“I watched my reputation disappear overnight,” she says quietly. “I wasn’t Tori Wells, soccer player, good student, a person with her own life. I was ‘the girl who dated Jason.’ The cautionary tale. People looked at me with pity, as if I should have known better than to think someone like him would actually want someone like me.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Maybe. But it’s also how the world works.” She settles her head back on my shoulder. “That’s when I made the rule: no athletes. No one who could turn me into a story instead of a person. No one with that kind of power over my reputation again.”
I press my lips to the top of her head and hold them there.
“He was an idiot,” I say against her hair. “A complete and total idiot who didn’t deserve a single second of your time.”
I tilt her face up to mine and press a soft kiss to her mouth.
She’s quiet for a moment, her fingers tracing absent patterns on my chest. “There was something else, too.”
“Yeah?”
“My first job out of grad school. A sports medicine clinic that worked with a college basketball team.” She exhales slowly. “There was another trainer there—Carla. She was good. Really good. Better than me, honestly. She’d been there for years.”
I wait, worried I know where this is going.
“She started seeing one of the players. Kept it quiet, thought she was being careful.” Tori shrugs against me. “Someone found out. I don’t even know who or how. But within a week, she was gone. No formal termination, no big announcement. Just... quietly removed. Like she’d never existed.”
“What happened to the player?”
“Nothing.” Her voice goes flat. “He finished the season, got drafted, moved on with his life. Meanwhile, Carla couldn’t get a reference, couldn’t explain the gap in her resume without the story following her. Last I heard, she had to take a demotion just to find another job.”
My jaw tightens.
“This rule isn’t just about protecting my heart. It’s about protecting everything I’d worked for.” She looks up at me. “Women in sports medicine—we’re already fighting to be taken seriously. One wrong move and you’re not the talented trainer anymore. You’re the cautionary tale. The one who couldn’t keep it professional.”
I release a long, heavy exhale, hating that part of me knows she’s right.
She stares at me, eyes searching. “Your turn,” she whispers.
“My turn?”
“Fair’s fair. I showed you mine.”
I almost smile. Almost.
Then I think about Sienna, and the almost-smile dies.
“Maisie’s mom... Sienna.”
Tori waits. Her hand finds mine in the dark, fingers intertwining.
“We met at a charity event. She was beautiful, charming, knew all the right things to say.” I stare at the ceiling. “I was twenty-two and naive, thinking I’d found the real thing.”
“What happened?”
“She got pregnant. I thought that meant we were building something, you know? A family.” The words come out flat. “Turns out we had very different definitions of that word.”
“How so?”
“Sienna didn’t want to be a mom. She wanted to be a hockey wife—the glamour, the money, the lifestyle. She thought a baby would be... I don’t know, an accessory. Something cute for Instagram photos.”
Tori’s hand tightens on mine.
“When she realized that motherhood was actually hard—the sleepless nights, the crying, the mess—she checked out. She hired nannies and started traveling for ‘work.’” I make air quotes in the dark. “She’s an influencer now.”
