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love you,” she said. “More than ice cream after training.”
    “I love you too,” he said. “More than winning.”
    She smiled. It was a perfect moment, and then she heard herself ruin it by saying, “Call me when the race is over, okay?”
    She cringed at herself for being so needy, for putting this extra demand on him. Love wasn’t supposed to require the constant reassurance. But then again, love wasn’t supposed to sit watching its own reflection in a dead TV while temptation rode a blazing path to glory.
    Whatever Jack said back to her, the crowd drowned it out by chanting Zoe’s name.
    She clicked the call off and let the phone fall softly to the washable, hard-wearing cushion covers. It wasn’t just that she’d stopped believing she would ever get to the Olympics. Now, if she was really honest with herself, she wasn’t even sure if she could win the kind of races you rode on kitchen chairs and sofas.
    She stared with glazed eyes through the window. In the shimmering heat of their little back yard, a squirrel had found something in the bottom of a crisp packet.
    She thought, Is this my life now?
    She held her hands to her temples, more gently now, and timed the pulse in them against the second hand of the living room clock. It had been months since she’d trained hard but even now—even with this stress—her heart rate was subsixty. The second hand was back where it started, and she’d only counted fifty-two. Sometimes this was the only small victory in her days: this knowledge that she was fitter than time.
    She looked up and saw that Sophie was mimicking her, trying to press her own tiny hands against the sides of her head. Kate laughed, and for the very first time Sophie laughed back.
    Kate brimmed with euphoria.
    “Oh my God, darling, you laughed !”
    She dropped to her knees, picked Sophie up, and hugged her. Sophie grinned—a gummy, prototype grin that faltered and twitched lopsidedly and then shone again. She gurgled noisily, delighted with herself.
    “Oh, you clever little thing!”
    Wait till I tell Jack , she thought, and the thought was so light and so simple that she suddenly knew everything would be okay. What did it matter if Zoe won gold today or if Jack won gold tomorrow? Kneeling here in the untidy living room, holding her baby close and breathing the warm curdled scent of her, it was impossible to believe that anything mattered more than this. Who even cared that she had until recently been able to bring a bicycle up to forty miles per hour in the velodrome? It seemed absurd, now that real life had begun for her—with its real progression through these lovely milestones of motherhood—that anyone even bothered to ride bicycles around endless oval tracks, or that anyone had had the odd idea of giving out gold to the one who could do it quickest. What good did it ever do anyone to ride themselves back to their point of origin?
    God , she thought. I mean, where does that even get you?
    After a minute, during which her heart beat forty-nine times, she smiled wearily.
    “Oh, who am I kidding?” she said out loud, and Sophie looked up at the sound of her voice and produced an experimental expression, unique to her and perfectly equidistant between a laugh and a lament.



Eight years later, Monday, April 2, 2012
Detention deck 9 of the Imperial battle station colloquially known as the Death Star
    The Rebel—the kid—resisted, so they locked her in a dark metal holding cell that smelled of machine oil. It was too much for her and she grinned and wriggled with excitement. She clung to her father. He held the kid’s skinny neck in the crook of one arm and squeezed with just enough pressure to restrain her or to convey silent affection, the way fathers will apply forces. The child squirmed to escape, giving the hug an aspect of violence: parenting didn’t seem to change much, wherever you went in the universe.
    Two Imperial Stormtroopers stood guard over the pair. They exchanged a