe my cheeks, once again drenched in tears. “I didn’t go back because it was expected, or because I wanted to make someone proud. I did it because I didn’t have to win anymore. I wanted to.”