33. The Call
Chapter thirty-three
The Call
Emma
J ennifer Walsh has a voice like a woman who’s spent thirty years in rooms full of men and learned to take up space without raising her volume.
“Ms. Cole, I appreciate you taking my call on short notice.”
I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed with wet hair and a half-eaten granola bar and the kind of under-eye circles that suggest I’ve been sleeping approximately never.
It’s Monday afternoon. Sixteen hours since the championship.
Twenty-four since I stopped refreshing the post that started this fire, mostly because Sloane physically confiscated my phone for six hours and replaced it with a pint of ice cream and a documentary about penguins.
“Of course, Ms. Walsh.”
“Jennifer, please.” A pause that feels intentional. “I’m going to be direct with you, Emma, because I think you’ve earned that. I’ve seen the social media post circulating about your program.”
My granola bar suddenly tastes like sawdust.
“I’ve also reviewed your game film from Sunday. Four goals in a conference championship is difficult to accomplish under any circumstance. Doing it under the kind of scrutiny you were facing tells me more about your character than any scouting report could.”
I don’t know what to say to that. So I say nothing. Let her continue .
“The Olympic committee evaluates athletes on what they do on the ice. Period. We don’t make roster decisions based on anonymous internet speculation, and we certainly don’t penalize women for having personal lives that other people find inconvenient.
” Another pause. Longer this time. “I’ve spent my career in this sport watching talented women get sidelined by narratives they didn’t author. I won’t contribute to that.”
Something cracks behind my sternum. Not the painful kind. Something warmer. Like sunlight finding a crack in a wall.
“That said.” Her tone shifts. Still warm, but with an edge that reminds me she runs an Olympic program, not a support group.
“I need athletes who can handle the spotlight without creating distractions for the team. Whatever your personal situation involves, I trust you to manage it with the same discipline you showed yesterday. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No qualifier.
“Good.” And now I can hear her smiling. “Then I’d like to formally invite you to the U.S. Women’s Hockey Development Camp this June at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid. You’ll receive the official paperwork by end of week, but I wanted you to hear it from me first.”
My hand is shaking. The one holding the phone. The same hand that scored four goals without trembling once, because apparently my body has decided that athletic excellence is manageable but receiving life-altering phone calls while sitting in pajamas is cause for a full neurological event.
“I… Thank you. I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t.” Then, lighter: “Ms. Kowalski should expect a similar call within the hour. I trust you can keep that to yourself until then?”
The laugh that escapes is the first real one in days. “You’re asking if I can keep a secret from Sloane Kowalski.”
“Is that a problem?”
“She has the intuition of a bloodhound and zero respect for closed doors, but I’ll do my best.”
Walsh laughs. A real one. The sound of a woman who remembers being twenty-one and hungry and surrounded by people who underestimated her. “I look forward to working with you, Emma. Enjoy the accomplishment. You’ve earned it.”
She hangs up. I set the phone on the mattress. Stare out the window at nothing and everything.
Olympic development camp .
Team USA.
I give myself forty-five seconds to feel the accomplishment. The enormity. The relief. The specific, dizzying joy of a dream you’ve been too scared to name out loud suddenly calling your phone on a Monday afternoon and saying your name.
Then I pick up the phone and call Sloane.
She answers on the first ring. “Tell me.”
“I can’t. Walsh said—”
“Emma Catherine Cole, if you called me just to tell me you can’t tell me something, I will come upstairs and—”
“We’re going to Lake Placid.”
Silence. One full second of Sloane being completely, utterly silent, which might be a first in recorded history.
Then a scream that I’m fairly certain shatters a window one floor down.
“WE’RE GOING TO THE OLYMPICS!”
“Development camp. Not the Olympics yet—”
“SAME THING. EMMA. SAME THING.”
She’s crying. I can hear it underneath the screaming.
And then I’m crying too, because the girl who showed up in August with stick superstitions and zero filter and enough confidence to power a small nation just became my Olympic teammate, and the joy of that is so clean, so uncomplicated, so free from every tangled, painful, beautiful thing that’s happened in the last seventy-two hours that I hold onto it like a raft.
“We did it,” I whisper.
