Danielle
She thought making her lack of interest clear would stop Andrew from showing up at her place of work for the rest of his time in Lake Placid.
Apparently, she was wrong.
Because, standing outside the bookshop at eight fifty-five on the dot the next morning, dog sitting beside him on his leash, is a six-foot-three hockey player with a ‘can’t take no for an answer’ smile on his face.
She’ll give it to him, at least it’s not a “ won’t take no for an answer”. Those are two very separate things. She thinks if she keeps telling him no, he’ll take the hint, which is better than a lot of people who’ve come knocking on her door for a scrap of attention .
Small towns tend to have… limited options after a certain age, and she was one of the few single women left.
Andrew is also holding two iced coffees in his hands, and any coffee she doesn’t have to make is a good cup of coffee.
“Is there a reason you’re here so early?” she asks, after she’s flipped the lock and opened the door for the day.
“Coffee?” he asks, extending the cup to her. “I wasn’t sure how you take it, but I have cream and sugar in my truck.”
“I also have an entire coffee bar,” she says, raising a brow.
“I’m allowed to be nice,” he replies with a shrug. He extends the coffee to her again, and his dog tilts his head at her.
She looks him up and down, eyes the coffee in his hand, waits another three seconds, and then takes the coffee from him. He releases a breath and she can see the nervous tension leave his shoulders.
“Am I allowed to come in?” he asks, gesturing inside the store. “Or are you going to make me leave? ”
“I can’t turn a customer away unless they’re doing something illegal,” she says, stepping aside. “Are you looking for anything in particular? Newspaper? Magazine?... A book?”
“Thanks for saying that last one with hesitation,” Andrew says, rolling his eyes. He points to the sign on the door. “Heard you’re hiring, and, as luck would have it, I’m looking for a summer job.”
She almost drops the cup he’s just handed her.
“You?” she asks, eyes gone wide. “A summer job? You ?”
“Can’t I do a job that doesn’t involve hockey skates?” he asks. “I’ll have you know that when I was in college I worked at the dining hall on campus in the off-season. How different can it be?”
“Now that I would pay to see,” she says, feeling a crack in the walls she’s built as she smiles. “What makes you want to apply for the job?”
“Well,” Andrew says, watching her as she moves behind the counter and adds two pumps of caramel and two pumps of vanilla to her coffee.
“I haven’t had the easiest time, and Coach Landry told me to find what’s important in life.
I think that getting back to simple might be helpful. And I could boost sales. ”
He folds his arms over his chest, giving her a downright sinful view of his biceps, and she meets his eyes to avoid staring.
“How so?”
“Come on,” he says, “people in this town are already talking about the ‘hockey player staying at Jet’s’. I’d be a draw, and you know it.”
“Have any sales experience?”
“I figure if I’ve seen the worst of humanity – drunk college kids – I can learn sales,” he replies, earnestly. She dumps milk into her coffee and turns back towards him.
“Starting rate is fifteen dollars an hour,” she says, “before taxes. Is that alright with you?”
“Honestly, I would do it for free,” he replies.
She was expecting him to say something about the thirty-seven million dollars he’s slated to bring home by the end of next year. Erick had told her when he had showed up at her house this morning so he could do drop-off duty.
She had gotten out of there before he could bombard her with stats and a full player profile.
“That’s illegal. ”
“Fifteen is fine,” he says quickly, then he looks at his dog. “Can I bring Roscoe? He’s kind of… an Emotional Support Animal. I can show you his papers and bring his harness, if you want.”
Her eyes widen slightly, that being the last thing that she thought he would say. She knew that ESAs were a thing, but she can’t imagine why someone with the world at their feet would need one.
There’s more to this man than meets the eye.
“The store is dog friendly,” she says with a shrug, “as long as he doesn’t bother customers, I don’t see why not.”
“Roscoe loves people so much, he’ll probably become the mascot before I leave,” Andrew says with a grin. “Can I start today?”
“Is that why you brought coffee?” she asks. “To bribe me into giving you a job?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“Well played, Fisher,” she replies, “well played.”
She leaves Andrew to fend for himself an hour later, after teaching him where everything is and tells him he can yell for her if he has any problems. It’s a Thursday, which is normally a quiet day in the summer, so she doesn’t anticipate anything going wrong.
