It had to be.
She powered on her laptop, bracing for another long day of managing narratives and putting out fires.
The knock came before her screen even finished loading.
“Come in,” she called.
Sasha swept in, phone clenched in her hand, her usual calm sharpened into something urgent. One look at her face and Hillary’s pulse kicked up.
“We’ve got a situation,” Sasha said, skipping preamble as she dropped into the chair opposite her. She slid the phone across the desk.
Hillary frowned and pulled it closer.
The headline made her stomach drop.
HOCKEY’S GOLDEN BOY CRACKING?
STAR FORWARD SEEN IN HEATED ARGUMENT, LATE-NIGHT DRAMA SPILLS INTO THE STREETS
Below it, photos loaded one after another.
Murphy outside a coffee shop, rain plastering his hair to his forehead, jaw tight as he spoke to someone just out of frame. Another shot showed him standing alone moments later, shoulders slumped, staring down at the pavement like the weight of the world had finally caught up to him. Then grainy images of him entering his building hours later, head down, posture closed, unmistakably dejected.
The captions were worse.
Speculation piled on speculation.
Was it a lover’s quarrel?
Trouble behind the scenes?
Burnout? Substances?
What finally cracked hockey’s golden boy?
Hillary’s throat went dry.
“Where did this come from?” she asked quietly.
“Freelancer with a long lens and too much time,” Sasha said. “They caught the argument outside the café and followed him. A gossip blog ran it first. Sports outlets are circling now, trying to decide how hard they can lean without pissing off the organization.”
Hillary scrolled, bile rising as she read the comments. Fans dissected his body language. Armchair psychologists were diagnosing him from a handful of still frames. Others sharpening knives, eager for the fall from grace.
“They’re already framing it as a pattern,” Sasha continued. “Golden boy image versus reality. Something has to be wrong if he’s standing in the rain looking like that.”
Hillary swallowed.
They weren’t wrong about one thing.
Somethingwaswrong.
She slid the phone back across the desk and forced herself upright, slipping automatically into work mode. “Okay. We don’t panic, and we don’t feed the frenzy. No comments yet. We keep it boring.”
“Agreed,” Sasha said. “The trick is cutting through the bullshit without giving them anything juicy to chew on.”
Hillary nodded, though her focus felt fractured, like she was watching herself from a few steps outside her body. She’d built a career on control, on shaping narratives before they spiraled. On seeing three steps ahead.
And yet here she was.
