Chapter 10 #2
Olivia texted from Dallas during lunch.
Hope your problem player is less of a problem today.
I stared at the message longer than necessary.
He’s working, I typed back.
That was safe. That was true.
Her reply came with a small heart. Good. You sound better when you have something to fix.
It should have made me smile.
Instead, it exposed something hollow.
Across the building, I passed Tessa outside the media room as she adjusted the schedule with one hand and held a coffee in the other.
“Holloway’s girlfriend is here for the afternoon content piece,” she said.
I stopped walking.
Only for a fraction of a second. Tessa noticed anyway because Tessa noticed weather changes in other people’s blood pressure.
“Vanessa?” I asked, because pretending I did not know her name would be pathetic.
“She’s early. Very polished. Very aware of lighting. She asked if Jace was still in treatment.”
“And?”
“I said I don’t track players medically for girlfriends, which was rude enough to be true and polite enough to keep my job.”
I looked through the glass.
Vanessa stood near the backdrop in a fitted coat, phone in hand, hair perfect, face composed in a way that looked practiced but not cruel. Jace came down the hall a moment later, still in team sweats. She smiled when she saw him.
He smiled back.
A real smile, but delayed. A beat late.
She touched his arm. He let her. He leaned in when she spoke. He was trying. I could see it, and that made the burn under my ribs worse, not better.
He was trying to stay in the life he already had.
So was I.
I walked away before he saw me watching.
By late afternoon, the building had thinned out. Meetings ended. Players scattered. Tiny had spent most of the day in my office after a vet appointment Benny had insisted required “emotional support staff,” which apparently meant my entire coaching room feeding him treats while claiming not to.
I found Jace in the video room just after five.
Alone.
The screen showed the same clip from the morning, paused at the moment before his release. He had a notepad open, two empty coffee cups nearby, and the exhausted stillness of someone who had hyper-focused past hunger, time, and common sense.
He turned when I came in.
“I was just leaving.”
“No, you weren’t.”
He glanced at the clock and flinched. “Shit.”
“When did you eat?”
His face did the thing people’s faces did when the answer was inconvenient.
“Holloway.”
“Breakfast.”
I took one breath through my nose. “Pack up.”
“I want to finish this.”
“You’re finished.”
“It’s five more minutes.”
“It won’t be.”
He pushed a hand through his hair. “I’m not screwing around. I’m trying to get it right.”
“I know.”
“Then let me finish.”
The words came out sharper than he intended. He knew it immediately. His eyes dropped, then lifted again, fighting himself in real time.
I stepped farther into the room and closed the door behind me.
The click was soft.
Jace heard it like a gunshot.
The room was suddenly too small for both of us.
No rink glass. No players. No plausible reason for the way his attention dragged over me and stuck.
My hands, when I set my folder on the table.
My forearms, the tattoos exposed below my sleeves.
My mouth, for one dangerous second before he forced his eyes back to mine.
I noticed every inch of that noticing.
“You did get it right,” I said.
His breathing changed. “Not all of it.”
“Enough for today.”
“That’s not how my head works.”
“I’m aware.”
“No, you’re not.” He stood, too fast, chair legs scraping.
“You think because you can say a thing and I listen, that means it’s handled.
It’s not handled. I’ll go home and keep seeing the clip anyway.
I’ll lie in bed and fix it six different ways and forget three things I’m actually supposed to do tomorrow because this one thing is still open. ”
The honesty stripped the irritation out of me.
I kept my voice level. “Then write down the next step.”
He stared.
“Not all six. One. The next action for tomorrow.”
His throat moved. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
He looked like he wanted to argue because it was too simple, because simple did not mean easy, because his brain was already trying to outrun the instruction.
But he sat.
He wrote one line.
Show low before delay. Wait for Lowell’s possession.
The handwriting was rougher than this morning.
He capped the pen and looked up at me.
The air between us had no safe place to go.
I should have opened the door. I should have told him to leave, gone home, called Olivia, fed Tiny, remembered the shape of my own life.
Instead, I stood there.
Jace’s gaze dropped to my hand again. Not long. Long enough.
I felt it like contact.
“You gave me Lowell today,” he said quietly.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because he trusts how you see the ice.”
“That’s not the real answer.”
“It’s part of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
I looked at him across the table, at the guarded set of his mouth, at the need he hated showing and could not fully hide.
“Because I knew you would take care of it.”
He inhaled once, slow and unsteady.
No praise had ever hit him like that. I knew it with a certainty that made my chest tight.
For a moment neither of us moved.
Then Tiny barked from my office down the hall, deep and offended, probably because someone had closed a door between him and possible snacks.
The sound broke the room just enough.
Jace let out a breath that almost became a laugh. “He always like that?”
“Worse.”
“Figures.”
I opened the door.
He gathered his notebook, but he did not leave immediately. He stopped beside me, close enough that I could smell cold air on his hoodie and the faint bite of soap from the showers. Close enough that if either of us shifted wrong, it would become something neither of us could explain.
His eyes met mine.
There was no confusion in them now.
Fear, yes. Guilt. Want, sharp enough to be a problem.
But not confusion.
I kept my hands at my sides.
He did the same.
“Eat dinner,” I said.
His mouth parted, then closed. He nodded once.
“Set an alarm for tomorrow before you leave the parking lot.”
“I will.”
“Not when you get home. Before.”
Another nod. “Okay.”
He walked out.
I stayed in the doorway and listened to his footsteps recede, then to Tiny whining from my office like he had been abandoned in a war.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Olivia.
Call when you’re home?
I looked down at the message until the screen dimmed.
Then I looked at the empty hallway where Jace had been.
For the first time, I did not try to file what was happening under coaching, discipline, responsibility, or any other clean word.
I wanted him to listen because it helped him.
I wanted him to listen because it satisfied something in me I had not known was starving.
And standing there with my wife waiting on the other end of the phone and Jace’s obedience still alive in the room, I finally understood that the line I had been drawing for him was now under my own feet.