CHAPTER THREE MARSHALL #2
She wore leggings and an oversized sweater that hung off one shoulder, and she'd pulled her dark hair up in a messy knot.
She opened the mailbox and then flipped through her stack of mail: envelopes, a catalog, something small and square that could've been a card.
She never once looked at me. Then she tucked her mail under her arm and walked back toward her house without acknowledging I existed.
I stood there with my mail in my hand, watching as she walked up her driveway and disappeared through her front door.
She had done nothing except exist in the same space as me, and it was enough to make my teeth clench.
My jaw was tight. Was it the argument? That she'd been right?
The way she'd closed her door in my face, like I wasn't worth another sentence? Whatever it was, it had gotten to me.
I went inside, ate a protein bar, drank a glass of water, answered three emails from my agent about sponsorship opportunities that I didn't understand yet, and then I tried to study the defensive plays Coach Briggs wanted me to watch.
There were four sequences from practice, each one time-stamped and annotated.
Briggs had marked the exact moments where I'd reacted instead of anticipated.
Watching them from the overhead angle made it obvious.
I watched each clip five times and then again, studying them and committing them to memory.
It was almost noon by the time I finished.
I had errands to run so I grabbed my keys and headed out.
The first stop was the post office to forward my mail.
I should've done that the first week I moved in, according to my mom, who'd texted me about it three times.
Then I went to the dry cleaner on Beacon Street to drop off my only suit for team events, and then I made a note to grab another one soon.
I stopped at a hardware store and bought a Ring doorbell camera, because Ashford was right.
I needed evidence, and the idea of catching the real culprit on camera was the most satisfying thought I'd had all day.
By two o'clock, I had done everything I needed to do, but I wanted a coffee. Jeremy had mentioned a place a couple of blocks away from my neighborhood, a small shop called Brewed Awakening.
I stared at the board behind the counter trying to decide what to order.
I needed nothing fancy. So I ended up ordering an iced coffee.
The barista handed it over with a nod, and I turned toward the door, already thinking about the Ring camera installation and whether I'd need a drill, which I probably didn't have. And there she was.
I recognized the posture first, the straight spine, the shoulders back.
She held herself as if she were prepared for confrontation.
She was two feet away, reaching for a napkin from the dispenser on the counter.
She was wearing a white blouse tucked into high-waisted navy pants.
She looked professional, as if she were on her way to a meeting or coming from one.
Her hair was down this time, falling past her shoulders in dark waves, and she held a leather portfolio tucked under one arm.
Everything happened in slow motion.
My shoulder caught her arm, or maybe her arm caught my shoulder. The coffee left my hand, the lid popped off mid-air and sixteen ounces of iced coffee cascaded down the front of her white blouse. First, I noticed the splash, then the spread as the stain bloomed across white fabric.
She gasped, and her eyes went wide, making everyone in the coffee shop turn around to look at us.
"Oh, shit," I cried and reached for napkins, pulling at them furiously. "I'm so sorry—I didn't see you."
"Are you fucking kidding me?" She looked down at her blouse, which was now a brown-and-white disaster zone. Coffee was dripping down her stomach, soaking into the waistband of her pants, dripping onto the leather portfolio she was clutching against her side. "Are you actually kidding me right now?"
"It was an accident." I was grabbing napkins by the handful, pulling them from the dispenser so fast that the metal holder rocked on the counter. I held them out to her like an offering. Like napkins could fix this. "I swear, I didn't—"
"Of course it has to be you," she cried, ripping the napkins from my hand. "The dog shit guy."
The dog shit guy. That was my name now. That was what I was to her.
"I'm sorry. I really am. Let me make it up to you. Let me buy you—"
"You can buy me a new blouse." She blotted at the stain, but it was everywhere: down the front, across her chest, soaking through to the fabric beneath.
The blouse was done. Even I could see that, and I knew nothing about fabric.
"This was silk you know. Do you know what silk looks like after it's been soaked in coffee?
It looks like this." She gestured at herself, at the ruined blouse of what had clearly been an expensive, carefully chosen piece of clothing.
"I'll pay for the dry cleaning."
She let out a loud laugh.
"Please, dry cleaning will not fix this.
This blouse is garbage." She looked up at me, and her eyes were darker than I remembered from the porch.
Brown, almost black in the coffee shop light, and burning with something that went deeper than anger about a stained shirt.
"You know what? Forget it. Just—stay away from me.
Can you manage that? Stay out of my yard, stay out of my coffee shop, and stay away from me. "
She wadded up the napkins, dropped them into the garbage, grabbed her portfolio, checking it for coffee damage with a wince, and pushed past me toward the door.
I turned to watch her go. When I turned back to the counter, I could tell that the barista had already cast me as the villain in a story she was going to tell everyone tonight.
"Can I get another iced coffee?" I asked.
She made it without saying a word.
I drove home with the iced coffee in the cup holder, the Ring camera in its box on the passenger seat, replaying the whole incident in my head like a terrible movie. I could still see the look on her face and hear the way she'd said, "Of course it's you," like I was a recurring problem in her life.
Two encounters. Two disasters.
In two weeks I'd be playing professional hockey in front of millions of people, skating at speeds that would terrify most humans, and taking hits from men who outweighed me by thirty pounds. And I couldn't share a neighborhood with one woman without everything going sideways.
I pulled into my driveway, killed the engine, and sat there for a minute.
The heat was building inside the cab, the August sun pressing through the windshield, and sweat gathered at the base of my neck.
Through the truck window, I looked toward her house.
It was quiet; the curtains were closed, and there in her driveway was the SUV with that damn bumper sticker: My dog is smarter than your honor student.
I grabbed the Ring camera box and went inside. I'd install it tonight and get the footage to prove it was her dog, or I'd prove it wasn't, and either way I'd have something to work with besides the look on her face when she'd said my name.
The dog shit guy.
I was going to have to do something about that.
I drank my iced coffee, then installed the Ring camera above my front door using a drill my father must have slipped into a box.
Then I went to bed with my quads still aching and my brain still replaying two things on a loop: the puck hitting the top corner past Ryan's glove, and the coffee hitting her blouse.
One of those things I was proud of.
Tomorrow had to be better.