7. Missing Footage
Missing Footage
The hallway outside the lobby felt ten degrees colder than the stage, and Noah’s body knew bad news before his brain caught up.
He stopped just past the curtain gap, half in shadow, while people streamed around him carrying paper cups and polite smiles. The sentence he’d heard hung there, unfinished and ugly.
“—if the board moves tomorrow morning, hockey needs to be notified before media gets it—”
Two administrators in navy jackets kept walking toward the side exit, voices dropping as soon as they realized they had an audience.
One of them glanced up, saw Noah, and put on that same bland campus expression he’d been seeing all semester—nothing to worry about, nothing to see, everything under control.
Which usually meant the exact opposite.
“Noah,” the older one said. “Good panel.”
He gave the man a neutral nod. “Thanks.”
“Enjoy the rest of your night.”
The lie of it almost made him smile.
They moved on. The lobby noise swelled and receded behind him—coffee urn lids clacking, donor laughter, the soft grind of academic networking. Noah stood still another beat with his pulse punching too high and his taped thumb throbbing under his cuff.
Board moves tomorrow morning.
Hockey needs to be notified.
Not if. When.
He should have gone back into the light. Shook hands. Smiled for one photo. Been what people needed. Instead he turned down the side hall toward the loading doors, where concrete held cold like memory and the building smelled faintly of wet wool, dust, and old salt tracked in from boots.
His phone was already in his hand by the time he hit the exit.
Three texts from teammates. Two from group chats. One from Sloane asking, how bad was the panel, be honest.
He ignored all of them and opened the team thread.
Anybody heard anything from compliance? he typed.
Then deleted it.
Too broad. Too visible.
He locked the phone and shoved it back in his pocket hard enough that the edge hit his thigh through the suit pants. He could still hear Talia’s voice, low and exact.
If the team can only survive dishonesty, then it’s already in trouble.
That had sounded clean onstage.
Out here, with a board ruling moving through the walls and a locker room full of freshmen who still looked at upperclassmen for cues on how scared they were allowed to be, clean felt like a luxury.
He blew out a breath and walked toward the parking lot.
The night air hit sharp enough to sting the back of his throat. Halcyon had gone hard black and silver, snow banked gray at the edges of walkways, campus lights haloed in the damp cold. Somewhere across the dark, the rink sat under its own glow like a threat and a promise.
His left hand ached all the way into the forearm now. The thumb had started doing that after hard practices—pain blooming farther than the actual injury, as if his whole hand had gotten tired of protecting one weak point. He flexed it once and regretted it immediately.
By the time he reached his truck, his phone was vibrating.
Coach.
Noah answered on the second ring. “Yeah?”
“Where are you?” Coach asked without preamble.
“Outside the lecture hall.”
“Get to the rink.”
Noah straightened. “What happened?”
A beat. The kind that told him plenty had happened and none of it was settled yet.
“Compliance meeting at eight tomorrow,” Coach said. “We just got told to keep the room together tonight and not let guys spiral.”
Noah looked out across the parking lot, breath fogging in front of him. “So it’s real.”
“It’s enough to plan for.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know exactly what they’re ruling on yet.”
That was bullshit, and they both knew it.
Noah leaned against the truck door, cold seeping through suit wool. “You calling everyone in?”
“Leadership group first. Then we decide.”
Noah’s jaw tightened. “I’m on my way.”
He hung up and stood there one more second, head tipped back toward the blank dark. His body felt divided straight down the middle—half trained toward action, half held in place by a dread so old it was almost familiar. Not fear of losing. He knew that shape. This was different.
This was the feeling right before a family secret stopped being manageable.
By the time he got to the rink, the building had mostly emptied.
A Zamboni smell lingered under the sharper bite of cold air and rubber matting.
The halls were quieter at night, stripped of fan noise and day traffic.
Cinder block. fluorescent hum. A distant metallic bang from equipment being stacked away. Home, in the least glamorous sense.
He cut through the locker room entrance and immediately caught the smell of wet gear, detergent, and the ghost of burnt sugar from the brownie tin still dented in the corner by his stall.
His suit made him feel ridiculous in here.
Dylan Avery was already sitting on the wooden bench by the center aisle in sweats and unlaced sneakers, elbows on knees, bouncing one leg like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.
