The Favorites

I was right. Just not in the way I imagined.

Heath kissed my shoulder. “Well, I’m not nervous. I’m skating with Katarina Shaw.” He said my name slow, reverent, savoring the sound. “And there’s nothing she can’t do.”

We stared at each other in the shadows, so close we were sharing breath. Later, we’d become world famous for that: stretching out the moment before a kiss until it was almost unbearable, until every member of the audience felt the quickening of our pulses, the pure want reflected in our eyes.

But that was choreography. This was real.

Heath’s mouth finally met mine—soft, unhurried. We thought we had all night.

By the time we heard the footsteps, it was too late.

Nicole Bradford, a middle-aged blond woman wearing a sparkly cardigan and heavy makeup, sits at the center island in her white-on-white suburban dream kitchen.

Nicole Bradford (Figure Skating Coach): There’s always a surge after the Winter Olympics. All these girls who think they’re destined to become stars. Though they usually aren’t quite as intense about it as Katarina Shaw.

Family photos show Katarina as a little girl in various skating costumes. In one, she’s in front of a wall covered in pictures of Sheila Lin, imitating Sheila’s pose in the central image.

Nicole Bradford: At her first lesson, Katarina said she was going to be a famous ice dancer like Sheila Lin. The other girls hated her instantly.

Four-year-old Katarina skates alone with a serious expression, her hair in two messy pigtails.

Narrator: Though her name eventually became synonymous with ice dance, Katarina Shaw spent her early career as a singles skater, since no boys were available to partner with her.

Ellis Dean perches on a stool at a chic cocktail bar, holding a martini glass. He’s in his early forties, with an impish smile and carefully coiffed hair.

Ellis Dean (Former Ice Dancer): There are vanishingly few guys who want to do ice dance. At least pairs has jumps, plus hurling pretty girls into the air and catching them by the crotch. If you like that sort of thing.

Narrator: Ice dance is perhaps the least understood figure skating discipline.

Archival footage of skaters competing in the ice dance event at the 1976 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria—the first year ice dance was contested as an Olympic sport.

Narrator: Drawn from ballroom dancing, ice dance focuses on intricate footwork and close partnering between skaters, rather than the acrobatic lifts and athletic jumps seen in other events.

Ellis Dean: A lot of female ice dancers start out skating with their brothers, cause those are the only dudes they can manage to guilt into it. That was not an option for Kat Shaw.

Chapter 2

The door banged open, and my bedroom filled with the mingled stench of Marlboros, Jim Beam, and body odor.

My older brother, Lee.

Heath and I leapt up. My brother didn’t want Heath in the house, let alone in my room. Which only inspired us to find more creative ways to sneak him inside. If Lee was sober—an increasingly rare occurrence—he limited his objections to snide remarks, maybe the occasional inanimate object hurled against the wall.

When he was drunk? He had no limits at all.

“What the hell’s he doing here?” Lee staggered across the threshold. “I told you—”

“I told you to stay out of my room.”

I used to lock the door and leave the tarnished brass key in place, so Lee couldn’t spy on us through the keyhole either. Until he kicked the door in and busted the lock.

“It’s my house.” Lee jabbed a finger in Heath’s direction. “And he’s not welcome.”

Heath moved in front of me, smooth as a dance step, and smiled in a way we both knew would only incense Lee further. “Katarina wants me here,” he said. “And so did—”

Lee surged forward, seizing Heath by the arm and yanking him toward the hallway.

“Stop it!” I shouted.

Heath gripped the doorframe, fingernails sinking into the cracked trim. As a competitive athlete, he was in far better shape, but Lee had several inches of height and many pounds of bulk on him. One brutal wrench, and Heath was forced to let go.

“Lee! That’s enough.”

Not for the first time, I wished we had neighbors close enough to hear the commotion, to call the police. But our house was in the middle of nowhere, bordered only by old-growth forest and the cold expanse of Lake Michigan.

No one was coming to help us.

