Page 109 of Her Coach

What I wasn’t ready to admit was that this time, starving the story meant starving something else.

Something I wasn’t sure I’d survive losing.

43

BRYNN

I found it on my phone at eight thirty-seven in the morning, sitting on the edge of his bed with my coffee going cold on the nightstand.

But I’d already heard enough downstairs.

I’d woken up to an empty bed and the low sound of his voice carrying up through the floorboards. Not words, just the cadence of it, the flat controlled tone he used when something was wrong. I recognized it because I’d heard it in the corridor at the arena once, when he thought no one was listening. I pulled on his shirt and made it halfway down the stairs before his words sharpened enough to catch.

I heard Dave’s voice first, tinny through the phone speaker. “Same situation. Different city, same setup. You cannot afford another —”

And then Colton’s voice, low and even. “I said I hear you, Dave. Let me think about it.”

I stood on the third stair from the bottom and didn’t move. I heard him end the call. I heard the quiet after it. I waited for the sound of him getting up, of him coming to find me, of anything that would tell me what I’d just walked into the middle of.

Nothing.

I turned around and went back upstairs. I made myself walk normally. I sat on the edge of his bed and picked up my phone and that’s when Dani’s text came in — just the link, no caption, which was her version of a five-alarm fire — and I thought, oh. So that’s what it is.

I read the article. All of it. And by the time I got to the part where they used the phrase “the owner’s daughter” three separate times, what I felt wasn’t embarrassment or even anger. It was the quiet, flat recognition of someone who had just heard the thing they were afraid of out loud and found out it was exactly as bad as they thought.

He was going to pull back. That’s what Dave was telling him to do and that’s what he was going to do, because that’s what the Colton Mercer who held his face completely still while everything underneath it was moving always did. He’d decide it was better for me without asking me. He’d protect me right out of whatever this was.

Not if I had anything to say about it.

Dani had sent it. No caption, just the link, which was Dani’s version of a five-alarm fire. I clicked it and read the whole thing without blinking, and by the time I got to the part where they used the phrase “the owner’s daughter” three separate times like it was a crime I’d committed, my hands had gone very still in my lap.

They had my photo. My name. My job title. And a photo of us in the parking lot that whoever took it had caught at exactly the right angle — him looking down at me, me laughing, his hand in mine. It was the best photo anyone had ever taken of me in my life and it was sitting inside a headline that suggested I was either a victim or complicit, and they hadn’t figured out which one yet.

I put my phone down. I picked up my coffee. I put that down too because my hands weren’t reliable right now.

Then I thought about how Colton had looked at me downstairs. The way he’d already had coffee made. The way he’d said “work stuff” without meeting my eyes. The way he’d pushed a mug across the table at me like a man trying to soften a blow he hadn’t delivered yet.

He’d already seen it.

Which meant the “work stuff” was me. And whatever he’d spent the last two hours thinking about at that kitchen table had already produced an answer. One he hadn’t asked me for my input on.

I got up. I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute first.

Not because I needed to collect myself. I was collected. I was very, very collected, which was actually the problem, because the collected version of me wanted to go downstairs and be reasonable about this. Wanted to hear him out. Wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt the way I always did, because that’s what you did when you loved someone.

But the other version of me, the one that had read that headline three times and felt her name in it like a splinter — that version knew exactly what “work stuff” meant. And that version was not interested in being reasonable before she’d at least had the chance to say so out loud.

I got dressed. I left my phone on the nightstand.

He was at the kitchen table when I came downstairs, phone face down, clipboard in front of him like a prop. He wasn’t looking at it. He looked up when I came in, and I saw it immediately — that set to his jaw, the way his shoulders had already braced. He was ready for a fight, which meant he already knew he’d done something worth fighting about.

I stopped in the doorway.

He opened his mouth.

“Don’t,” I said.

His jaw tightened. “Brynn —”