“The doctors said you’ll be fine in a few months, Katie,” he said when I told him I was worried. “You’ve got time, you’re going to come back and kill it in Turin.”

“What if I don’t though?”

The question hung. Blair had continued to have success as a tech skier but, just as I was, was more known for his relationship to Luke than anything. I knew he wanted to do well in Turin as much as I did.

“You know I believe in you, but you can’t control for everything. None of us can. We’ll all survive.”

It was a kind of a sacrilege to admit that anything but the best could ever be enough. But it was a relief too. Skiers fell into two camps when it came to thinking about the future: there were those who squeezed in an education so they’d have something to fall back on, and those who so passionately disbelieved in life after skiing that they refused to make any other plans, some declaring they’d prefer to die on the mountain than work a nine-to-five and meaning it with every fiber of their being. Blair was majoring in quantitative social science at Dartmouth, focusing on the relationship between organized sports and low-income communities. He wanted to pass along his love for the sport, a love that was not so tied up with winning as Luke’s was.

I knew in my heart why I was nervous around Penny and the baby, but I refused to peel back the layers of my fear. We had all moved past it, I told myself. Penny was better, she was married to Captain Stewart now. She was stable and happy and it would all be fine. If only little Ava could make it through the next few weeks.

The NICU is a liminal space that feels like the worst kind of purgatory. Babies too small and fragile to be in the world take labored breaths and look out with shocked, uncertain eyes from their plastic enclaves. Terrified parents roam the halls like zombies. We made sure Penny was never alone: when Stewart wasn’t there, my parents or I would be, holding Ava when we were allowed to and trying to remain cheerful in the air of the NICU, which was thick with worry and fear. We brought meals for Penny and books to read to Ava. Penny was admirably calm and seemed to have tapped into some deep reserves of resilience. It didn’t occur to me then that she was perhaps eerily calm, considering the circumstances. Penny had always been at her best when she was in the center of a crisis; it’s what made her so good at her job.