42. Colton
COLTON
My phone lit up at six in the morning.
I’d been awake for a while already. Old habit from twenty years of early morning skates.
Brynn was still out cold on her side of the bed, one arm folded under her cheek, hair everywhere, dead to the world.
I’d been lying there watching the ceiling do nothing, just thinking.
Good thinking, for once. The kind where the future didn’t feel like something I was running from.
Then my phone lit up again. Then again. Three times in under a minute, which meant it wasn’t a text.
I knew that pattern. I’d felt that pattern before, and every single time it came, it meant something had broken overnight that I was going to have to deal with before I had my coffee.
I slipped out of bed as quietly as I could and took my phone into the hallway.
Eleven missed calls. Four from Dave. Two from a number I didn’t recognize. One from Rhett, which made zero fucking sense at six in the morning. And the rest from a 212 area code I’d spent the past few years trying to forget.
New York.
I opened the first text from my agent before I even thought about calling anyone back. He’d sent a link. Nothing else, just the link. Which was the worst possible way to receive bad news because it meant he couldn’t even find words to put around it.
I clicked it.
The headline loaded fast. PHL HockeyBuzz, one of those sports gossip rags that dressed itself up as legitimate journalism.
The photo was worse than the headline. Someone had caught us in the parking lot after the opening game — me, Brynn, hand in hand, her laughing at something I said, me looking down at her like she was the only person in a half-full parking lot.
It was a good photo, actually. Under any other circumstances, I’d have kept it.
Disgraced PHL Coach Colton Mercer’s Pattern Continues — This Time It’s the Owner’s Daughter.
I stood there in the hallway of my penthouse and read the whole thing.
Every word. The recap of the Titans scandal.
The insinuation that I’d targeted Brynn because she had access to the owner.
The suggestion that Victoria Caldwell had either sanctioned it or was being kept in the dark.
They’d pulled Brynn’s name from the team’s public website — community relations coordinator, right there for anyone to find.
They’d pulled her photo. Her job title. The little bio paragraph she’d probably written herself without ever once thinking a gossip rag was going to put it in a story next to a photo of her and a man with a reputation like mine.
I put my phone face down on the hallway table.
I went downstairs and made coffee.
I stood at the counter while it brewed and looked at the cabinet above the refrigerator.
The one I’d been emptying slowly since the morning after the opening game.
There were still two bottles in there — a bourbon I’d opened the night before the season started and a backup I’d never cracked.
I could see the shape of them through the frosted glass of the cabinet door.
I stood there looking at those bottles for longer than I wanted to. Long enough that the coffee finished brewing and I didn’t move to pour it. Long enough that I heard the sound it made hitting the burner plate when the cycle ended.
Then I opened the cabinet and took them both out.
Set them on the counter. Uncapped the open one and tipped it over the sink and watched it go.
The backup I didn’t open. I just held it for a second — good bourbon, the kind I used to know by label without looking — and then set it in the recycling bin under the counter where I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.
It wasn’t dramatic. That was the thing I hadn’t expected — how undramatic it felt. Just the sound of liquid hitting porcelain and then it was done and the cabinet was empty and I was still standing at the sink with the same problem I’d had before I opened it.
Then I poured a cup and sat down at the kitchen table instead.
I knew exactly what happened the last time.
I’d watched a woman I cared about get her name dragged through the dirt because she had the bad luck of being connected to mine.
That hadn’t been my choice. This one was.
And the question that sat on my chest like a full set of gear wasn’t whether I was willing to take the hit — I could take the hit, I’d been taking hits since the Titans.
The question was whether I had any right to ask Brynn to take one too.
She hadn’t signed up for this. She didn’t know what it actually looked like, not from the inside.
She’d said she did, last night, with those big brown eyes and all that certainty.
But she was twenty-six years old and had spent the last five years running her mother’s errands and working behind a bar.
She hadn’t had a camera shoved in her face.
She hadn’t seen her name in a headline with words like “pattern” and “predatory” sitting next to it.