Two other upperclassmen stood near the whiteboard talking low.
Cole hovered by the training door, not coming all the way in.
Noah clocked all of it in one sweep. Habit.
Dylan looked up first. “What’s going on?”
“We’re finding out,” Noah said.
Which was answer enough. The room tightened.
Coach came in a minute later with the associate head coach and shut the door behind them. He looked like every long road trip and every donor lunch and every emergency phone call had landed in his face at once. Not panicked. Worse. Controlled.
“Sit down,” he said.
The scrape of bodies on benches sounded too loud.
Coach planted himself in front of the whiteboard, hands on hips. “I’m not going to insult you by pretending we called you in for no reason.”
Nobody moved.
“We’ve been informed the board may issue an interim ruling in the tutoring review tomorrow morning.”
A muscle jumped in Dylan’s jaw.
Coach kept going. “We don’t have full details yet. We do not know the exact scope. We do know there may be immediate eligibility implications for more than one player.”
The words dropped into the room like pucks into open water—small splash, then sinking fast.
“Who?” one of the upperclassmen asked.
“We don’t know.”
That time, Noah believed him.
Coach looked around the room. “What we do know is this: no one talks to media, no one posts vague nonsense online, and no one starts playing detective in the dorms tonight.”
Noah kept his face still.
Because of course that landed directly on him.
“We show up tomorrow,” Coach said. “We work. We let the process move.”
Process.
Noah could practically hear Talia asking him whether he even heard himself anymore.
Dylan raked a hand through his hair. “If guys get pulled, what does that mean for Saturday?”
The associate head coach answered. “It means the guys who are available play.”
Simple. Brutal. Hockey.
Coach’s eyes cut to Noah then, just for a second. Leadership request and warning in one look. Hold the room.
Noah nodded once.
Ten minutes later, the meeting dissolved with nothing solved. Freshmen left in clumps, trying and failing to look normal. The upperclassmen dispersed toward showers, phones, girlfriends, whatever version of coping they trusted.
Noah stayed by his stall pretending to retape the edge of his thumb wrap so he wouldn’t have to leave immediately.
The locker room had gone mostly quiet, all those post-practice sounds gone.
Just ventilation, the occasional drip from drying gear, the low grind of a skate sharpener in the equipment room.
“You heard more than that,” a voice said.
Noah looked up.
Assistant Coach Ben Foster stood in the doorway to the coaches’ office with a paper cup in one hand and exhaustion stamped under both eyes.
Foster had been around North Lake forever, one of those assistant coaches who knew every billet family, every SAT retake, every kid whose parents forgot a birthday because they were working doubles.
Players loved him because he remembered things and because he had a gift for making institutional bullshit feel survivable.
He also had a reputation for doing whatever it took.
Most people said it like praise.
Noah had said it that way himself.
Now the phrase sat differently.
“No,” Noah said.
Foster studied him over the rim of the cup. “That was a bad lie.”
“Been getting that a lot tonight.”
“Maybe workshop new material.”
Despite everything, Noah’s mouth moved.
Foster came farther in. He wore a quarter-zip with the Wolves logo and khakis that had seen better decades. There was coffee on the cuff. His tie, if he’d had one earlier, was gone.
“You all right?” Foster asked, eyes dropping briefly to Noah’s hand. “Thumb still giving you grief?”
Noah curled the hand around the roll of tape automatically. “It’s fine.”
Foster snorted. “You sound like every nineteen-year-old defenseman I’ve ever met.”
The easy concern should have reassured him. Instead it made the dread spread wider.
Noah looked down at the tape, then back up. “You know what this is about?”
Foster’s expression didn’t change much, but something in it closed. “I know enough to tell you not to go borrowing trouble.”
That was not a no.
Noah went still.
Foster took another sip of coffee. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow’ll be ugly enough without you showing up half-cocked.”
He turned back toward the office.
“Coach,” Noah said.
Foster paused.
“Did someone ask you to cover for a guy?”
Silence.
The equipment room grinder hummed and clicked off. Somewhere farther down the hall, a shower started, pipes knocking in the walls.
Foster looked back at him. “Be careful what question you ask when you’re not ready for the answer.”
Then he walked away.
Noah stared after him until the office door shut.
His stomach dropped.