15. Buzz #2
Lucy blinked once, and some of the tension in her face eased.
Sarah glanced at me. Her expression did not change, but something about it sharpened. Like she had just moved me to a different column in one of her mental spreadsheets. Great. That was probably bad.
Lucy moved to the next slide.
“Player expectations are straightforward. Arrive dressed in team-issued warmups. Personal skates and gear are required. Equipment services will have backups available if needed. No personal social media during the fan portion of the event unless cleared by PR. No joking about injuries. No staged content with minors unless their guardians have signed releases.”
“Standard,” I said.
Lucy’s eyes moved to mine. “I wasn’t finished.”
I closed my mouth.
Alois looked vaguely entertained, which on him meant one eyebrow moved half a millimeter.
Lucy continued. “The tone matters. This is not an autograph conveyor belt. It’s not about player visibility for the sake of brand optics. It’s supposed to feel like the organization showing up for families in Northbend without making those families feel like props.”
Something in the room quieted.
That was Lucy.
Not the polished operations voice.
Not Ezra’s daughter.
Not the woman who could turn a meeting packet into a weapon.
Her.
The girl who used to sit beside me in Betsy with her knees tucked under her, arguing that people were more interesting when they didn’t know they were being watched.
The girl who saw everything.
Alois’s gaze shifted to the screen, and for once, his face changed.
Not much.
But enough.
He understood something about this event that the rest of us didn’t yet.
Bea’s fingerprints, probably.
That woman could get Müller to walk into traffic if she asked softly enough.
Sarah looked at me. “Buzz, you’ll be assigned to Lucy for the duration of the event. She’ll manage your schedule, transitions, and any donor or family interaction that needs coordination.”
I should not have liked the sound of that.
Lucy looked like she liked it about as much as dental surgery. “Given the short turnaround,” she said, “I’ll need your full cooperation.”
“You’ll have it,” I replied, the words spilling over my lips too quickly.
Sarah looked at me again. Coach did too. Ezra’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in warning. More like he had finally noticed a sound in another room. Alois stared directly at the table.
Lucy adjusted her glasses. “Good.”
“One question,” Coach said.
Lucy turned toward him. “Yes?”
“Is Burns the right fit if the goal is controlled community interaction?”
I opened my mouth, mostly because defending myself was a reflex older than my NHL career.
Lucy beat me to it. “Yes.” She looked at Coach, not me. “Burns is good with people,” she went on. “He’s comfortable with fans, he knows how to keep energy light, and kids respond well to him. If expectations are clear, he’ll be fine.”
Not exactly a love letter. But, still, Lucy had defended me. Professionally. Carefully. With enough distance to preserve both of us. But she had defended me.
My throat went tight in a way I deeply resented.
Coach nodded slowly. “Fair enough.”
Sarah added, “His public engagement metrics are strong.”
I leaned back. “That is the sexiest thing anyone has ever said about me.”
“Do not make me regret defending you,” Lucy snapped without looking at me.
A laugh slipped around the table. Even Ezra smiled. For half a second, it felt easy in the way Lucy and I used to be, before we learned how badly two people could hurt each other by saying nothing.
Then Rawlings shifted again. “Has Bea confirmed Alois’s media parameters?” he asked.
Alois looked at him. Rawlings immediately reconsidered being alive.
Lucy answered smoothly. “Bea is handling Alois.”
Alois nodded once. “Yes.”
That was it. End of discussion.
I stared at Alois. “Must be nice to be that concise.”
“You should try it.”
“I’d hate to deprive the room.”
“We would survive.”
Coach laughed. Lucy looked down at her folder, but not before I caught the smallest pull at the corner of her mouth.
Sarah tapped her pen once. “Back to logistics.”
Lucy clicked to the next slide. The itinerary filled the screen, more detailed this time. Arrival times. Staff positions. Locker room access. Secondary rink entrances. Family hospitality table. Photo release check-in. Player warmup window.
Lucy spoke through it all with terrifying efficiency. But the strain was still there.
Lucy knew her work. She probably knew Charlotte’s work too, had rebuilt the whole damn thing from whatever emails remained and shared-drive scraps while the rest of us were sleeping.
Her pauses were too controlled. Her transitions were too clean. Her eyes kept skimming the page like she was tracking five problems ahead and trying not to show anyone the math.
I knew that look. I had seen it in high school when her mother forgot a parent meeting and Lucy pretended she hadn’t expected her to show anyway. I had seen it the night I let her walk away.