I chased after them, snatching at the collar of Lee’s shirt, pulling his greasy hair, anything I could think of to slow him down. He jabbed an elbow into my rib cage, knocking me back.

Heath made a valiant effort to stomp on Lee’s toes, and Lee slammed him into the banister. They were close—treacherously close—to the top of the staircase.

Gruesome images flashed through my mind: Heath, in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the steps, a pool of blood spreading. Bones protruding through skin, shattered so thoroughly he’d never be able to stand, let alone skate.

I scrambled back to my feet. I ran into the bedroom.

I didn’t realize what I was doing until the knife was already aimed at my brother’s face.

“Get your hands off him.” I jabbed the blade toward Lee’s stubbled chin. He regarded it with a lazy grin. He didn’t believe I was capable of hurting him.

Heath knew better.

“Katarina.” The lower Heath’s voice, the raspier it sounded, rustling the edges of every word like a breeze through tree branches. “Please. Put the knife down.”

It was only a little paring knife, taken from a dusty drawer in the kitchen. Sharp enough to carve wood, but not to seriously maim someone, let alone murder them. Still, I did want to hurt Lee, just a little. Just enough to make him afraid of me for once.

I looked at Heath, like we were standing at center ice, our music about to start. Ready?

He winced and shook his head. I held his gaze, tightening my grip on the knife. I could tell he thought this was a terrible idea—and also that he didn’t have any better ones.

Heath’s chin dipped, almost imperceptibly. Ready.

I lunged at Lee, swiping the knife across his bicep. He let out an enraged yelp—and let go of Heath so he could take a swing at me. I managed to duck the blow but dropped my weapon as I shoved past my brother, racing down the steps. Heath hauled open the front door, letting in a blast of cold wind, then stopped on the other side of the threshold to wait for me.

Lee spat out a flurry of curses as he tripped on the last step and stumbled into the foyer. I kept running, eyes locked on Heath. I was almost there.

But Lee got there first. With one hand, he slammed the door and threw the deadbolt.

With the other, he pressed the blade to my neck.

Nicole Bradford: Katarina and Heath met at the rink, but he wasn’t a skater.

Narrator: Heath Rocha grew up in foster care. By the time he was ten years old, he’d lived with six different families.

Nicole Bradford: I don’t know for sure what Heath’s home life was like, so I don’t want to cast aspersions. I’ll just say his foster parents didn’t seem very…involved. He first came to the rink through a charity organization that offered free sports programs for local kids.

Slow zoom in on a photograph of young boys in hockey gear, highlighting ten-year-old Heath. He’s the only child in the photo who isn’t white.

Nicole Bradford: Heath signed up for hockey, and after his lesson, he’d hang around the rink, like he didn’t want to go home. When he thought no one was looking, he sat in the stands and watched Kat skate. It was clear he had a crush on her. I thought it was cute.

A photograph of nine-year-old Katarina practicing at the North Shore Ice Rink in Lake Forest, Illinois. Zooming in reveals a blurry figure behind her in the bleachers: Heath.

Nicole Bradford: Eventually they struck up a friendship, and he started going home with her for dinner. Even sleeping over at the Shaw house. She hadn’t mentioned her ice dancing aspirations for a few months; I thought maybe she’d finally gotten over it and was ready to go all-in on singles. I should have known she wouldn’t give up so easily.

Stock footage of Lake Michigan in the dead of winter, the waves frozen solid.

Narrator: Katarina taught Heath to figure skate in secret, on the lake near the Shaw home.

Ellis Dean: I took up skating at seven, and that was late. Heath Rocha was almost eleven.

Jane Currer, a severe-looking woman in her seventies with curly hair dyed bright red and a silk scarf in a clashing hue, sits rinkside at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

Jane Currer (U.S. Figure Skating Official): While ice dancers do tend to peak at an older age, skaters who start any discipline past the average age are at a disadvantage. Basic skating skills lay the foundation for future success.