“Damn right we did.” She sniffs. Hard. As if she's aggressively rejecting her own tears. “Now get your ass downstairs so I can hug you before I spontaneously combust.”
Sloane gets the call. Tells Sky and Rowan, who tell everyone, and within thirty minutes our living room is full again.
Different energy this time. Not the cautious solidarity of yesterday morning.
Pure, deafening, joyful chaos. Katya produces a bottle of something Polish that she claims is “celebratory” and tastes like lighter fluid mixed with ambition.
Emery attempts to give a toast and starts happy-crying before she finishes the first sentence.
Becca sits beside me on the couch during a lull.
“Walsh called you directly?”
“Yeah.”
“Not through Calloway. Not through Addison.” She lets that sit. Turns her water glass in her hands. “Someone gave her your personal number.”
I look at her. She looks back. Neither of us says his name, but it fills the space between us anyway. The man on administrative leave who couldn’t speak to me from his own bench but apparently still found a way to hand-deliver my future to the one person who could secure it.
Infuriating. Devoted. Impossible man.
“You should go,” Becca says simply.
“I’m celebrating with my team.”
“You’ve been celebrating with your team. Now go celebrate with the person who made sure that phone rang.”
Have I mentioned I love my captain?
I don’t text first. Don’t call. Don’t announce myself.
Just drive to Building C, unit 21B, at 9 PM on a Monday with nothing in my hands and everything on the line, and knock.
The door opens faster than it should, which means he was either close to it or has maintained that supernatural proximity sensor that activates whenever I’m within a fifty-foot radius.
Luke looks like he hasn’t slept since the last time I saw him sleep, which was in this apartment, in his bed, wrapped around me, three days and an entire lifetime ago. Gray t-shirt. Sweats. Hair doing that thing where it sticks up in six directions because he’s been running his hands through it.
But his eyes. When they find mine, something happens in them that I don’t have a word for. Relief isn’t big enough. Joy isn’t accurate enough. It’s the look of a man who’s been holding his breath underwater and just broke the surface .
“Walsh called,” I say from the doorway.
“I know.”
“You gave her my number.”
He doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t explain. Doesn’t deploy the justification I know he’s already built in his head about how a reference call technically falls within the scope of his professional obligations. And providing contact information for a player being scouted is standard practice regardless of—
“You gave her my number,” I repeat. “While you’re on leave. While you’re under review. While some lawyer somewhere is probably drafting a list of things you shouldn’t be doing. You picked up the phone and made sure my dream didn’t get lost in the bureaucratic chaos of our consequences.”
“It was a phone number, Em. Not a felony.”
“It was you. Being you. Putting me first when you should be putting yourself first for once in your—”
“Can you come inside before you deliver the rest of this speech in the hallway where Mrs. Patterson can hear you? She might start drafting a note. With bullet points this time.”
I step inside. The door closes. And I don’t kiss him.
Not yet.
Because there are things to say first. Things that matter more than the ache in my body that’s been building since Saturday when I watched him walk away from the people he considers family.
“Lake Placid,” I tell him. “June first. Sloane too.”
He nods.
“Walsh said something,” I continue, sitting on the arm of his couch. Casual, like I’m not vibrating out of my skin. “About women being sidelined by narratives they didn’t author. About not penalizing athletes for having personal lives.”
“Sounds like Walsh.”
“You’ve talked to her more than once, haven’t you?”
A beat. “She called last week. Off the record. We ended up talking for a while.” He leans against the kitchen counter.
The same location where I told him my chapstick was strawberry flavored and watched his soul leave his body.
“She asked how you handle pressure. I told her you handled it better than any athlete I’ve coached. Sunday proved that to be true.”
He crosses his arms, anchoring. “Walsh is smart, Em. She’s not going to let a gossip account override two decades of scouting experience. She saw you play. Saw how you reacted when you could have crumbled. Instead, you used it to push harder.”
I want to touch him. The wanting is a physical thing, separate from thought, operating on a frequency that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with the fact that this man is standing in his kitchen looking wrecked and proud and mine, and I haven’t been close enough to feel his heartbeat in three days.
“What happens now?” I ask. “With you. The review. All of it.”