When the lobby thins and the Zamboni driver’s wife catches sight of Dad’s assistant coach, she migrates her advice elsewhere, I step into the hallway by the trophy case. The case throws back a version of me I could swear is older than yesterday. My hands are steady. My mouth is not. I take the card out.
There’s one sentence typed on it in a font so plain it becomes menacing.
My breath gets small, hummingbird small. Inside my chest, something with claws decides it’s time to live. It isn’t a command; it’s an instruction manual for a machine we both built with our eyes closed. Beneath the sentence, in neat black letters that look like they belong on a blueprint:Strawberries.
I hold the card near my face and choke on a laugh. Not because it’s funny. Because it’s exactly the right word thrown like a match into February-dry grasses. The maze haunted me with thorns and the scent of dirt. December is going to haunt me with red fruit, sugar and choices.
The second card is taped behind the first with a neat strip of clear tape. I peel it free with careful fingers, sucking in a breath when the tape popslike a secret learning to pronounce itself.
I could pretend it means jewelry or a reputation. I could argue it’s melodrama. Or I could tell the truth: he’s warning me to leave the version of myself that apologizes at home.
“Working hard?” my father says, and my body remembers tunnels, not hallways. I turn with the cards pinched between thumb and forefinger, letters pressed to my palm so the instructions stare at my skin, not him.
“Always,” I say, my voice snapping back into the register I use when we’re wearing our public names. “Skate drive numbers look good.”
He nods, eyes scanning the lobby like he’s counting exits. “Do you need anything?”
I almost say a time machine that takes me back to the minute before I learned what the inside of a yes feels like. I say, “I’m good,” meaning it in a way that makes me ache.
His gaze dips to my wrist. The ribbon must have slipped; a dark edge peeks from under my cuff. He doesn’t move, but the hallwaytemperature drops by a degree and my skin learns to shiver again. He opens his mouth and then closes it. Open it again. “Your mother loved blue,” he says finally, the sentence lands like a truce shoved through a locked door. “She said women in blue look like they know the weather is going to obey them.”
I try not to smile, but fail. “She wasn’t wrong.”
“No,” he says. Then, more coach than father: “Keep the gala clean. Keep it classy.”
“I know what to do.”
“And what not to.”
“Also that.”
He nods once, as if that settles both of us and neither. “I need the final vendor list by tomorrow.”
“You’ll have it.”
He looks at me for a fraction past polite and I see it—the thing that men like him try to hide because they are both generals and fathers and the battlefield is wearing their daughter’s face. He is afraid of being the villain in the story where he is trying to be the shield. He is afraid he is too late. He is afraid of a lot of things, including the truth that I learned how to be stubborn from watching him win.
When he walks away, I lean against the trophy case, biting the inside of my cheek so hard it burns. The plastic of the case is cold through my sweater. My reflection watches me holding two cards and call it strategy.
Back in the office, I tuck the cards under the desk blotter like they’re receipts for a purchase I haven’t decided whether to keep. I attack the vendor list with soldier energy, editing until the columns line up like they’re bracing for inspection. The DJ adds a track that’s borderline offensive and I move it to the “after-midnight” playlist because I am generous when other people make choices Idon’t love. The caterer calls to confirm strawberries are in season thanks to the fancy greenhouse he uses. I tell him to add a second tray, and when he laughs I laugh with him like nothing in this is heavy.
The phone buzzes again near the end of the day. I pretend I’m busy for three rings. I’m not.
Unknown:The hallway was a mistake.
My stomach drops, then rebounds into fury so fast the whiplash makes me dizzy.
Me:Because it was risky?
Unknown:Because I looked at you like a man who doesn’t deserve to hide it.
I sit back in the chair and let the breath leave me in a long ribbon I could tie around my own stubbornness. The world wants to make this simple—predator and prey, villain and good girl, coach’s daughter and the man who should know better. But the truth lives messier. In practice hours, in hallways, in instructions written like prayers, in a man telling me he failed at the performance other people require.
Me:Don’t do it again.
Unknown:I won’t.
Me:Unless I ask.
