Chapter 7
Present Day
I’m aware that most women my age don’t leave home the way I did—by leaving a vague note about my New York plans on Mom’s kitchen table and sneaking out of town with my clothes and skating gear.
That’s what I did, though. My overbearing mother was on a business trip to Paris, and my stealthy exit bought me a five-day reprieve from her probing questions and sharp comments.
But now I know the exact moment she arrives back home in Massachusetts, because that’s when she starts blowing up my phone.
Zoe, what have you done.
New York? Really?
Which team? Brooklyn?
It’s not HIS team, is it?
It’s only eight thirty a.m., and there’s no way she’ll leave me alone unless I talk to her. So I sit back down on the mattress—my only piece of furniture—and I call her.
“Zoe!” she gasps when she answers the phone. “Where are you?”
“In my new apartment,” I say crisply. “I got a job, as I mentioned.”
“This job,” she sniffs. “Is it full-time? With benefits? Was there a signing bonus? New York is expensive. Is there corporate housing? Where did you find to live in such a hurry?”
I glance around my tiny, drafty New York apartment and flinch. If she could see this place, I’d never hear the end of it. “I signed a lease. The building is close to the Legends’ headquarters.”
She gasps again.
I roll my eyes. “Mom, that’s who was hiring. What do you care which team it is?”
“Because of him. He destroyed you.”
“Are you referring to Chase Merritt?” I ask, rolling my eyes. “Can you not even say his name?”
“Why should I?” she demands. “You cried for months after he left. Your skating suffered. And it’s all his fault.”
Her facts aren’t exactly wrong, but the emphasis is odd. She remembers how my skating suffered. Not how I suffered.
Yet I don’t argue the point, because trusting a nineteen-year-old guy to love me forever was something I did to myself. “There are two dozen guys on this team, Mom. I’ll barely see him.” Especially since he’s avoiding me.
“Still,” she grumbles. “There must be better jobs.”
This, too, is hard to argue at the moment, so I change the subject. “How was your trip? Any good meals?”
“The meals were a challenge. Too much butter in everything.”
My mother, ladies and gentlemen—always a hater, even of Parisian food.
And she’s not done with me yet. “This contract you signed with the Legends—did you have Bruce look at it?”
Just hearing my ex’s name makes my stomach twist. “Of course not. It’s not his kind of contract. And I don’t talk to him unless I have to.”
“That’s a shame,” she says. “He’s a tough negotiator.”
This is accurate. He’s a cutthroat sports agent—that’s how we met. Except Bruce would never help me get a job in hockey. In fact, he’s blowing up my email inbox right now trying to get me to headline a skating show in development in Las Vegas.
We’re divorced, though, so I don’t have to read his emails. And unlike my mother, he’s not allowed to text me.
“Hey, Mom? I actually have to go. I have my first one-on-one training sessions today. We start in half an hour.” This excuse has the benefit of being true, so I get up off the mattress and reach for my Legends jacket.
“Oh!” she says, because my mother hates tardiness almost as much as she hates hockey. “We’ll talk soon, then. I need to see this new apartment of yours.”
I glance around the empty room again, picturing the face she’d make if she saw this place. She’d complain about how cold it is, and she’d be apoplectic about my lack of furniture.
Nope. She definitely can’t visit. “I’m really busy with the new job, but we’ll see how things shape up in a few weeks.”
“Weeks?”
I put her off by promising twice that I’ll call her tomorrow. Then I hang up and head outside.
Even if my apartment is terrible, my commute is not. It’s a ten-minute walk. As I turn toward the river, the Legends complex, with its glass and sharp angles, gleams like a modernist jewel in the wintry morning light.
Foot traffic thins as I approach the building on the corner where Eleventh Avenue becomes the West Side Highway. After pushing through the revolving doors, I scan my shiny new Legends ID at the turnstile.
Beep! The light turns green, and I feel a little thrum of victory. From there, I get on the escalator and ride toward the smaller rinks upstairs. I’ve booked sixty minutes of ice time for this morning, because the only guys who scheduled sessions with me are Eric Tremaine and one other player.
I hope Tremaine is bringing some of his buddies, as we discussed. Either way, I’m going to have to make another round of calls and emails and nag these guys to book their sessions.
Upstairs, I pause in the staff locker corridor to pull out my skates and stash my gym bag.
The lockers are made of oak, and they give off the vibe of a high-end spa.