At least not this early in the morning.
She thinks that Andrew has already met her more insane customers already, just in the minimal time he’s spent at the store.
The brothers have already taken to calling him ‘the grizzly bear demonrat’ because of how long his hair is, and Dan, the café guy, had looked up from his laptop and given him the nod.
Small wins with the population of Lake Placid.
Danielle sits behind her desk in the office, computer screen glowing in the low light she keeps.
She’s always liked a chill space, even if it makes her sleepy in the mornings sometimes.
There’s inventory to be ordered, taxes to pay for the month, and it’s Harper’s last day of school so Erick is picking her up and bringing her to the store after.
Then they’re going to go to the cemetery, at Harper’s request, so that she can see her parents and tell them who she got for a teacher.
Danielle doesn’t have the heart to tell her that they can’t hear her, and honestly, suspending her own disbelief is the only way she’s been able to find any comfort in the last two weeks since they’ve been gone .
The school had suggested a child psychologist for Harper, just to help her handle the trauma of it all, and they have their first appointment next week.
Today will be Danielle’s first time back to the cemetery since the funeral. She thinks, no, she knows , she’s still waiting for all of this to be a joke.
Once Harper has talked to her parents, and they’ve had dinner, she’s going to stay overnight at Erick’s. He has the next day off and requested some uncle-niece time and Danielle didn’t have the heart to say no when two days off in a row for him are few and far between.
Danielle puts some lo-fi music on, pulls up her inventory order form, and locks in. Denial isn’t just a place in Egypt, it’s her new home address, and pushing it away with work is the only think that keeps her above water.
A knock on her door interrupts her process, and she looks at the clock before looking up. She’s been looking at her screen for two hours.
Cara is standing, arms folded over her chest, in the door. “What is Andrew Fisher doing running the register right now? ”
“I don’t even get a hello?” Danielle asks. “That’s rude.”
“Sorry. Hi.” Cara says. “What’s Andrew Fisher doing running the register right now?”
“I hired him for the summer.”
“You what ?”
“You heard me,” Danielle says, “are you going to question my decisions, or are you going to do your job? We needed an extra staff member. That sign has been up for months. He asked, I said yes.”
“Does he even know how to stock a shelf?”
“That’s going to be what I teach him tomorrow,” Danielle says, “he’s getting register down today, and it’s quiet. It’s not like he can set the place on fire.”
“When people find out he’s working here, he just might,” Cara says, “I know you don’t pay much attention to the NHL but his situation is… precarious at best. People might start coming to pick a fight.”
“If it gets to that point, I’ll leave,” Andrew says, appearing behind Cara. She goes white as a sheet and turns slowly, eyes wide, to stare at Andrew.
Honestly, it serves her right, talking behind his back.
“I didn’t mean to— ”
“It’s fine,” he says, firmly, but Danielle can see a shake in his hands that wasn’t there earlier this morning. Roscoe trails up beside him, sitting down so Andrew can run a hand over his ears. “I take it you’re not a fan?”
Danielle’s gaze shifts from Andrew’s face to the dog, and back again. Pieces beginning to line up, but not quite click into place yet.
“Like I would tell you if I was,” Cara says, glaring.
“Is there something I should know?” Danielle asks, turning back towards Cara.
“You didn’t Google him?” Cara asks. “He’s the captain of one of the top teams in the league, and he—”
“Why would I Google him?” Danielle asks.
“If it’s all the same,” Andrew asks, “if you haven’t, I’d rather you didn’t. I can tell you what you need to know.”
“You should at least prepare her for the worst,” Cara spits, Raleigh accent mixing with something foreign in her anger. Russian, maybe?
Danielle shakes her head, focusing on Andrew again .
“There a lot of things, that you should probably be aware of,” Andrew says, looking at Danielle. “Just know that if it gets to the point where people start coming here just to harass me, I’ll leave. I know that this is a place of business.”
“Whatever Cara is worried about won’t be a problem,” Danielle says, “as long as you’re not a criminal—”
“In some circles, he is—” Cara mutters.
“— which seems unlikely,” Danielle says, voice firm so she can put an end to… whatever this is. “I’m not concerned. Now, if the two of you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to doing my job while you both do yours.”
