“Hi,” I say, and I mean it kindly.
She swallows. “So. How was it? Tell me everything.”
“It was hockey practice.”
She slides the serving bowl down the island toward me without breaking eye contact, blonde hair piled in a bun, green eyes doing that thing where she reads me like a box score. I pull a fork from the drawer and drag the bowl in.
“You don’t seem thrilled,” she says.
“I was trying to get my dad off speaker phone.” I bunch a few bites onto the fork and lean my forearms on the cold marble. “And I almost hit Ermington with my car in front of his house.”
Her mouth drops open. “Wait. With your car?”
“He didn’t move until the last second.” I take a bite. “Then he slapped both palms on my hood like I’m the problem.”
What I don’t tell her is that when I looked up and saw him in the middle of the road, too close, not moving, my heart climbed so high and so fast that I genuinely thought I might vomit all over my own steering wheel. My hands were still shaking when I pulled into the garage, and I’m a little on edge right now.
“Do you want to go to a Hawthorne House party this weekend?” Kirra asks.
“Those still exist?” I say, dry, because of course they do, because that house is a permanent fixture of bad decisions and worse music, and I have spent two years successfully not setting foot in it.
I take the bowl and the fork and head for the hall. “I’ve got work before class. Thanks for the salad, Ki.”
“Always.”
My bedroom looks like a fitting room. There are three sweaters laid out flat on my bed where I left them this morning, and a coat, and a second coat, and I still couldn’t decide — couldn’t commit to a color or a neckline or a single thing — because my head was already full of him before I’d even left the house. Full of zone entries and shooting angles and a list of things my father wanted me to watch for, like I’m a security camera he installed at the rink for the protection of his own future. The keeper of his investment.
I gather the sweaters up and start folding, because I cannot think straight in a mess.
The whole arrangement would be tolerable if it weren’t such a chore. Ermington and I happen to attend the same university, which my father treats as fate handing him a free set of eyes, so I’m under strict orders to attend every home game this year. All of them. I refuse to be the girl in the third row with a spiral notebook and a pen like some obsessed little freak, so I type everything into my phone instead, thumbs moving, head down. And if Stanley Ermington wants to believe the world’s most ambitious woman is glued to her phone for fun, he can keep believing it. It’s easier than the truth, which is that I’m writing an NHL prospect report on him in real time, and he’s the prospect.
My desk catches my eye when I set the last sweater down.
The photo’s been there for years. My father, drenched, twenty-something, holding the Stanley Cup over his head the summer I was barely old enough to walk. I won it for you, he’s told me my whole life, and I’ve never had the heart to point out that I don’t remember a second of it. That was the golden year, the one he tells at every dinner — the season the league put him on a line with his biggest rivals and the three of them turned unstoppable, and Robert Ermington, who’d lifted the same cup the year his own son was born, went from a man my father wanted to destroy to the closest friend he’s ever had.
So I was around the Ermingtons while I was in a stroller and not much after. We moved cities. They moved cities. We crossed paths a few times a decade, holidays and tournaments, and my mother — who is colder than I am and never pretended otherwise — could not stand Stanley’s mother and her endless, easy laughing. I learned distance early. I kept it on purpose. And I have never once regretted it, because there is no universe, none, where Stanley Ermington and I are friends, or mutuals, or anything other than two people our fathers won a trophy beside. I do what my dad asks. I move on with my day.
That’s the version I tell people.
Here’s the version I don’t.
This past summer I was a Hockey Operations Intern at Robert Ermington’s club. Not because anyone wanted me there but because of the deal. The arrangement that got Stanley three months on a private sheet with my father’s name on the lease came bundled with an envelope of office hours for me, a courtesy thrown in like a free coffee, and I took every single one of them. Eight in the morning until they physically asked me to leave. I tagged tape. I cleaned up pre-scout reports nobody else would touch. I sat at the back of development camp like a quiet animal, saying nothing, missing nothing.
I got the seat because of my father.
I kept it because of me.
By July, they were giving me real work. By August, I was the name they passed around the room when somebody needed the entries chart for the first three opponents of next season — ask Linwood, she’s got it — and when I left, the analytics director offered me a remote contract for the year. Hockey Operations Assistant. Paid by the hour. I watch the games they assign me, I tag what they tell me to tag, I clean the reports for the coaches, and every Tuesday morning, I sit on a Zoom where ten men older than my father ask me what I noticed.
And then they write it down.
That’s the part I can’t get over. That’s the part I won’t. Ten men who’ve been in this business for so long, leaning toward a screen, pens moving, because of something I saw. Nobody gifted me that. Nobody’s father bought that. I earned that, and I would do the eight a.m. mornings and the worst reports and the back of the room a hundred times over to feel it again.
Which is the whole thing, really. The reason why he gets under my skin like a splinter I can’t dig out. Stanley Ermington was born at the top of the mountain and treats the climb like a joke he’s too good to bother telling. The talent fell out of the sky and into his hands and he uses it to do the airplane. Meanwhile, I have crawled up every inch of mine on my fingernails, and I’d give anything to have what he wastes, and he doesn’t even know it’s in his hands.
Effortless. That’s his word. I’ve never once in my life gotten to be effortless.
I plug in my laptop and open it, because I have twenty-six minutes and a job to do, and the job is the only place the noise in my head goes quiet.
