This one seemed like it would take a week at a specialized clinic to be able to execute. I needed to talk to Penny. Being with Luke gave me some common ground with my sister—I was in boyfriend land, where she’d long had a permanent residence. The credit card incident lingered in my mind, but I wove a safety net of justifications around it. Penny was right; after all, I did live in a bubble. Maybe the debt was just a normal part of being out on your own for the first time. And she’d lied only because she was embarrassed.

Sometimes, I envied my sister her quiet life back in our hometown: her straightforward job, her eternal, uncomplicated relationship with Emily. I relished finally having something in my life that she could relate to: a boyfriend. She’d long made it clear that she had no interest in hearing about my skiing. I knew that from the outside, the life I wanted seemed insane. As talented as I was, as much potential as I had, the chances of turning it into a sustainable career were minuscule. Even if I started racking up World Cup wins this season, as I planned to, there was always someone faster, gutsier, and more talented waiting in the wings. In Austria and Norway, being a ski racer was a real career, but in the United States no one other than diehard ski fans cared about it for more than five minutes every four years during the Olympics. And the threat of injury lurked around every gate on the course. We’d all seen it a dozen times: a skier having the run of their lives and, in an instant, their season—maybe their entire career—was extinguished. It was unreasonable to expect Penny to understand why I wanted this madness. But boyfriends were Penny’s gold-medal event. I took the chance to pick her brain about it when I was home for Thanksgiving.

I took the short flight home Wednesday night. I was nursing a sore hip flexor, and my coach had put me on R & R for the long weekend. I was relieved to get out of the gym for a few days. Penny came into my bedroom that night. Being in there always filled me with nostalgia.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come to Turkey Bowl with us tomorrow?” she asked, referring to the annual game of touch football she and Emily played with their high school friends to celebrate them all being home from college. After the botched back surgery, Penny had become a bit heavier than she used to be, but she wore it well; it made her softer, more feminine. She’d been trying to get back to exercising, she told me, but then had gotten an infection in her ankle joint—a complication of her lupus—and it had sidelined her. She was designated cheerleader for the big game the next day.