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A second folder lands on the first. "Your first project is the one who has cost us the most this month."

I know before I open it. My whole body knows, the way it always knows when he's in the room.

I open the folder. Jax stares up at me from a press photo, gray eyes flat for the cameras, the club girl blurred at his shoulder, a headline howling underneath.

"He's one bad week from torching a nine-figure deal that helps the league and him." Denise folds her hands. "Fix him. Or we lose the money." Now she smiles, and there’s nothing warm in it anywhere. "Your first meeting will be in the video room after his practice drills. You start today."

TODAY.

That grinning, model-dating disaster… he knew.

Chapter 2: Jax

"All rise for the Honorable Jax Hunter, patron saint of lost causes and league fines."

Ryker's voice carries across the locker room, pitched to reach the last row of a sold-out barn, and half the guys look up from their stalls to enjoy my sentencing.

He drops onto the bench beside me and holds up his phone, where a loop of me dropping the gloves last night plays under a swell of opera, some soprano nailing a high note every time my fist lands.

Ryker with his black hair, green eyes, and a cocky grin he was born with enjoying the media frenzy. "Four million views. Jax you're art now. You're culture."

"I'm a role model." I peel the tape off my knuckles and the split reopens, a bright clean sting. "Kids look up to me."

"Kids should run."

Aiden doesn't look up from taping his stick in the corner, our captain, patient as a man defusing a bomb. "The Torres thing was a good fight. Wrong place but right reason. I understand why you did it." He bites the tape clean. "But it costs you being benched for two games and you got sent to the woman you refer to as your 'favorite enemy' in the ops department."

Three stalls down, Torres gives me a nod he doesn't have the words to fill. His kid's got a stutter, and a Minnesota winger decided that was material on national television, and I decided it wasn't.

I'd do it again and hum while I do it. Some things are worth the fine.

The tabloids won't run that part. They like me one way, shirtless and stupid, and I quit correcting them somewhere around my third season.

I open my locker, and there it is. A photo curling at one corner.

Cade and me and Margot on the dock at the lake house, caught mid-laugh in a photo my parents took years ago, her head thrown back, her face lit up. Just beautiful.

Cade sent it to me years ago and I printed it, and I have never admitted, to him or to a soul in this room, which Callahan I keep it for.

I have two pictures. This one, curling at the corner from seasons of me touching it, and another I keep at home. That one I framed.

Cade dropped her graduation picture in his Boston group chat, just a proud brother running his mouth. GRADUATE, he wrote under it. My baby sister, smarter than all of us put together, off to conquer the world, don't tell her I said it.

Twenty guys from the team hit it with a thumbs-up and went straight back to arguing about a trade.

I read the rest of what Cade typed and felt the floor shift.

She'd taken a job. Out of state. Packing up her whole life and moving away, out of the orbit I'd spent years pretending I didn't want her in.

Moving to a new state, meant a new life and probably a relationship that will lead to marriage. I’ll never see her again. Not really.

I saved the photo to my phone. Margot in a crooked cap, diploma crushed to her chest, head thrown all the way back laughing at something off camera, so purely, stupidly happy it did something to my heart.

And I couldn't stand the idea of her being gone with nothing left to remind me of her.

So I stood in a drugstore at night like a lunatic, feeding a photo kiosk a picture of my best friend's little sister. It would be the only thing I have of her.

I framed it and I set it on my mantle, next to my mom, the team, and everyone I love.