Seven Cities on Her Skin

In a dying rink stripped bare for renovation, work lamps buzzing orange over sweating ice, the smell of cold water and dust in the air, a retired skater returns to her former coach under the pretense of rescuing a piece of furniture, but really to pay a debt of silence that has cost her four years. Rhea and Elara have circled each other through a decade of blue-ink ledgers and careful hands, one guiding and one surrendering, both recording the same unspoken wanting in their separate columns. Rhea's internal battle is the price of love she has rehearsed as obligation, she arrives ready to confess in counted laps, to owe her way into deserving, and it is Elara's own trembling hands and the word *Ongoing* that dismantle the ledger entirely, shifting Rhea from shame-bound debt into something she is simply, freely given. Readers can expect to be held inside the ache of long-delayed honesty, where ritual and tenderness collapse the distance between punishment and devotion.