Page 81 of Her Rival

Still on. Brynn driving me. Security car following us. Marielle says it's fine, he won't move while the letter's in his hand.

Okay.

The drive to the arena was the most ordinary thing I'd done in a week, which after the week I'd had felt almost like an insult. I got there at ten-fifteen the way I always did on a Monday, parked in my usual spot, walked in through the side entrance, said hi to Janice at the security desk, went to the locker room, changed into the team polo, and walked down to the media room on the second floor at ten fifty-five.

Brynn was already there. Setting up the chairs. Doing the Brynn thing. She was in the navy blazer she wore when she was running point on something official, hair up, her face wearing the precise expression I'd come to recognize over the weekend as I am operating in crisis-management mode and you will not be able to tell from looking at me.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey."

"They're downstairs. Came in through the front like a normal interview party. Mom is with them."

"Victoria's here."

"Mom's taking the interview today. She wants to be in the room. She wants the room visible to her. She's doing the thing she does, Jett, which is put herself in the center of the situation so the situation has to go through her."

"Okay."

"You okay with that."

"I'm okay with that."

"Good. They'll be up in two minutes. Dani's good. She slept four hours. She ate. She's terrified. She's also wearing the dark blue dress, the one from Saturday, which my husband-adjacent boyfriend tells me is a thing women do when they need armor that looks like a dress."

I almost laughed.

I did not laugh.

I sat down at the table in the chair facing the door, because I'd decided in the elevator that I was going to be the first thing she saw when she walked in, and I waited.

She came in two minutes later with Victoria one step behind her and a Caldwell security guard one step behind Victoria. The guard, a woman in her forties in a black suit with a clear earpiece, took a position by the door. She didn't introduce herself. She didn't need to. Her job was being in the room and being a thing in the room, and she did it the way the Caldwell security people did everything, which was to disappear into the wall while remaining visibly present.

Dani sat across from me. She set the recorder down. The notebook down. The pen down. She looked at me. The look did the work of a sentence I'll never be able to write down.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi."

"You look tired."

"You look beautiful, Hartley."

She almost smiled. Pulled it back. Brynn hadn't closed the door. Victoria had taken the chair at the end of the table with her tablet in front of her and her reading glasses up on her head, and she gave me a particular look that meant we are proceeding as normal, please cooperate. I cooperated.

We did the interview.

Dani had a list of follow-ups from the previous Thursday's session, the one at my kitchen island, the one with the spaghetti, though neither of us mentioned the spaghetti and the existence of the spaghetti was not in the room with us. She asked about the second-line forecheck again, the part she hadn't been satisfied with. About the playoff defenseman pairing Coach had used in the third round. About a specific shift I'd taken in game four of the conference final that I hadn't realized she'd clocked, which she had, and which she wanted to talk about with the kind of detail that meant she'd watched the tape and rewatched it.

Then she asked about this season. Not the championship. This one. The one we were standing in the middle of, where we'd come out of the gate as defending champions and spent November playing like a team that had left something somewhere in the summer and couldn't remember the room it was in.

She had the numbers better than I did. She knew we'd dropped four of six. She knew the goals-against had crept up half a goal a night. She knew I personally hadn't put one in the net in three weeks, and that I'd been on the ice for two against in the Phoenix loss that I should have killed and hadn't. She didn't say any of it like an accusation. She said it like a woman trying to understand a thing she was watching come apart at the edges, which was her whole job, and which was also, I was realizing, the most honest anybody had looked straight at my season in a long time.

"You are pressing," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I am pressing," I said.

She didn't ask me why. She was too good to ask me why in a kitchen where she already knew the answer was sitting across the island from her in wet hair and my shirt. She wrote something down. I let her.