May [H.S]

30

Magnolia
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À perte de vue.

"What do you know about the relationship between your father and Florian Wentworth?" 

Stunned, I scramble to form words, most of what I'd prepared catching on the tip of my tongue, "My dad—uh he was his coach, Wentworth and his pair's." I clarified; the afterthought of guilt tickles up my spine at the thought of a rain-wrecked Cypress. She hid it well, but I knew that with everything that went down, she suffered the most.

His eyes are so blue—so earnest it's hard to focus.

"And this professional relationship between them... Was it similar to that of the one you had with him?" I'm not sure I could call their relationship nonexistent. Florian knew him better than I ever could, understood him in a way I never cared to try.

I laugh uncomfortably, not only with the addition of my accumulating confusion but at his words and the irony behind them, "I don't understand."

The only useful cop out my lawyer gave me. 'Can you clarify, I'm not sure what you mean, etc, etc, etc.'

"Was he as pushy about practice–obsessive over training and routines–as he was with you?" He stares, and it says miles more than anything he could articulate to me. His eye contact is piercing, so piercing I'm sure I look guilty with how much I avoid it.

"I wasn't..." I stare down at the piece of dead skin crawling over my nail, "close to Florian. And my father never spoke of his trainees outside the rink. Never spoke of it in general." Barely recognized my existence in this world, why would he waste his time gossiping to me about his trainees?

"We are trying to understand the connection between them, why and how they were connected. You know nothing of their relationship outside of a professional setting?"

By now the inside of my cheek is shredded, and I've smoothed my lips over so many times that the lip gloss I applied beforehand is gone. The surface of my cracked lips ache, and I debate shuffling through the mess of my bag looking for anything to soothe them.

Frustration bites out rather than the responses I'd calculated exactly for this situation, "Haven't there been plenty of rumors for you to spin into a tale and wrap your case up in a nice big bow?"

He sighs, and I can smell the spearmint on his breath, even from the distance.

"Rumors can't be used to convict someone, to close a case, Magnolia." His response is that of one you'd hear from a haggard preschool teacher.

"Yes, they were intimate with each other. If that's what you're getting at. I don't know enough about—whatever happened between them." If I had, for example, some damning evidence that they killed each other in some outrageous crime of passion, I would've handed that straight over just for the satisfaction of this shit show being last season's news. For the sake of the headlines with my name, for the sake of focusing on my career.

"If you're trying to paint this into 'wife kills husband because he had an affair'. I won't have anything to do with it. If I'm certain about one thing it's that she had nothing to do with it. Do we understand each other?" I hold the eye contact for a beat longer than usual just to nail the detriment into his head.

"That's not where I'm—" A long hitched pause, "you've been compliant, so I'm gonna be honest with you, Meg."

Harry
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