I tugged the pastry bag from my waistband and laid it on the seat beside her.
“I love raspberry filling too,” I said, the words coming out gruff.
CHAPTER THREE
HALEY
The office was mine in the way small things became yours when nobody else wanted them.
Tucked between the equipment corridor and the coaches’ offices, it was barely large enough for a desk, three monitors, and a chair I’d dragged in from somewhere else because the original one had made my back hurt. The air conditioning worked too well, which meant I wore a hoodie even in summer. The blue light from the screens gave everything a cold cast that probably wasn’t great for my eyes.
I’d been here since six-thirty. Most of the players wouldn’t arrive for another hour. Mark, the other team analyst, came in at about seven. He had his own tiny office down the hall, though we shared space in a larger room where we could show plays to the assistant coaches or multiple players. I hadn’t seen him yet.
The screens showed footage from three different games, all the same opponent, tagged and color-coded by play type. Power play sequences in red. Penalty kill in blue to show how we might stop the opposing team if one of our orcs had a penalty and we were down a player. Five-on-five or full team plays in green. I’d been building this package for two days, and it was good work.The kind that made me forget to eat lunch or notice when the building got loud around me.
My coffee had gone cold at least an hour ago.
On the center screen, a defenseman made the same positioning mistake he’d made in four other games. I tagged it, added it to the sequence, and made a note about the pattern. This was the part of the job I liked best. The puzzle of it. The way footage revealed things that happened too fast to catch in real time.
My phone sat face down on the desk. I hadn’t checked it in forty minutes, which was probably a record.
The empty pastry bag from two days ago was gone. I’d thrown it away after staring at it for an embarrassing length of time. Tolrek had laid it on the chair beside mine during the scrimmage before he was called back into play.
He’d eaten the pastry I’d given him. From the way my heart was leaping around in my chest, you’d think he’d asked me out on a date. Not just eaten something from a random person he ran into in the parking lot. I’d been thinking about it since, giving a lot of thought to an empty paper bag.
The thing was, I’d been tracking him, though not on purpose. Or maybe on purpose, but not consciously. The same way I tracked plays developing on ice, peripheral awareness that didn’t require true attention. I knew where he was during practice. I knew which part of the locker room he gravitated toward. And I knew he arrived early and left late and didn’t talk to anyone unless they talked to him first.
I’d also watched more of his footage than the job required.
Last night I’d pulled videos from three seasons ago, before the injury and the trade. I’d told myself it was a professional thing to do to give context for his current patterns. I needed to understand his baseline before I could identify the changes.
That was true, though it also wasn’t the whole truth.
If someone else had shown me this pattern, I would’ve recognized it immediately. I was choosing not to recognize it in myself, which was pretty much a lie.
I took a breath and returned my attention to the screen.
The opponent’s power play had a tell. Their center positioned himself near the net before the pass. I tagged three more instances and added them to the sequence. My father would use this in the team meeting tomorrow. He’d pull the clips I flagged, and the players would see what I’d seen.
That part still felt good.
Five more minutes passed. The footage rolled. I got lost in it the way I always did, and for those five minutes, I was just competent at something I was good at.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. My father doing his morning rounds, checking in with staff before the players arrived. He appeared in the doorway with a coffee mug in his hand and the easy authority he wore like a comfortable coat.
“You’re here early,” he said.
“I wanted to finish the package.”
“How’s it looking?”
“Good. Their power play has a positioning tell. The center telegraphs the pass.”
He stepped around my desk, looking at the screen over my shoulder. I pulled up the sequence and ran it for him. He watched with the focus he gave everything, processing it the way a coach did information.
“That’s useful,” he said. “Can you isolate the weak-side defender? I want to see what he’s doing when that happens.”
“Already tagged. I’ll have it ready for the meeting.”
