2. Chapter Two
Aspen
“Dad, why do you care so much? You’re not even the one signing him.”
I say it with the phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder, because both my hands are full. I already know the answer, which is what irritates me. I don’t ask questions I don’t know the answers to, but I asked that one anyway, just to hear how thin it sounds out loud.
And the boy in question nearly went under my front bumper ninety seconds ago, in the middle of Hawthorne Street, barefoot, screaming. So I’d argue my point stands.
I step around the car door, push it shut with my hip, and let the garage door close behind me.
The house is quiet and cold, the way I like it.
Kirra’s at the kitchen island with a bowl of salad, and she opens her mouth the second I clear the doorway.
I lift one finger. One minute. I smile so she knows I’m not being a bitch, and she goes back to her lettuce.
“You should know this, Aspen,” my father is saying, in the patient tone he uses when he’s about to explain hockey to me like I haven’t been breathing it since before I could walk.
“Just because Stanley’s been drafted somewhere else doesn’t mean he stays there.
Entry-level deal runs out. Free agency. A trade.
Anything can happen, and I’m playing the long game.
The investment comes back. And if you play your cards right, you could be the one representing him one day. ”
The word represent lands in my stomach and curdles there.
Stanley Ermington. Across a table from me.
On purpose. For years. There is no version of my life that includes that.
I don’t want anything to do with the Ermingtons, and I never have.
His mother is always laughing, always — like nothing in her whole existence has ever been taken seriously.
His father is arrogant in a tailored coat, old money with no filter and no shame about either.
And Stanley is, as far as I can tell, a beautifully engineered delivery system for a slap shot and nothing else.
There’s no prefrontal cortex in his head.
There’s a rink, a puck, and an audience.
The lights come on, and the boy turns into a god, and the second they switch off, there’s just a kid skating around with his arms open like he’s five years old doing the airplane for an empty building.
I know exactly what he looks like at practice. I’ve seen it more than I’d like.
“Okay, Dad. I just got home.” I set my flask down on the counter. “I have to get ready, I’m leaving in thirty. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Send me the report. And thank you for taking the time. It means a lot to me.”
I blink at the cabinet.
He doesn’t say that part often. It means a lot to me. It’s nothing — a courtesy, the kind of line he’d say to an assistant coach — but it makes me feel uneasy anyway.
“Yeah. No problem, Dad. I love you.”
“I love you too, Aspen. Have a good day.”
“You too.”
“Buh-bye.”
“Bye.”
I end the call and look up. Kirra is mid-bite with a piece of lettuce and a smear of dressing on her lip, staring at me.
“Hi,” I say, and I mean it kindly.
She swallows. “So. How was it? Tell me everything.”
“It was hockey practice.”
She slides the serving bowl down the island toward me without breaking eye contact, blonde hair piled in a bun, green eyes doing that thing where she reads me like a box score. I pull a fork from the drawer and drag the bowl in.
“You don’t seem thrilled,” she says.
“I was trying to get my dad off speaker phone.” I bunch a few bites onto the fork and lean my forearms on the cold marble. “And I almost hit Ermington with my car in front of his house.”
Her mouth drops open. “Wait. With your car?”
“He didn’t move until the last second.” I take a bite. “Then he slapped both palms on my hood like I’m the problem.”
What I don’t tell her is that when I looked up and saw him in the middle of the road, too close, not moving, my heart climbed so high and so fast that I genuinely thought I might vomit all over my own steering wheel.
My hands were still shaking when I pulled into the garage, and I’m a little on edge right now.
“Do you want to go to a Hawthorne House party this weekend?” Kirra asks.
“Those still exist?” I say, dry, because of course they do, because that house is a permanent fixture of bad decisions and worse music, and I have spent two years successfully not setting foot in it.
I take the bowl and the fork and head for the hall. “I’ve got work before class. Thanks for the salad, Ki.”
“Always.”
My bedroom looks like a fitting room. There are three sweaters laid out flat on my bed where I left them this morning, and a coat, and a second coat, and I still couldn’t decide — couldn’t commit to a color or a neckline or a single thing — because my head was already full of him before I’d even left the house.
Full of zone entries and shooting angles and a list of things my father wanted me to watch for, like I’m a security camera he installed at the rink for the protection of his own future. The keeper of his investment.
I gather the sweaters up and start folding, because I cannot think straight in a mess.
The whole arrangement would be tolerable if it weren’t such a chore.