Nicole Bradford: I’ll admit it, I was extremely skeptical. Until I saw them skate together.

Chapter 3

I didn’t fight anymore, as Lee dragged me back upstairs and threw me into my bedroom. As soon as his shuffling steps faded down the hall, I ran to the window. Heath stood on the lawn below, bare feet in the frost-covered grass. His shoulders dropped with relief when he saw me.

For January, it was reasonably pleasant outside: no snow on the ground, the lake still unfrozen. Heath had been chased out in far worse weather. I used to toss things down to him—clothing, food, clean blankets—but Lee got wise to that and screwed the window casing shut.

Heath waved, then turned and walked toward the woods. Lee might not have been able to lock my door anymore, but I was still as good as trapped until he passed out, which could happen anytime between midnight and the break of dawn. I knew where Heath went to hide on nights like this, and I couldn’t risk my brother ruining that too.

I pressed my hand against the pane, like I could touch Heath from a distance, and kept it there until he’d disappeared beyond the twisting branches of the locust trees. When I pulled away, my palm left a streak of red on the glass.

I hoped my brother was still bleeding.

Since our father’s death, Lee was in charge—though he was only five years my senior, and barely capable of looking after himself—and he thought Heath was a bad influence. Bold of him to worry about Heath’s “influence,” when Lee brought a different girl home every week. I’d lost count of the nights I spent with a pillow over my ears, trying to drown out the sounds of those poor girls’ obviously faked orgasms.

The media likes to make my younger years with Heath out to be some sordid Flowers in the Attic shit: the two of us raised together as siblings (we weren’t), left unsupervised to explore our undeniable passion for each other (I wish).

The truth, whether you want to believe it or not, is that Heath and I were both still virgins at sixteen. Sure, we kissed, we touched each other, we slid aside clothing so we could press skin against skin. We knew how to make each other gasp and groan and shudder with pleasure. I knew he wanted to go further. So did I.

In some ways, it seemed absurd to wait. After all, we were already intimate in ways even adults in years-long relationships find difficult to comprehend. We went to school together, skated together, spent practically every waking moment together—and our sleeping moments too, when we managed to sneak past my brother.

Despite that, the upcoming trip to Nationals would be the first time the two of us were truly on our own. We still technically had a coach, though we could barely afford to pay Nicole. My father’s will divided everything equally between Lee and me, including the property, but I couldn’t access my half of the estate until I turned eighteen.

Nicole helped Heath and me out as much as she could—arranging part-time jobs at the rink to subsidize our ice time, assisting with choreography since hiring a professional was out of reach—but asking her to give up days of paid lessons to travel with us for free was out of the question. So we were going it alone, staying several nights in a shabby motel we’d booked because the official event accommodations were too expensive.

Any normal teenage girl would have been eager to take advantage of the lack of chaperoning. But I wasn’t a normal teenage girl. I was going to be an Olympic champion, and I wasn’t about to do anything stupid to jeopardize that. Like stabbing my brother, no matter how much he might deserve it. Or getting myself knocked up and having to spend our dwindling training funds on an abortion.

Everyone thinks Heath Rocha was my first love. He wasn’t.

My first love was figure skating.

It started in February 1988—the Winter Olympics in Calgary. I was four years old, and up way past my bedtime, watching the last night of the ice dance competition.

Lin and Lockwood were the final couple to take the ice. As they posed in the center of the rink, awaiting the first note of their program music, the camera zoomed in—straight past Kirk, with his skintight costume and slicked-back hair, to focus on Sheila’s face alone.

The skaters who’d gone before had looked as if they were swallowing their nerves, hoping and praying to whatever god they believed in that all those years of grueling work would pay off with Olympic glory.

Not Sheila Lin. A smirk played across her lips, which were painted the same ruby hue as the jewels shining in her black hair. Even as a kid with no knowledge of the sport, I was sure she would win. Sheila looked like she’d already won—like she had the gold medal around her neck and her blade firmly planted on the still-twitching corpse of her competition.

