After Lee drags Katarina back to her bedroom, Katarina stops resisting and waits for him to leave. She runs to the window and sees Heath outside in the frost, relieved that she is alive and able to move. Heath heads toward the woods to hide for the night, and Katarina stays at the window until he disappears, noticing the blood from Lee's injury smeared across the glass.

Katarina reflects that, since their father's death, Lee has controlled the house and tried to keep Heath away, blaming Heath as a bad influence despite Lee's own reckless behavior. She rejects the sensational version of her past that outsiders tell about her and Heath. At sixteen, Katarina and Heath are sexually inexperienced despite their emotional and physical closeness, and Katarina makes clear that their intimacy has not yet crossed that line.

Her thoughts turn to the upcoming trip to Nationals, which will be the first time she and Heath are effectively on their own. Because Katarina cannot access her inheritance until she turns eighteen and money is scarce, their coach Nicole helps however she can but cannot afford to travel with them. Katarina and Heath therefore plan to stay alone in a cheap motel, yet Katarina is determined not to let freedom distract her from skating or endanger the future she is chasing.

Katarina then reveals that Heath is not her first love; figure skating is. She remembers watching Sheila Lin and Kirk Lockwood at the 1988 Olympics and being struck not by beauty or glamour, but by Sheila's total confidence and dominance. Since then, skating has become both Katarina's deepest ambition and her imagined route out of Lee's control. Looking into the darkness outside, Katarina tells herself that Nationals is the beginning of escape, and that she and Heath will eventually leave this life behind together.