I didn’t go back upstairs. I stood at the counter while it brewed and stared at the backyard through those floor-to-ceiling windows and tried to figure out the right thing to do.
The wildflowers the landscaper kept barely in check were still dark, just starting to catch the first pale edge of morning light.
I watched them like they were going to tell me something useful.
They didn’t.
I poured a cup and sat down at the kitchen table and pulled up my agent’s contact on my phone. I stared at it for a while. Then I opened a new message to Brynn instead and typed out three words, saw the article, and then sat there looking at them until I deleted them without sending.
She hadn’t seen it yet. I knew that by the way she’d been sleeping when I slipped out. Deep, easy, one arm folded under her cheek. She hadn’t been braced for anything. She was just asleep the way people slept when the day before had been good.
I put my phone face down on the table.
The problem was that I’d spent the past few years doing the right thing and ending up in the same place every time. Alone at a table. Coffee going cold. Trying to figure out how to be less of a liability to the people around me.
I thought about what Brynn had said last night.
You sitting at this table deciding for me what I can handle.
She hadn’t said it yet — that was still coming, I could feel it — but I already knew she was going to say it, because she was right.
She was almost always right about the things that mattered.
It was one of the more inconvenient things about her.
My agent texted. Call me before nine.
I called him at eight forty-five.
Dave answered on the first ring, same as always.
He went through it fast: the article, the traction it was getting, two calls already from the league office, a reporter outside the Titans’ front office asking for comment about a “pattern.” I let him talk.
I already knew most of it. What I needed from him was strategy, not a recap.
“You need to pull back,” Dave said. “Whatever this is with the Caldwell girl — you need to cool it. Publicly, at least. Give the story nothing to feed on.”
I didn’t answer right away. I was watching the back door when I heard the creak of the third stair from the bottom — the one that groaned no matter how carefully you stepped on it. I’d noticed it the second day I was in this rental and never got around to telling the landlord.
She was awake.
I kept my voice level. “I hear you.”
“Colton. This is the same situation. Different city, same setup. You cannot afford another — “
“I said I hear you, Dave.” I kept my eyes on the doorway to the hall. The footsteps had stopped. “Let me think about it.”
I ended the call.
The hallway was quiet. I set the phone down on the table and sat there for a moment, not moving. If she’d heard any of that, she’d heard enough to make it sound worse than it was. Dave’s voice wasn’t exactly subtle on a good day, and this was not a good day.
I turned the phone face down again.
The backyard was gold now, the sun finally clearing the ridge. I’d been sitting here long enough to watch the whole thing happen and I still didn’t have an answer I was comfortable with. I had an answer. Just not a comfortable one.
By the time I heard her moving around upstairs, I’d made my coffee last as long as it was going to.
“Morning,” she said, still half-asleep, padding into the kitchen in my socks and a shirt that was three sizes too big for her. She went straight for the coffee pot without looking at me, which is how I knew she hadn’t checked her phone yet.
“Morning,” I said.
She must have clocked the tone, because she turned around before she even had her coffee in hand.
She looked at me the way she always did when she was trying to read me — that slight tilt of the head, eyes working, not saying anything yet.
She was smart that way. Brynn never came out swinging.
She waited until she had something worth swinging at.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I pushed the coffee cup I’d already poured for her across the table. “There’s something I need to deal with today. Work stuff. I’m going to need to focus on it.”
She didn’t move for the cup. “Work stuff.”
“Yeah.”
She studied me for another second. Long enough that I had to look away. Which was probably the dumbest thing I could have done, because Brynn Caldwell didn’t miss a thing.
“Okay,” she said finally. She picked up the coffee. She didn’t push. She just took her cup back upstairs, and I sat there at the kitchen table and hated every single thing about the next hour of my life before I had to go face it.
I was going to pull back. Give the press nothing new to find. No more photos. No more parking lots. No more hand-holding in public until this blew over. I’d done it before — weathered a story by starving it of oxygen. It worked. It always worked.
What I wasn’t ready to admit was that this time, starving the story meant starving something else.
Something I wasn’t sure I’d survive losing.