mirrors. She loved how the mats gave gently under the pressure of her feet when she pushed a loaded bar over her head, and the sharp smell of iron against iron when she pushed another weight plate onto the metal bars. She loved how the speakers drowned out her anxieties when she plugged in her iPod. The room was a sanctuary and also one of the reasons she hadn’t moved out of her parents’ house yet.
But why should she feel trapped here? She wasn’t just a runner, she was the runner. The runner who’d made Americans care about middle-distance running again. The runner who’d graced the covers of Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine and People.
Someone else’s blood in her veins hadn’t been the only reason for her success. Ruby’s best skill when running had always been her ability to escape from the crowd, no matter how tightly others tried to box her in. She’d been the story of her first Olympics because in her first heat, she’d slipped through gaps no one else could see to beat the favorite.
Intrusive Micah, her anxious mother, stupid Mike Danforth, this beloved room—she realized now that they were all trying to box her into the role she’d accepted. Disgraced Olympian. Someone who should hide from her past. Someone who should be ashamed for the rest of her life because there were no second chances and there was no forgiveness.
Ruby could stay in this room, in this house, for the rest of her life. Or she could duck out of the trap and find something new.
Ruby cut her stretch session short, rolled up her yoga mat and headed to her room.
“HOW WAS THE ultramarathon?” Micah’s father asked as they left his hotel and headed for the lakeshore. His father still traveled too much on business, though he regularly stopped on his way back home to visit Micah.
Parking his son at the child’s grandmother’s and sending regular checks had been a coward’s way of fathering, but they’d both decided it was better to forgive. After Micah’s accident, when his father had been the only person to look him in the eyes as the doctor told him he would never walk again, Micah had understood that brave men faced their past and letting go of childhood hurts didn’t make him weak.
The other pedestrians gave them a wide berth, like a school of fish parting around a video camera in a nature documentary. The unfamiliar object seen and its foreignness avoided because it couldn’t be ignored.
At the crosswalk, Micah handed over a couple bucks to the StreetWise vendor before answering his father. “It was fine.” He debated elaborating. When they reached the other side of the street and Grant Park, he said, “Ruby Heart was there.”
“With her mother?”
An enveloping hug between mother and daughter had been one of the iconic photographs of Ruby’s stratospheric rise to fame. After Ruby’s cheating had been revealed, Mrs. Heart had vanished and Mr. Heart had appeared as the parent of supreme importance.
“No. She was alone.”
His dad snorted. “Her mother always did look too brittle to survive adversity.”
“Brittle?” The woman had been thin, with a cutting quality to her face that Micah had always associated with wealthy women and crystal champagne glasses, neither of which he would ever identify as brittle.
“Yeah, I got the sense—even in photographs—that if Ruby fell, her mother would break.”
They stopped at another light, the traffic on Columbus speeding past them. Micah looked up at his father, who didn’t appear to be joking. “I always got the sense her parents supported her.” Actually, at the time of her scandal, Micah had found the closeness of her parents in her life—she’d been twenty-four and still living at home for God’s sake—to be a sign of weakness.
His father shrugged before stepping forward to cross the street. “I guess they filled the role of a track team for her once she left college, but all I saw was a mother seeking fame through her daughter. Maybe I’m not being fair to the woman.”
“She isn’t your mother,” Micah replied, directing the conversation away from anything resembling sympathy to Ruby Heart.
“No, but the benefit of my mother is that once you realized she couldn’t be pleased, you could stop trying.”
His father hadn’t reached that point until Micah was nineteen, and it had taken a crippling accident for Micah to get there. From what Micah knew of his own mother, part of the reason she’d run off had been because she hadn’t even wanted to try to live up to his grandmama’s strict standards. Grandmamas love little boys who win football games.
“She’s dead now, so I guess I don’t have to worry about it.”
They crossed the rest of the park in silence. Only when they stood at the crosswalk on Lakeshore Drive, the whoosh of cars and busses nearly drowning out his voice, did his father respond. “I’m sorry, you know.”
“I know.” His father apologized anytime grandmama was brought up in conversation. He had never claimed he didn’t know what he’d left his son to deal with, but he’d also never shied away from any punishment Micah dealt out during his rehabilitation. And the first time his grandmama had said, “Cripples belong at home,” and Micah had been too doped up to do more than grunt, his father had ordered her barred from the hospital.
The light changed and they crossed the wall of revving car engines and exhaust before arriving at the lakeshore.
“Ruby looked good,” Micah said, changing the subject. With her natural plain hair, she’d looked fresh and warm and healthy. A Midwestern milkmaid whose slender figure hid muscles that could bench-press a cow before outrunning all the boys. Weak women were for weak men.
She’d gained some weight in her five years out of the public eye, adding a suggestion of curves to what would otherwise be a stick-straight figure. She looked less of a fantasy and more of a real person one would want to sit across a table from and share a meal with. A crazy dream. She was also a cheater.
“Yeah?” his father said, the question in his voice the only acknowledgment either of them would give to the interest Micah had given Ruby’s career before her doping was revealed.
His father had to slip behind him on the path to make room for some bicyclists. After the bikes passed and he caught up with Micah, he asked, “Are you going to interview her again?”
“She said no, but I’m not giving up.” Not to mention that Micah had determined the anchor spot was his and Ruby was the key. Despite the paucity of current information available online, he didn’t think Ruby was truly forgotten in the public’s mind. After all, the American public loved two stories more than any other: Judas’s downfall and the possibility of his redemption.
His father stopped to look out over the blue of Lake Michigan. “If I were her, I doubt I’d want to be interviewed by a man who couldn’t take no for an answer.”
“She’ll come to me.” Micah let the fact that he’d had Mike call her stay buried under the surface of the rippling water.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY Micah was sitting in his office when the phone rang and he knew, without recognizing the number on the caller ID, what voice he would hear on the other end.
“What part of no didn’t you understand?” The words were tight—angry—and Micah imagined the clench of her jaw as the words punched their way past her teeth. Well, she couldn’t fake doe-eyed innocence anymore. Indignation was probably as close as she could get.
“The part where you call me.”
“Yeah, to tell you to leave my mother alone. To tell you to tell Mike to leave my mother alone. I have no interest in helping NSN pay their satellite bills. Did that once, don’t plan to do it again.”
“Not even to show the world how you’ve reformed?” He threaded the carrot on