"Barely," Theo said.
"Barely is still a yes," Lottie replied, and waved them toward the exit gap.
Outside the boards, the city came back in layers: taxi exhaust, pretzel steam, the distant honk of someone who believed traffic lights were suggestions. Rowan sat on a bench to unlace. Theo sat beside her and discovered that taking skates off while trying to look dignified was its own athletic event. His childhood skates—black, a little scuffed at the toes, the leather softened by years of attic heat—came away with a smell like old gym bags and snow days.
Rowan noticed. "Those really are yours."
"My mother's idea of a legacy," Theo said. "She bought them when I was twelve and swore I would become the kind of person who skated on lakes. I became the kind of person who writes radio scripts about other people doing brave things. The skates lived in a box labeled SEASONAL / DO NOT ASK."
"And tonight you asked."
"Tonight Bridie threatened me," Theo said. "Politely. With pastry."
Rowan's sister Bridie ran a small bakery two blocks from Theo's office and had appointed herself, without election, the minister of other people's second chances. She had cornered Theo on Tuesday with a paper bag of almond croissants and the information that Rowan was free on Friday if someone with a spine invited her somewhere cold and honest.
"I don't have a spine," Theo had told Bridie.
"You have a borrowed one in that bag," Bridie had said. "Eat. Call her. Stop rehearsing the apology for a crime you haven't committed yet."
Now, on the bench, Rowan smiled sideways at him. "She told me you asked her what my favorite winter thing was, and she said ice, and you looked terrified, which she took as a good sign."
"Your sister is a menace."
"She's my menace," Rowan said, fond and tired in equal measure. "Come on. Cart food. I'm starving, and you owe me the truth about the skates."
The food cart was run by a man who called everyone "boss" and made cocoa that tasted like it had opinions. Rowan ordered a pretzel with mustard. Theo ordered cocoa and a knish and immediately regretted the knish as a skating-adjacent choice, then ate it anyway because pride was expensive and the knish was not.
They stood under the string lights with their shoulders almost touching and the Christmas tree throwing colored light across the wet pavement. A taxi pulled away. Another took its place. The rink music shifted from something swoony to something with a drum machine that had no business being near ice and somehow worked anyway.