Page 106 of Her Player

“File the recusal documentation with the committee today,” I said. “Along with every roster decision involving Rhett for the last three years. Every one goes through Chu or Coach and I want that paper trail airtight before we walk into that committee room.”

“Already pulling it.”

“And Seth.” I picked up my cold coffee and looked at it. “We win that championship in forty-eight hours. Document everything that happens between now and then. Every decision I make. Every communication. If they want to review my conduct I want them to have so much evidence of a clean operation that the committee room feels embarrassing for them to be sitting in.”

A pause. Then something that sounded almost like admiration. “Yes ma’am.”

“Thirty days,” I said. “We’ll be ready in ten.”

I hung up.

I stood in my kitchen with my cold coffee and my crooked glasses and the photograph still locked on my phone screen and I thought about Ryan building this franchise from nothing and me rebuilding it from grief and three years of turned lefts instead of rights and a man who had been waiting longer than I deserved for me to be ready.

I thought about forty-eight hours.

I set the coffee down.

I was ready.

I heard the shower shut off down the hallway.

That was when Rhett appeared in the doorway, freshly showered, his hair damp and disheveled, tugging a shirt over his head. He took one look at my face and stopped moving.

“What happened?” he asked.

I turned my phone around and held it out to him.

He took it. He read. I watched his face cycle through several expressions in quick succession, recognition first, and then the look of a man who had been half-expecting this for longer than he’d admitted to himself, and then, unmistakably, relief. Like a man who’d been holding a secret too long and finally got caught.

That was when my temper ignited.

“You don’t look upset,” I said.

He set my phone down on the counter between us. “I’m not.”

“Rhett.”

“Victoria.”

“We have a championship game in two days.” I kept my voice measured, the way I did in boardrooms when everything inside me was anything but measured. “The PHL has a conduct policy about owner-player relationships. My lawyer is already on the phone with their office. The sports media is going to spend the next forty-eight hours talking about whether the only reason you’re starting center is because you’re sleeping with the woman who signs the checks⁠—”

“Let them talk.”

The flatness of it stopped me cold.

He stood there, all six-foot-seven of him, freshly showered and completely unbothered, looking at me like I was the one not making sense.

“Let them talk,” he said again, quieter this time. “Victoria, we were going to be found out eventually. You know that. You’ve known that.”

“Eventually is not two days before the championship.”

“There’s never going to be a good time.”

“There would have been a better time than this.” I pushed off the counter and turned away from him, pacing the length of the kitchen the way I always did when my brain was moving faster than the room around me. “After the championship. After the season closed. After I had time to get ahead of it properly, with a statement and a plan and⁠—”

“A script,” he said.

I stopped pacing. “What?”