Tad looked at me askance. Somehow it felt like he was talking to me as an adult, something he’d never done before. I laughed.

“Okay, I don’t really get it.”

“They’re absolute losers, and they’re dragging him down. He’s never going to qualify for FIS if he keeps this up. Now, he’s going on about the X Games and wanting to shoot videos instead of train. There’s no future in that, and those boys are reckless. They don’t even wear helmets.”

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. Tad nodded. This was why I was here, I suddenly understood.

We all went out to dinner on our last night in Sun Valley, and after Tad insisted on paying the bill, he asked my parents and me to hang back for a moment.

“I want to talk to you,” he said, matter-of-factly, “about bringing Katie out to Sun Valley.”

It probably would have been much more appropriate for Tad to approach my parents before he looped me into the conversation, regardless of how grown-up I thought I was at fifteen. But Tad knew how to persuade people to do what he wanted. He knew if my parents watched my eyes fill with hope at the opportunity he was presenting, that would outweigh any other misgivings. Given how close I was with his sons, he also likely knew that Penny was having trouble, though he made no mention of it now.

“Listen,” Tad had said, a knowing look on his handsome face, which was so like Blair’s, “Katie’s done amazingly well as it is, but the opportunities the kids have in Sun Valley”—he shook his head—“are unmatched. Luke is doing great with his tutor, and Blair’s already been accepted to Dartmouth—it will take him more than four years naturally, but that could eventually be a great place for Katie too; they’re fantastic about working with skiers’ schedules. For now, it would be easy to integrate Katie, she and Luke being the same age. They’re all smart, disciplined kids. We’re not going to let their education go by the wayside, we would never do that.” The “we” he spoke of was always endlessly inclusive and open to interpretation: we were all on the same team. Team Katie, Team Luke, Team Blair, Team U.S.A. “But if they’re going to get where they want to go, the focus has got to be there. They need the right support and access to the right resources. And we could get you out here as much as you wanted.”