She saw words she’d learned to recognize over eight seasons. Phrases that pretended to be neutral but weren’t. Comments about “work ethic.” About “cultural differences.” About whether certain players “got it.” No slurs. Nothing that would get flagged easily. Just enough implication to make her stomach tighten.
Cassie leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for a moment.
She’d seen this pattern before. How narrative became assumption. How assumption attached itself more easily to some players than others.
She didn’t respond. She never responded directly. She opened a new document instead.
Later that evening, she published a follow-up—not a rebuttal, not a think piece, just context. She pulled league-wide examples of players scratched for missing meetings. Quoted Parker again. Let Caleb’s accountability stand on its own. She framed the incident as what it was: a minor disciplinary moment for a young player, early in a long season.
No spotlight. No silence either.
When she shut her laptop, the noise didn’t disappear. It never did. But it dulled, blunted by clarity.
The next afternoon after practice, her phone buzzed as she was leaving the arena. It was Luke.
“Zheng mentioned you in the room today.”
Her heart dropped momentarily, wondering if she inadvertently made Zheng’s problem worse, until a second text came through.
“He said he appreciated that you didn’t turn it into something else,” Luke wrote. “Said it mattered that someone just saw himas a player who messed up—not the Chinese kid who messed up.”
Cassie swallowed. She pictured Caleb at his stall, helmet hair still damp, shoulders squared the way they were when he was trying not to show too much. She’d asked him the question cleanly. Let him answer fully. Trusted him to own it. That had been the choice.
“I just told it straight,” she said.
Luke’s reply came a beat later.
“Yeah. But not everyone does. He noticed.”
She set the phone facedown again, the weight of that settling in her chest. This was the part of the job no stylebook covered—the quiet calculus of when context mattered, of when fairness required more care, not less. She hadn’t written to protect Caleb. She’d written because the truth, fully told, demanded it.
Thirty-Four
They didn’t drive to the game together. Not technically.
Luke dropped Cassie a block from Allegheny Arena, easing the car to the curb like he was parallel parking instead of executing a small, deliberate deception they’d practiced without ever naming. He snuck a kiss before she gathered her bag.
She shut the door, waited until the car pulled away, then started the familiar walk toward the arena, badge already out, shoulders settling into work mode. By the time she hit security, Luke was just another player somewhere beneath the stands, taping his stick, lacing his skates. By the time she climbed to the press box, she was just another reporter with a laptop and a deadline.
The game against Columbus was chippy from the opening faceoff.
The Arsenals played fast and mean, crashing the net, testing Connor early with low shots and traffic. Cassie typed steadily, tracking zone time, noting a couple of clean exits Luke made under pressure. Pittsburgh didn’t score in the first, but neither did Columbus. Connor looked sharp — aggressive in his crease, tracking pucks cleanly, talking to his defensemen like he owned the paint.
Midway through the second, Cassie spotted Luke glance up at the press box after a whistle, something that still never failed to give her butterflies.
Early in the third, Elias Johansson finally opened the scoring with a laser of a shot from the point. Now down a goal, Columbus pressed hard.
The Arsenals’ winger cut across the slot, snapped a shot high glove-side through traffic — the kind that beat goalies nine times out of ten. Connor lunged, lost his edge for a split second, then somehow recovered, throwing his arm back across his body in a desperate windmill.
The puck caught leather.
The building erupted.
Cassie felt it in her chest before she heard it — the collective intake, the roar, the disbelief. Connor sprawled, then popped back up, pounding his stick once against the ice like punctuation.
And then, inexplicably, chaos.
The Columbus winger skated past the crease, turned, and without warning swung his fist. The punch landed on Connor’s mask, but hard enough to jolt Connor backward into the crossbar of the goal.