“Yes ma’am,” Andrew says, saluting and heading back out to the sales floor, Roscoe trotting along next to him.
Cara hangs back.
“You should probably Google him,” she says.
“Anything else?” Danielle asks, raising a brow.
Cara shakes her head no, and follows the path Andrew just took to the sales floor. Danielle sighs, rests her head in her hands, and glances up at the picture of she and Emerson she has on her desk .
“You’ve been gone two weeks and this is what my life has become,” Danielle says to the picture, annoyed. “It’s like you want to keep me on my toes.”
She has to go clean out their house at some point. She just can’t bring herself to do it when Erick is living there, for the time being. Erick had already packed up Harper’s stuff and brought it to her house, moving her in and trying to adapt her to their new normal.
Her curiosity about Andrew is piqued, so she decides she can take a ten-minute break, and do something she never thought she would: listen to Cara and Google him.
She types his name into the search bar, clicks onto the ‘news tab’ and her screen is instantly flooded with NHL reports, scouting reports, opinion pieces, and gossip articles.
There’s so much she doesn’t know where to begin, so she clicks onto a recent podcast episode of a show called Pucks Away .
“Andrew Fisher from North Carolina has gone virtually off the grid,” one of the hosts says, voice tinny as it comes through the speakers. “No one has seen him since that disaster of a performance in June. ”
“Well, Brad,” a second host says, “he’s probably sick of people talking about him.”
“Agreed, Chad,” Brad says, “but it’s all anyone wants to talk about, because it’s still fresh.”
“Or he got sent to an AHL team for the off-season.”
“Sending him to the AHL without a trade negotiation coming through the pipeline? Seems a little unlikely.”
“And we have to take into account fan conduct, as well,” Chad says. “They broke about eighty NHL Code of Conduct rules at the Stanley Cup Finals.”
“And the blow-out has been a little much,” Brad replies.
“A little much?” Chad says with a laugh, “it was Beckham missing that last goal for England bad.”
“You have to wonder when enough is enough,” Brad says, “we know the trading window is open, we know that he’s MIA, and we know that him missing the goal to tie made his team lose the Stanley Cup. At what point are we just talking to talk?”
“And at what point does it make him less than human?” Chad asks. “Poor guy had a good reason to run, if you ask me. ”
“He thinks lost them the Stanley Cup?” Danielle asks, clicking a new tab open and searching for the footage. She finds the clip easily, and watches the play over and over again.
The shot had gone wide, there was no doubt about that, but how could they say he lost them the Cup when all it would have done was put them in overtime? How could anyone think that when they would have had plenty of chances to lose during that five minutes.
No one could have known what would have happened. For the hockey world to continue to talk about this for almost a month was a lot.
As if echoing her thoughts, Chad comes over her speakers.
“I mean, really, the guy needs a break,” he says, “I know that fans are still mad and wanting a trade, but no one could have predicted what would have happened if they had gone into overtime. They could have still lost.”
“And his stats aren’t bad enough to justify trading him,” Brad says. “He’s still one of the leading defenders in the league. I think once everyone has a little more time to cool off, they’ll see that Carolina is definitely better for having him on their team. ”
“Aunt D!” Danielle hears Harper call through the store, followed by her running footsteps.
“Hey Sparrow!” Danielle says with a grin, holding her arms out for the little girl to crash into.
She has a huge smile on her face, which is a lot different from what Danielle has grown used to in the past few weeks. Harper pulls out of her arms, practically bouncing up and down in excitement.
“I got Mrs. DeLisle for first grade!” She says. “She’s my favorite !”
“You want to know a secret?” Danielle says, leaning in close and dropping her voice to a whisper. Harpers eyes widen, and she leans close.
“Yeah!” she whispers back.
“She was me and your mom’s favorite teacher, too.”
Harper’s eyes go wide. “Really?”
“Really,” Danielle nods. “And Uncle Erick’s. And your dad’s.”
“The whole family has had her as their teacher?” Harper asks. Danielle nods again. “She’s going to be so excited to have more of us! Can we go tell mom now?”
Danielle clears her throat and puts on a shaky smile. “Sure, Sparrow. We can go right now.”