I didn’t become a skater because I harbored some childish fantasy of wearing sequins and spinning around like a pretty little top. I became a skater because I wanted to feel like that.

Fierce. Confident. A warrior goddess covered in glitter. So sure of myself, I could make my dreams come true through sheer force of will.

Skating was my first love, but in the intervening years it had become so much more. It was the only thing I was good at—my best hope for survival, for escape from that dark and crumbling house, from my brother and his rages. And if I worked hard enough, if I got good enough…one day I might become as invulnerable as Sheila Lin.

Nationals was the first step, the beginning of everything. Soon, I told myself, staring into the shadows beyond my bedroom window, Heath and I would be free of this place.

And no matter what, we would be together.

Chapter 4

The sun was rising by the time I managed to sneak out of the house.

Lee lay facedown on the sofa in the parlor. The fireplace hearth was scattered with cigarette butts, and liquor bottles left rings all over the original hardwood floors. My brother’s idea of a quiet night in.

Outside, the morning was crisp and calm, silent aside from the gentle lap of the waves and the crunch of my shoes on the gravel driveway. I picked up my pace, jogging past Lee’s mud-spattered pickup truck to follow the path I knew Heath had taken in the dark.

My childhood home is in a far-flung Chicago suburb closer to the Wisconsin border than to the city, dubbed The Heights due to its very slight elevation over the pancake-flat landscape surrounding it. Most of the area was populated in the late 1800s, following the fires and labor riots that sent all the richest assholes fleeing downtown Chicago for the relative safety of Lake Michigan’s northern shore. The Shaws had already been there for decades.

My some-number-of-greats-grandfather bought a big patch of lakefront property back when the area was nothing but dirt and sand and black oaks bent double by the winds that whipped across the water. A generation after him, another Shaw built a house right on the lakefront, leaving plenty of forest to block the view of future prying neighbors.

The house itself is relatively simple: a modest flagstone farmhouse with a few Gothic revival flourishes. It’s the land that’s valuable. Every decade or so, developers come sniffing around, offering stacks of cash, and whichever Shaw is currently in residence tells them to fuck off, sometimes with Midwestern passive-aggression, other times with the barrel of a shotgun.

You can see how I came by my winning personality.

As a girl, I hated that house. It had already fallen into cobweb-choked disrepair when my parents inherited it, and my mother passed away before she had a chance to carry out her grand redecoration plans. If I wasn’t at school or at the rink, I was usually running wild outdoors—on my own at first, and then with Heath by my side. In warmer months, the lake itself was our favorite spot. We’d wade through the waves, climb on top of the rocks to watch the sailboats and freighters passing by, and build bonfires in the small strip of sand that passed for a private beach.

When the weather turned, we retreated to the stable. Everyone still referred to the building that way, though it hadn’t held any horses since decades before my father was born. Made of the same gray stone as the house, it sat near our northern boundary line, right next to the family burial plot. Lee steered clear of that corner of the property; he never came to visit our parents’ graves, not even on their birthdays or the anniversaries of their deaths.

So when Lee banned Heath from the house barely an hour after our father’s funeral, it seemed like the ideal hiding spot. For weeks, I smuggled things out to him: candles, firewood, an old mattress I dragged up from the cellar, even a battery-operated boom box.

As soon as I entered the stable that morning, I could tell Heath hadn’t gotten any more rest than I had. He’d pulled the mattress into the warmest stall, away from the shattered skylight that served as a makeshift chimney, and a Debussy nocturne played on the classical radio station he tuned in to when he had trouble sleeping. Last night’s fire had burned down to ash, and though sunshine had begun to melt the frost crystals on the jagged remains of the glass, it was still so cold I could see my breath.

I’d brought him his warmest coat, which I draped over his shoulders before lying down beside him. He opened his eyes, and even in the dim light, I could see how bruised the right one was, a purple bloom unfurling between his lashes and cheekbone.

