“Ready to find our table?” she asks, sending the guys a smile that says go sit down, children.
They scatter with parting shots—“Don’t choke, brother!” “We’ll film it!”—and Reese turns my attention back where it belongs. She straightens my tie again because she knows it steadies me.
“Hey,” she says, soft, looking directly in my eyes. “You know exactly what you want to say.”
Her hand on my chest locks me in place—in a good way. I breathe, and the air actually moves.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For what?”
“For being here. For handling them. For making this feel doable.”
Her smile reaches her eyes. “That’s what I do. One step at a time.” She tips her head toward table one. “Let’s go charm the billionaires, then you do what you came to do.”
We walk toward the front. The speech sits in my inside pocket like a paper weight. With her hand in mine, the noise in my head finally drops to something I can live with.
Dinner plates clatter onto trays, the emcee recites a list of donors, and my pulse keeps trying to punch through my collar. I lean toward Reese. “I need a minute.”
She reads me like always. We stand, slide out past a knot of gala donors, and angle toward a service corridor. The noise dulls three steps in. Fluorescents buzz. Somewhere, a dishwasher thunders.
I loosen the bow tie and breathe like it’s a new skill. “Better?” she asks.
“Yes.”
I’ve done interviews with microphones a thousand times. Those are about line changes and systems. This is about me and what I think about something that has almost nothing to do with hockey.
I pull the folded pages from my pocket. The words I’ve memorized look like the wrong language. Responsibility. Mentorship. Community. I believe every sentence. My hands still shake.
“What if they see straight through me?” I ask the tile floor. “What if they hear this and think it’s a PR fueled crock of shit?”
Reese takes the pages from my hands and tucks them into her palm like contraband. Then she turns my face to hers.
“Logan,” she says, clear and calm, the way she probably says a kid’s name when they’re about to cry. “You’re the man who runs hockey camps for kids every summer back in Hibbing. You’re the man who stays after games until every single kid who wants an autograph gets one. The man who showed up at my school and read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to my kids. That’s not a gloss.”
A server barrels by with a tray. Reese steps back just enough to avoid a collision, then steps right back in. She produces a glass of water—I didn’t even see her snag it.
“Drink,” she says, teacher-voice.
I drink. Cold slides through the heat. I give the empty glass back. Her hands smooth my lapels like she’s ironing me steady.
“I don’t deserve you,” I say, not meaning to say it out loud.
“Probably not,” she says, with a wink and an adorable smile. “But I’m here anyway.”
I breathe. My lungs finally cooperate.
“When I’m on the ice,” I say, catching the metaphor and swerving, “there are patterns. Here, it’s all people.”
“People are patterns too,” she says. She taps my pocket. “You know what you want to tell them. And you know who you are.”
The event coordinator appears at the mouth of the corridor, a clipboard clutched like a life preserver. “Five minutes, Mr. McCoy.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Reese takes my hands, squeezing gently. “Find my face if you get lost,” she says. “I’ll be the one smiling like an idiot.”
That earns a real laugh. Tension slips.
