Page 5 of Her Player

I sat back in my chair, set the pencil down on the desk in front of me, and looked at that number for a long damn moment. Without expression. Without celebration. Without any of those involuntary movements that gave away what I was thinking to anyone in the room with me. Ryan had taught me that, the year before he died, after he’d watched me lose a negotiation because I’d let my face react to a counteroffer. Faces tell. Numbers don’t, he’d said. I’d been twenty-eight years old, and I’d never once forgotten it.

Forty thousand fans, packed nine games deep, at premium ticket prices we’d raised twice since opening night because the market kept absorbing it. Concessions running double what we’d budgeted for. Merchandise moving faster than the team store could restock it. And ten weeks of broadcast revenue from a regional sports network that had paid us up front, in full, before the season even started, because they’d seen the preseason numbers and known exactly what was coming.

I picked the pencil back up and circled the figure once. Neat. Precise. The way I circled everything.

There was nobody to tell.

That was the small, specific weight that always sat on me whenever I closed out a quarter that justified a decade of work. Brynn was busy with her own life, the way she was supposed to be. My GM would get the report in the morning and email back his usual one-liner, good work, Vic, and that would be that. The foundation board would clap politely at the next quarterly meeting and move on to the next agenda item.

There was nobody to call from the car on the drive home and say we did it. The franchise. The team. The whole impossible damn thing. We did it. Because the person I wanted to say it to had been gone for fourteen years. The one person who would have understood what it actually meant was the very same person who wasn’t coming home to hear it.

I sat with that for exactly the length of one breath.

Then I set the pencil down beside the clipboard, perfectly parallel to the edge of the page, and reminded myself that pity was an indulgence I had not built fourteen years of empire on.

Forty-three years old. A grown daughter living her own damn life. A team I’d dragged kicking and screaming into the PHL by sheer force of will. A foundation that had funded six grief counseling centers across a state I’d chosen because it had the best tax structure for what I was trying to do, not because I’d ever loved Las Vegas. I had built something Ryan would have been proud of. I’d built it alone. And there was no one in this damn building to hear me admit out loud that I missed the part where someone got to say we did it with me.

I picked the pencil back up.

The work didn’t care if there was someone to tell.

The work was the point.

I sank into such a numerical frenzy that I didn’t even register my office door creaking open.

"Heeeeey, Miss C."

I didn't look up. "Rhett."

"Whatcha doing?"

"Crunching numbers." I circled another figure. "What do you need?"

"Just checkin' on ya. Wanted to see how you were."

"I'm fine."

"You sure?"

"Yep."

"Positive?"

I finally looked up. He was leaned against the doorframe with his hands shoved into the pockets of his sweatpants and that boyish grin that meant he had nothing in particular he needed to be doing. Which was a problem, because I had quite a lot I needed to be doing.

"Rhett. What do you actually need."

"You could call me Stone, you know."

I scoffed. "I would rather die."

"Everyone calls me Stone. You could if you wanted."

"Brynn doesn't call you Stone."

"Yeah, well... I don't expect her to⁠—"

"Coach doesn't, either."