My fingertips ghosted over the swollen skin. It must have been tender, but Heath exhaled a cloud of steam and leaned into my touch.

“I’m going to kill Lee,” I said.

“It’s not that bad.” Heath’s teeth chattered when he spoke. I slipped off my shoes and rubbed my wool socks against his cold-numbed toes. “You can cover it up for Nationals, right?”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure the watery drugstore concealer in my makeup kit was up to the task.

“I think freezing my ass off out here might’ve kept the swelling down.” He brushed my hair back, fingers catching in a tangle. “I’m just glad he didn’t hurt you.”

Lee had figured out a long time ago: the best way to hurt me was to hurt Heath.

Heath always stayed stoic, brushing off every insult and injury, no matter how severe. Once Lee shoved him into a wall so hard, he lost consciousness for a few terrifying seconds, and when I shook him back awake, all he did was shrug and tell me it could’ve been worse.

As close as we were, I knew next to nothing about Heath’s life before me. He had a birth certificate showing he was born in Michigan and shared his surname with his mother. The line that should’ve listed his father was blank. The name Rocha was Spanish in origin, or maybe Portuguese—the only solid clue he had to his heritage. Most people in the Midwest took one look at Heath’s brown skin and dark hair and assumed he was either Mexican or Middle Eastern (then made other, less charitable assumptions accordingly).

Heath knew nothing more about his real parents and insisted he had no desire to search for them. I’d never set foot inside his foster home, a squat sepia bungalow by the train tracks that didn’t look anywhere near large enough to hold the number of people who lived there at any given time. When Heath moved in with us the summer before eighth grade, my father gave him Lee’s childhood bedroom, which he’d vacated the second he turned eighteen in favor of a filthy shared flat closer to the city. Heath had gaped at the cramped, drafty room like it was a royal palace, and I’d realized it must have been the first time he’d had space all to himself.

He didn’t like to talk about his past, and I didn’t want to pry. All I knew was, if life with Lee Shaw was an improvement, whatever he’d endured before must have been truly horrific.

“Murdering your brother seems a little extreme.” Heath’s shivering had slowed, so the words came out steadier. “But I could get behind slashing his tires.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Check your pockets.”

Heath rummaged through the coat until there was a metallic clink. A slow smile spread across his face as he held up the keys to Lee’s truck.

I didn’t have my driver’s license yet. But Heath had gotten his the summer before.

“Now he’s going to kill us,” Heath said.

“Not if we’re gone before he wakes up.”

Still clutching the keys, Heath took my face in his hands and kissed me. Cold metal pressed against my cheek. “What did I tell you, Katarina Shaw?”

I smiled and kissed him back. “There’s nothing I can’t do.”

Nicole Bradford: At first, Heath seemed hopeless. Thanks to his hockey lessons, he could skate fast, but he had no finesse. Ice dance is all about maneuvering on the edges of your blades, carving into the ice with precision and control.

In a home video taken by Ms. Bradford during one of their first practices together, Katarina and Heath attempt some simple forward crossovers, skating hand in hand.

Nicole Bradford: But they had this…connection.

Heath’s skates keep getting tangled up as he tries to match Katarina’s rhythm. She squeezes his hand. He stops focusing on his feet, looking at her instead. Soon, they’re moving in unison.

Nicole Bradford: It was like they were reading each other’s minds. His technique needed a ton of work. But I’ve never seen anyone work as hard as Heath.

Ellis Dean: Imagine being down so bad you’d master a whole Olympic sport to spend time with someone.

Nicole Bradford: By the time they turned thirteen, I was starting to think bigger: Nationals, Worlds, maybe even the Olympic Games. I never made it that far myself.

Katarina and Heath wave from the top podium step at a regional competition.

Nicole Bradford: One afternoon, I found them together on a bench outside the rink. They were embracing, and I thought for a second they might be…(She clears her throat.) Anyway, it turned out they were crying. They were both so upset, I thought someone must have died.