43. Brynn
brYNN
I found it on my phone at eight thirty-seven in the morning, sitting on the edge of his bed with my coffee going cold on the nightstand.
But I’d already heard enough downstairs.
I’d woken up to an empty bed and the low sound of his voice carrying up through the floorboards.
Not words, just the cadence of it, the flat controlled tone he used when something was wrong.
I recognized it because I’d heard it in the corridor at the arena once, when he thought no one was listening.
I pulled on his shirt and made it halfway down the stairs before his words sharpened enough to catch.
I heard Dave’s voice first, tinny through the phone speaker. “Same situation. Different city, same setup. You cannot afford another —”
And then Colton’s voice, low and even. “I said I hear you, Dave. Let me think about it.”
I stood on the third stair from the bottom and didn’t move. I heard him end the call. I heard the quiet after it. I waited for the sound of him getting up, of him coming to find me, of anything that would tell me what I’d just walked into the middle of.
Nothing.
I turned around and went back upstairs. I made myself walk normally. I sat on the edge of his bed and picked up my phone and that’s when Dani’s text came in — just the link, no caption, which was her version of a five-alarm fire — and I thought, oh. So that’s what it is.
I read the article. All of it. And by the time I got to the part where they used the phrase “the owner’s daughter” three separate times, what I felt wasn’t embarrassment or even anger.
It was the quiet, flat recognition of someone who had just heard the thing they were afraid of out loud and found out it was exactly as bad as they thought.
He was going to pull back. That’s what Dave was telling him to do and that’s what he was going to do, because that’s what the Colton Mercer who held his face completely still while everything underneath it was moving always did.
He’d decide it was better for me without asking me.
He’d protect me right out of whatever this was.
Not if I had anything to say about it.
Dani had sent it. No caption, just the link, which was Dani’s version of a five-alarm fire.
I clicked it and read the whole thing without blinking, and by the time I got to the part where they used the phrase “the owner’s daughter” three separate times like it was a crime I’d committed, my hands had gone very still in my lap.
They had my photo. My name. My job title.
And a photo of us in the parking lot that whoever took it had caught at exactly the right angle — him looking down at me, me laughing, his hand in mine.
It was the best photo anyone had ever taken of me in my life and it was sitting inside a headline that suggested I was either a victim or complicit, and they hadn’t figured out which one yet.
I put my phone down. I picked up my coffee. I put that down too because my hands weren’t reliable right now.
Then I thought about how Colton had looked at me downstairs. The way he’d already had coffee made. The way he’d said “work stuff” without meeting my eyes. The way he’d pushed a mug across the table at me like a man trying to soften a blow he hadn’t delivered yet.
He’d already seen it.
Which meant the “work stuff” was me. And whatever he’d spent the last two hours thinking about at that kitchen table had already produced an answer. One he hadn’t asked me for my input on.
I got up. I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute first.
Not because I needed to collect myself. I was collected.
I was very, very collected, which was actually the problem, because the collected version of me wanted to go downstairs and be reasonable about this.
Wanted to hear him out. Wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt the way I always did, because that’s what you did when you loved someone.
But the other version of me, the one that had read that headline three times and felt her name in it like a splinter — that version knew exactly what “work stuff” meant. And that version was not interested in being reasonable before she’d at least had the chance to say so out loud.
I got dressed. I left my phone on the nightstand.
He was at the kitchen table when I came downstairs, phone face down, clipboard in front of him like a prop.
He wasn’t looking at it. He looked up when I came in, and I saw it immediately — that set to his jaw, the way his shoulders had already braced.
He was ready for a fight, which meant he already knew he’d done something worth fighting about.
I stopped in the doorway.
He opened his mouth.
“Don’t,” I said.
His jaw tightened. “Brynn —”
“I read it.” I crossed my arms over my chest and kept the doorframe at my back because I needed something solid behind me. “I know what it says. I know what you’re sitting there thinking. And I’m asking you not to do it.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“You’re thinking you need to pull back so the story dies,” I said. “You’re thinking that if you give them nothing to chase, they’ll move on. You’re thinking that the right thing to do is protect me by putting distance between us until this blows over.” I held his eyes. “How’m I doing?”
He didn’t answer, which was its own answer.
I let that sit for a second. I wanted him to feel it, the shape of what he’d been about to do without asking me. Then I pushed off the doorframe and walked into the kitchen, not toward him, just far enough that I wasn’t shouting across the room anymore.
“I’m not her,” I said. My voice came out quieter than I meant it to.
“I’m not whoever she was. The one before.
I’m not going to fall apart over a gossip article, Colton.
I work in a hockey stadium. I’ve been listening to people talk about scandals and trades and front office drama my entire life. I know how this works.”
“Knowing how it works and living through it are two different things.”
“You said that to me last night,” I said. “And last night I let it go because you needed to say it. But Colton, you sitting at this table deciding for me what I can handle is the exact same thing I do with my mother, and you have spent weeks telling me to stop doing it.”
That landed. I watched it land. He sat back in his chair, jaw working, eyes somewhere on the table between us.
“I’m not asking you to hold a press conference,” I said. “I’m not asking you to go public and make some big statement. I’m asking you to not disappear on me because a story got picked up. That’s it. That’s all I’m asking.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“You deserve someone without this kind of baggage,” he said. His voice was low. Almost like he didn’t want me to hear it.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t want someone without baggage. I want you. And you need to decide right now if you’re going to let a headline make that decision for us, or if you’re going to sit there and let me drink my coffee and figure out what we do next. Together.”
He looked up at me then. Really looked.
I didn’t say anything else. I walked to the coffee pot, poured myself a fresh cup, and sat down across from him at the kitchen table. I wrapped both hands around the mug. I waited.
It took him about thirty seconds. Then he reached across the table and put his hand over mine. Both of them, the way he always did when he meant something.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For the thirty seconds I spent thinking about walking away from this.”
I nodded. “Was it longer than thirty seconds?”
“Might’ve been closer to two hours.”
“Then I accept an apology for two hours,” I said.
The corner of his mouth moved. Not a full smile, but the start of one. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I squeezed his hands. “Now what are we going to do about it?”
He was quiet for a beat. Then he picked up his phone from the table, flipped it face up, and slid it toward me so I could see what he was typing.
A text to his agent. Three words.
No statement. Done.
I blinked. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he said. “Last time I made a statement, they had six more weeks of material. You say nothing, you give them nothing. Story dies on its own.” He leaned forward on the table, his eyes on mine.
“And Monday I’m walking into that rink with you, and I’m not hiding a thing.
Anyone who’s got a problem with it can come talk to me directly. ”
I studied his face. “You mean that?”
“I’m not in the habit of saying things I don’t mean,” he said. “Not anymore.”
I reached across and took his phone out of his hand. I hit send on the text to his agent. Then I set it back down on the table between us.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he said back.
We sat there and finished our coffee. Outside, the backyard was gold in the morning light, the wildflowers his landscaper kept just barely in check bending a little in the early breeze.
It was quiet. The kind of quiet I hadn’t had in years — not the hollow kind that came from an empty house, but the full kind.
The kind that meant someone else was in it with you and that was exactly right.
“For what it’s worth,” Colton said after a while, his eyes still on the backyard, “it’s a really good photo.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “It really is.”