Page 34 of Her Coach

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” She went back to her screen.

“I’m serious. You have the same approach to things. You both think about the long game. You both run tight ships. You’d⁠—”

“Brynn.”

“I’m just saying.”

“I know what you’re just saying.” She took off her glasses and set them on the table, which meant she was about to actually talk to me. “He’s an attractive man. He’s clearly competent. And I’m sure the two of you have a wonderful time when you’re together.”

The fry I was holding stopped halfway to my mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She gave me the patient look. The one she reserved for when she thought I was being deliberately obtuse. “It means I see you, princess. I always have.”

“You’re not even giving him a chance. You haven’t spent more than ten minutes with the man.”

“I don’t need to.” She picked her glasses back up. “And neither do you, if you’re doing it for my sake.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

“Eat your burger,” she said.

I ate my burger. We watched half an episode of something neither of us was paying attention to, and when Mom finally closed her laptop and said goodnight, I stayed at the kitchen table with the last of the fries going cold in front of me.

The thing was, she wasn’t wrong. That was the part I couldn’t shake. I’d been sitting there talking about the way he listened, the way he thought, the way he’d looked at me in that office with his hand at my face like he was deciding something important — and I’d been pitching it to my mother like a sales call. Like if I handed her the good parts carefully enough, I could stop keeping them for myself.

I pulled out my phone. Opened his contact. Stared at it.

I hadn’t saved him as anything yet. Just Colton, the name he’d told me to use. I thought about changing it to something stupid — Coach, or Off Limits, or Mom’s Future Husband — the kind of thing Dani would’ve done to make a point. But I didn’t.

I just looked at his name until the screen went dark.

The plan was still the plan. He was here to coach the team. He was fourteen years older than me with a blown-up career and a drinking habit he was only just starting to look at honestly. He was my mother’s employee, technically. He was the most obvious bad idea I’d encountered in twenty-six years of finding ways to put myself last.

And he’d said I want to do this right like it cost him something to wait. Like I was worth the cost.

I put my phone face-down on the table.

I picked up the last fry, cold and a little soggy, and ate it anyway.

I just needed to figure out what came next. Not for Mom. For me.

14

BRYNN

On Wednesday I told myself I was going to the arena for work reasons.

This was technically true. I had a media package to put together for the season opener, three sponsor emails that needed responses, and a call with the local news station at two that I needed to prep for. All of that was real. All of that needed doing.

None of that was why I ended up walking past my office and down toward the ice at eleven in the morning with my coffee and my laptop like I was going to find a quiet spot to work near the rink boards.

Information gathering, I told myself. About the team. For community relations.

Sure.

The ice was empty when I got there, which surprised me. I had expected morning skate. Instead there was just Frank, quiet barely-speaks Frank who I had known for four years and exchanged maybe forty words with total, sitting on the bench at the boards lacing up his skates. Alone.