There’s a palatial women’s bathroom available as well.
“And nobody ever goes in there,” Darcy told me.
“So it’s basically all yours.” It’s the one perk of being the only woman on the coaching staff.
I head into the smaller practice rink, where I change into a pair of Bauer Vapor hockey skates that set me back almost eight hundred bucks. But a girl has to look the part.
On the adjacent rink, the goalies are practicing with their skills coach. Pucks thwack steadily off the players’ sticks and the goalpost pipes. This is the soundtrack of my life—the crisp, clean scrape of steel against the ice and the rumble of the Zamboni. I love it.
After I retired from figure skating, I thought I’d never go back to a rink. I thought about college. I looked for a program that would fill me with a new kind of passion—one where I could use my brain and not my body.
But it didn’t take. Instead, I kept peering at coaching programs and ultimately found a new way to love skating—one without the soul-crushing anxiety of trying to be a perfect ice princess. Now I’m a different kind of skating nerd, one who isn’t the main character.
That’s the idea, anyway. I check the time and pray that Tremaine hasn’t forgotten our meeting.
At nine on the dot, though, he appears. “Morning, Coach!” he calls out, giving me a wave as he sits down to lace up his skates.
“Morning!” I paste on a smile and stride out onto the ice for a warm-up lap. I need to be sharp. If this session goes well, Tremaine can help me convince the rest of the roster that a session with me is both useful and interesting.
But hey, no pressure.
Tremaine steps onto the glistening oval a couple of minutes later.
He pushes off on powerful legs and takes a warm-up lap, and I snap into coach mode.
Long stride. Smooth transitions. His upper body is relaxed, while his legs do most of the work.
A textbook stance that stabilizes his center of gravity.
As I catalog his technique, I relax by a fraction of a degree. Because I know how to do this job. I have a lot to offer—I just need a chance to make my point. And this is it. I have thirty minutes to impress the captain with my deep knowledge and sparkling personality.
He finishes his lap and skates toward me. “Hey, Coach Carson. I asked a few guys to join us. But we got back pretty late last night, so I didn’t make it mandatory.”
My heart drops. “No problem.” I grab a stack of cones and drop a couple of them on the ice. “I thought we’d start with a simple dexterity drill to get the blood flowing.”
“Sure,” he says. “Anything you want.”
I hastily set up a row of cones down one side, and then another one for the journey back. “I’d like you to take this in a U shape—down and around, then up again.” And I give him a brief explanation of the pattern I want him to skate around the cones.
“Got it,” he says easily. He’s been doing drills like this since before he put away his teddy bears.
“Awesome. Ready… set… go.”
And as soon as Tremaine moves, I push off, too, heading around the course from the other corner.
At first he doesn’t realize that I’m skating in parallel. But even as I power down the course, I clock the moment he notices. That slight twist of his head, and the sideways glance.
After a beat, his gaze snaps back to the task at hand. He tucks his chin down and focuses all his energy on the job of maneuvering his large body back and forth around the cones, like a slalom skier.
He’s got a long stride and smooth edgework, powered by two of the strongest legs in the Eastern Conference. But this drill doesn’t favor speed—it favors precision. That’s why I’m able to keep pace with him as we hit the first turnaround and start back down the ice.
I make the second turn with him, too. And the third. I’m a foot shorter than he is, and I’d bet cash money that he didn’t miss that. No professional hockey player wants to be bested by a girl half his size.
And yup. His competitive urge kicks in, and he shifts into a higher gear, pulling ahead of me on the fourth and final leg of the drill. I end up finishing about a half stride behind him.
Then he drops his hands to his knees and laughs. “Holy heck, Coach. You got wheels.”
And now I’m preening inside. “First of all, call me Zoe. And secondly, I’ll never ask you to do a drill that I can’t do myself.”
But we both know this was a setup. I’m wearing black hockey skates just like his. And I picked an exercise where I could impress him, because I need him to understand I didn’t come here to play.
“All right, Coach Zoe,” he says, aiming a stealthy glance at the big clock on the wall. “Point made. Now what do you want to work on? Or is this just a getting-to-know-you session?”
Skating up to him, I make a quick stop. “I watch a lot of tape, so I already know you’re one of the best skaters on the roster. And you don’t have many bad habits.”
I see the flicker of pride in his eyes, because literally everyone is susceptible to praise. “Does that mean we’re done here?”