Page 12 of Her Coach

Go to work, Brynn.

"See you at the bar, boys," I said to no one in particular, and made myself move.

I had six minutes before I needed to clock in, anyway.

And I sure as hell didn't need to think about the way the entire hallway had just reorganized itself around one man standing in a doorway.

5

COLTON

I watched her until she turned the corner.

Then I turned back to the team.

They were looking at me the way new players always looked at a new coach, sizing me up, trying to figure out what kind of man they were dealing with, whether the reputation matched the reality. I had been on the other side of that look enough times to know exactly what it meant and exactly what it needed from me.

I let the silence sit for a second longer than was comfortable.

"Tomorrow," I said. "Seven a.m. On the ice. Not in the parking lot, not in the hallway, not almost there. On the ice." I looked at Jett specifically, because Jett was the kind of player who needed to know he was being watched. "Any questions?"

Nobody had questions.

"Good." I nodded once toward the exit. "Go home. Eat something real. Sleep."

They moved. Not scrambling, not dragging their feet. Just moved, which told me the baseline was better than I expected. Rhett was the last one out. He paused at the door and looked back at me with an expression I recognized, the kind that was deciding whether to say something.

He decided not to. Just nodded once and left.

Good instincts. I filed that away.

The hallway went quiet. I stood there for a moment in the doorway of my new office, looking at the space Victoria had just walked me through. Drop ceiling. Desk too small. Chair that was going to last about three days before I found a replacement. A whiteboard on the wall that still had Coach Harry's handwriting on it in blue marker, some kind of defensive scheme from a season that was already over.

I left it there for now.

I had been sitting at the desk for maybe twenty minutes, going through the schedule Victoria had left me, when I heard her heels in the hallway. She appeared in the doorway in that way she had, like she had been there for a moment before you noticed her.

"Ready?" she asked.

I set the schedule down and stood. "Yeah."

She walked me out the way she had walked me in, like she owned every room, which she did. And she talked the whole way. Through the corridors she covered the first game schedule, the media obligations she expected me to fulfill, the community events Brynn had already locked in on behalf of the team. Past the trophy case she covered the season ticket numbers, the sponsorship renewals that were pending, the local press contacts who were already calling for a first interview.

I said the right things. Nodded in the right places. Asked two questions that I actually wanted the answers to.

The third time she said Brynn's name I stopped hearing the sentence around it.

One handshake. That was all it was. She had slipped her hand into mine for exactly three seconds and something had moved in my chest that I hadn't felt in a long time. Not since before New York went sideways. Not since before Claire. Maybe longer than that.

I didn't know what to do with that so I filed it somewhere I wasn't going to look at and told myself it was nothing.

It wasn't nothing. I already knew it wasn't nothing.

That was the problem.

"The pre-season community skate is something Brynn set up last year," Victoria was saying, "and it did wonders for the team's visibility in the city. I'd like to keep it on the calendar if you have no objections."

"No objections," I said.