Page 6 of Her Rival

"Jett."

"Coach. Come on." I dragged the towel over my face. "You know I hate that crap. The cameras, the questions, some reporter trying to make me cry about my childhood so they can stick it in a box with a pull quote. I did the whole media tour after the championship. I did Kimmel. I did the morning show with the lady who kept touching my arm. I paid my dues."

"This is different."

"It's always different until it's exactly the same."

He gave me a look. He had a few hundred of them and I knew most by now. This one said, I am being patient with you and the patience has a clock on it.

"Victoria asked for you specifically," he said. "She believes in this piece. She handpicked the writer — somebody she trusts, somebody who'll do it right and not turn it into a tabloid thing. The league wants it. The magazine wants it. And frankly, son, after the title, you're the face people want to read about. The mouthy kid who buried the championship goal. That's the story."

"That's not a story. That's a highlight."

"So give them a story." He pushed off the desk. "One interview to start. You sit down, you answer the questions, you behave like a professional human being for ninety minutes — which I realize is a big ask. If you hate it, we talk. But you're doing the first one. Monday, here, after practice."

I rolled the towel up and snapped it against my own knee, thinking.

"Who's the writer?" I said.

"Some friend of Victoria's. Or Brynn's. I didn't get the full org chart." He waved a hand. "It's not gonna be Bob Woodward, Jett. Relax. Hockey story for a hockey magazine. Smile, say nice things about your teammates, tell the one about Moose and the Zamboni, you'll be a hero."

"The Zamboni story makes Moose look like a genius. I'm not doing the Zamboni story."

"Monday," Coach said, in the voice that ended things.

I stood. Stretched. My back made a sound like a bag of gravel.

"You good?" he said, and the question had shifted, gone quieter, the way it did sometimes when the door was closed and it was just us. Coach noticed things. It was what made him good at the job and what made him a pain in my ass. "You've been off the last couple weeks. Quiet for you. Which for you is basically catatonic."

"I'm great," I said. "I'm always great. It's my whole thing."

He looked at me a moment too long.

"Monday," I said, and got out of there before he could find whatever he was looking for.

It wasn't a lie, exactly. I was always great. Greatness was the bit, and the bit was load-bearing.

But he wasn't wrong that I'd been off. And I knew exactly why. It had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with the phone in my bag that had lit up four times that week with a 931 area code.

I knew that area code in my body. Middle Tennessee. Middle Tennessee was the town, and the town was the church, and the church was my mother, and my mother only ever called for one of two reasons. Either somebody had died, or somebody wanted to remind me I was killing them slowly by living the life I'd built.

I sat in my car in the players' lot and looked at the latest voicemail without playing it.

Then I did the thing I'd been doing for eight years, which was nothing. Phone in the cupholder, face down. Backed out. Drove home.

Home was a problem I'd made for myself, if I'm honest, which I tried not to be too often because it was exhausting. Six bedrooms for one man and a dog I didn't have yet but kept meaning to get. Glass and stone up in the hills, the whole valley laid out underneath like somebody'd spilled a jewelry box. I'd bought it with cash, through an LLC with my name nowhere a reporter could find it. The last thing I needed was some beat writer doing math on a hockey salary and an eight-figure house, asking questions I didn't answer.

Nobody on the team had ever been up here except Rhett. And Rhett didn't ask questions, because Rhett had his own locked doors, and we'd struck a silent deal a long time ago to leave each other's alone.

The guys thought I lived in some flashy condo on the Strip. I let them. Easier than explaining how a loudmouth winger from a Tennessee church town ended up worth what I was worth. Easier still than explaining why I didn't act like it. Why I drove a 1969 Pontiac Firebird I'd restored from the frame up over four off-seasons, flew commercial, clipped coupons in my head out of a habit my mother beat into me back when we didn't have a dime. The car was the one thing I let myself have. The one thing my mother would've called sinful. I'd built it with my own two hands, and every time I dropped into the seat I felt better in some quiet way I never tried to name.

The money wasn't the life. That's the part none of them would've understood. The money was just proof I'd gotten out. The life was the barn full of noise, and the laugh I could pull out of Stone twice a practice, and a coach who closed his door to ask if I was okay.

I let myself in. The house was quiet in the enormous way it always was. I dropped my keys in the bowl by the door, the bowl my decorator picked out, because I wouldn't have known to have a bowl.

The phone buzzed again in my bag.

931.