That was the thing about Lucy. When she was hurting, she got sharper. People mistook it for strength. It was strength. It just also cost her something.
“Buzz,” Sarah said.
I straightened. “Yep.”
“You’ll attend the walkthrough at two with Lucy. Secondary rink, family entrance, hospitality room, media boundary points, and the player movement route.”
“Got it.”
“No conflicts?”
“No.”
Coach looked at me again. “You have recovery blocked then.”
“I’ll move it.”
“Don’t move recovery,” Lucy said immediately. Every head turned toward her. She looked annoyed with herself for speaking so fast. Then she recovered. “We can adjust the walkthrough by thirty minutes. Player recovery should not be compromised for event logistics.”
Coach nodded, approving. “Good.”
Sarah made a note. I stared at Lucy because I enjoyed suffering.
She had said it without thinking.
Not because I was me.
Because I was a player.
Because she cared about the job.
Because she cared about doing things correctly.
Because some part of her, no matter how hard she tried to bury it, still paid attention to what my body needed after games and practices and travel weeks.
I wanted to say something.
That was the problem.
I always wanted to say something around Lucy.
The right thing.
The wrong thing.
Anything that might reach across all the years we had wasted pretending we were finished.
Instead, I said, “Appreciate it.”
Lucy’s eyes touched mine briefly. Something flickered there. Then she looked back at Sarah. “Two-thirty works.”
Sarah’s gaze moved slowly between us. “Two-thirty,” she said.
Alois stared at the ceiling like he was praying for strength. I kicked his shoe under the table. His eyes dropped to mine. That was a mistake. I looked away first because I enjoyed having a functioning body.
The meeting went another twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes of check-in procedures, parking passes, donor lists, minor consent forms, PR restrictions, player movement, building access, and the kind of details that made me understand why Lucy looked five minutes away from murdering a printer.
But the longer it went, the more obvious it became.
This event mattered.
Not in the big flashy way. Not the gala way, with suits and cameras and rich people clapping at themselves for writing checks.
This mattered in a quieter way. The kind where one messed-up parking instruction could make a family’s morning harder. The kind where one player treating the event like a chore could ruin something a kid had been looking forward to all week. The kind where the smaller details really mattered.
Lucy knew that. Bea had known that too. And Charlotte had tried to turn it into something else.
I did not know the whole story, but I knew enough to feel my jaw tighten every time Charlotte’s name hovered near the conversation without being spoken.
At one point, Lucy lost her place in the packet. A single page had been duplicated, and the correct attachment was missing from her folder. It should not have mattered.
It did. Because she froze. Lucy drew in a quiet breath. “I apologize. The final family arrival list appears to be missing from this copy.”
“I have it,” I said.
She looked at me.
I slid my packet toward the center of the table, already open to the page. “Page nine. Mine’s clean.”
She hesitated. Just long enough that I knew she hated needing it.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I only read the important-looking words.”
Coach shook his head. Sarah sighed. Alois muttered something in German that sounded insulting. And Lucy, against every visible effort not to, let out a tiny breath that was almost a laugh.
She took the packet. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
By the end, Sarah had assigned half the room action items, Coach had agreed to adjust morning skate timing, Rawlings had promised three follow-ups in the tone of a man praying he would remain employed through lunch, and Alois had agreed to arrive at eight-thirty without threatening anyone.
Mostly because Bea had apparently already told him to.
The man was terrifying on the ice and completely owned by a five-foot-something PR strategist with gold hoops.
Sarah closed her tablet. “Lucy, send final briefing documents by end of day.”
“They’ll be out by four.”
“Good. Buzz, two-thirty with Lucy.”
“I’ll be there.”
Coach pushed back from the table. “And tomorrow?”
“I’ll be there too.”
Alois stood, towering over all of us because subtlety had never been part of his biological design. “This is suspicious.”
“What?”
He looked at me. “You have agreed to everything.”
“I’m growing as a person.”
“No.”
Sarah gathered her things. “For the sake of the event, please continue whatever this is until tomorrow afternoon.”
Coach laughed as he headed for the door. Rawlings escaped with the energy of a man leaving a crime scene.
Ezra remained near the head of the table, watching Lucy. For a moment, I thought he saw it. The tightness. The way she was holding herself together with both hands. But then he smiled softly, proud and warm and completely missing the bleeding edge underneath. “You handled that well, Luce.”