“He told me that he would ruin me, that I’d never work in the sport again, that I was an ‘ungrateful bitch’ who was giving up the best life with the ‘greatest man’ I’d ever know,” she recalls, spitting out each brutal word. “But, I mean, fine. Nothing worse than anything he’s said before. And, most important, he let me go.”

“He let you go,” I repeat dumbly, trying to absorb how casually Jasmine tosses off his cruel remarks.

I remember how horrible he was to us years ago, but it’s different to hear of him hurling insults like that at his wife. It’s depressing.

“He said he was angry with me, but he wouldn’t stop me,” she says. “His exact words, I think, were that I’m now ‘an adult woman who can make her own choices.’ ”

“As if you weren’t when you got married,” I say, filling in the implication.

“Barely,” she admits. “I was twenty-one. I had been on a few dates with guys my own age, but he was the first person I dated. He was the only man I’d ever really known.”

Someday, when a little more time has passed, Jasmine will eventually dip one toe in the dating pool, and she’s going to discover an entire world out there: electrifying first dates; butterfly-inducing texts; real, equal love. Maybe heartbreak, too. But at least this time around, she’ll be standing on her own two feet, away from Dimitri’s shadow.

“So. Help me put everything into boxes?” she asks.

“Of course.”

We work side by side, stacking her jewel-toned shift dresses, workout clothes, and thick winter sweaters into cardboard boxes, securing them shut with strips of tape, and labeling each box with thick, definitive black lines of Sharpie. I don’t want to dwell on the reason she’s moving out, but there’s still so much I’m dying to understand. Once she leaves here, that will all be in her past—today feels like the last chance I have.

“Do you ever think you would’ve had a real relationship with Dimitri if he weren’t our coach first?” I ask.

She looks up from the box she’s taping shut with a sour, stunned expression. “No. We wouldn’t have known each other.”

“How did it happen? We weren’t really… talking then,” I say awkwardly.

Even after all these years, I still can’t picture it.

She returns to taping the box, maybe so she doesn’t have to look at me as she explains this part.

“I did a TV segment at a news station in Boston after the Olympics,” she recalls. “He came with me—he was on-air, too. Instead of driving me straight back home afterward, he said he was in the mood for a drink, and so we went out to this Irish pub.”