Her eyes flare and I chalk it up to the fact that I haven’t publicly admitted to ever having a girlfriend. Out of the corner of my eye I can’t help but notice Beau is no longer being interviewed by his brother. He’s standing beside him and both are looking over at me. I have no idea why. They have no reason to care about my personal life.
“Wow. That’s a first for you. I mean…that you talked about. There were rumors this summer…” Again she lets the sentence trail off.
“I have had girlfriends. Contrary to popular opinion, I’m not a monk.” I give her a big, friendly grin. “Although obviously hockey is my first priority.”
“So I know you give a lot of your time and money to children’s charities,” the reporter starts, and it feels like a jarring left turn. I have no idea why she’s switched topics so suddenly. “Mostly you donate to pediatric cancer foundations. Will you be donating to youth drug treatment centers now?”
“I…umm…I’m always open to worthy causes,” I stutter like an idiot. How did we get onto my charity work? I watch Ty stand up from where he’s being interviewed. It’s abrupt, and he’s got a scowl on his face as he unclips his mic and shoves it at the reporter from TSN.
The door to the room, way at the other end, opens and the manager of the Saints is standing there. He’s in a dark suit wearing a darker look on his face. He’s with Coach Meisner, who looks like he just swallowed a bag of glass. They whisper to each other, hands motioning tersely. My reporter is still talking and I realize with horror I’ve tuned her out, so I ask her to repeat herself. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”
“I was saying what about runaway advocates like the Canadian nonprofit Roadways, which provides housing, medical help and education for teen runaways?” she repeats, staring at me with curious, innocent eyes. “I know they’re closing some locations due to lack of funding. That must be very close to you heart now, considering your girlfriend’s past.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I’ve never said that once in an interview, let alone twice.
Suddenly there’s a huge crash. Everything stops as every head in the room spins to see the source. Ty is standing near where NBC is set up wearing a sheepish look as he stands next to a toppled light and stand. He raises his shoulders. “Oops. My bad. Sorry, Echolls.”
Chance Echolls glares at him. “You didn’t see a giant light on a six-foot pole? Really, Parsons?”
Ty ignores him and descends on me along with the coach and Peter Doughty, the team’s manager. He gives me a weird look, but it’s the reporter he talks to, asking for a moment of her time. Coach grabs my arm. “Go up to your room, Westwood. We’ll meet you there.”
“Okay,” I reply, because I am completely lost. I feel like I’m standing in invisible quicksand and with every moment I stay in this media room it inches higher and higher around me, threatening to suffocate me.
Ty nudges me. “Let’s go. Now.”
I don’t speak again until we’re at the elevator bank. I realize I still feel like I’m in quicksand. “My reporter was asking some weird questions,” I say, my voice sounding tinny and pitchy, even to me. “What the hell is going on?”
The elevator opens and Ty yanks me inside, repeatedly jamming the close door button so no one else slips in with us. When the doors are closed and we’re alone, he pulls his phone out of his pocket and replies. “I don’t know. My reporter asked me if I thought that you had a drug problem, which I laughed at, and then he said something about how players on your junior team did and so did your girlfriend.”
“What?”
“He referenced—” Ty’s voice cuts off and then he hisses out a swear and turns his phone screen toward me. “He said there was a story online. Here.”
I look at the Google page on Ty’s screen. He punched in my name and Stephanie’s and the page filled with articles from twenty different websites. Each headline is slightly different but every single one has three things in common:Westwood, girlfriend, drug addict. I grab his phone roughly and punch the link for the first article, which is a credible sports news site. I read it at lightning speed and then take a deep breath and read it again, just to be sure.
“Did you know Steph had a problem?” Ty questions quietly.
“No. She doesn’t,” I argue back in a monotone. “She would have told me. This is some kind of lie someone is spreading.”
“Is it?” Ty sounds as convinced by my theory as I am saying it, which is not at all. But…how can this be? Stephanie is Sebastian’s sister. He never mentioned anything like this the whole time I’ve known him and neither has she. I don’t understand.
“Do you want me to call Maddie?” Ty asks. “I mean Maddie would know, right?”
“I don’t know,” I mutter as the elevator opens on our room floor. “I need to talk to her.”
As we make our way down the hall toward our rooms, I pull my own phone out of my pocket and turn it back on. It screams with alerts. Three text messages from my dad along with two voice mails from him, two from my agent and fourteen others from numbers I don’t recognize, which are probably reporters. There’s none from Stephanie. Why the fuck isn’t she contacting me about this? And what the fuck is going on?
Chapter 29
Stephanie
“Hey, Stephanie,” Dan says quietly as he passes by my desk.
I fight the urge to shudder. The sound of his voice, as always, has the same gross and creepy effect as having a spider crawl across your shower floor, while you’re naked and defenseless.
“Hi, Dan,” I mutter back, and watch as he heads across the open floor to his own office. He reaches behind him and rubs his lower back through his suit jacket, and that’s when I remember his pills. I quickly unlock the desk drawer where I keep my purse and dig around inside it until I find the bottle; then I march across the office, tracing his steps.
I knock lightly on his open door. He looks surprised to see me. “Does Conrad need me for something?”