Ermington and I happen to attend the same university, which my father treats as fate handing him a free set of eyes, so I’m under strict orders to attend every home game this year.
All of them. I refuse to be the girl in the third row with a spiral notebook and a pen like some obsessed little freak, so I type everything into my phone instead, thumbs moving, head down.
And if Stanley Ermington wants to believe the world’s most ambitious woman is glued to her phone for fun, he can keep believing it.
It’s easier than the truth, which is that I’m writing an NHL prospect report on him in real time, and he’s the prospect.
My desk catches my eye when I set the last sweater down.
The photo’s been there for years. My father, drenched, twenty-something, holding the Stanley Cup over his head the summer I was barely old enough to walk.
I won it for you, he’s told me my whole life, and I’ve never had the heart to point out that I don’t remember a second of it.
That was the golden year, the one he tells at every dinner — the season the league put him on a line with his biggest rivals and the three of them turned unstoppable, and Robert Ermington, who’d lifted the same cup the year his own son was born, went from a man my father wanted to destroy to the closest friend he’s ever had.
So I was around the Ermingtons while I was in a stroller and not much after.
We moved cities. They moved cities. We crossed paths a few times a decade, holidays and tournaments, and my mother — who is colder than I am and never pretended otherwise — could not stand Stanley’s mother and her endless, easy laughing.
I learned distance early. I kept it on purpose.
And I have never once regretted it, because there is no universe, none, where Stanley Ermington and I are friends, or mutuals, or anything other than two people our fathers won a trophy beside.
I do what my dad asks. I move on with my day.
That’s the version I tell people.
Here’s the version I don’t.
This past summer I was a Hockey Operations Intern at Robert Ermington’s club.
Not because anyone wanted me there but because of the deal.
The arrangement that got Stanley three months on a private sheet with my father’s name on the lease came bundled with an envelope of office hours for me, a courtesy thrown in like a free coffee, and I took every single one of them.
Eight in the morning until they physically asked me to leave.
I tagged tape. I cleaned up pre-scout reports nobody else would touch.
I sat at the back of development camp like a quiet animal, saying nothing, missing nothing.
I got the seat because of my father.
I kept it because of me.
By July, they were giving me real work. By August, I was the name they passed around the room when somebody needed the entries chart for the first three opponents of next season — ask Linwood, she’s got it — and when I left, the analytics director offered me a remote contract for the year.
Hockey Operations Assistant. Paid by the hour.
I watch the games they assign me, I tag what they tell me to tag, I clean the reports for the coaches, and every Tuesday morning, I sit on a Zoom where ten men older than my father ask me what I noticed.
And then they write it down.
That’s the part I can’t get over. That’s the part I won’t.
Ten men who’ve been in this business for so long, leaning toward a screen, pens moving, because of something I saw.
Nobody gifted me that. Nobody’s father bought that.
I earned that, and I would do the eight a.m. mornings and the worst reports and the back of the room a hundred times over to feel it again.
Which is the whole thing, really. The reason why he gets under my skin like a splinter I can’t dig out.
Stanley Ermington was born at the top of the mountain and treats the climb like a joke he’s too good to bother telling.
The talent fell out of the sky and into his hands and he uses it to do the airplane.
Meanwhile, I have crawled up every inch of mine on my fingernails, and I’d give anything to have what he wastes, and he doesn’t even know it’s in his hands.
Effortless. That’s his word. I’ve never once in my life gotten to be effortless.
I plug in my laptop and open it, because I have twenty-six minutes and a job to do, and the job is the only place the noise in my head goes quiet.
I log into the team’s video software. The queue’s already waiting — a West Coast team’s last three games, my assignment for the week. Tag every zone entry. Type, side, result. Simple. Endless. Mine.
I slide my AirPods in and hit play, and the world narrows to hockey and a clock.
The big left defenseman picks the puck up behind his own net. Six-four, heavy-footed, all reach and no feet, the kind of player who survives on wingspan. He moves it up to his winger, takes it back, rolls down the right side, and carries it over the blue line himself.
Pause. Entry. Player 44. Carry. Right side. Shot. Save.
Play.
Three minutes of game clock later he picks off a long pass at center and walks it in clean, like nobody told him he’s slow.
Pause. Carry. Right side. Turnover. Save.
Play.
He flips it into the far corner and doesn’t bother chasing.
Pause. Dump. Right side. Lost possession. Save.
Three down. Ninety-something to go in this game alone, and two more games after it.
This is what they pay me for, and I am very good at it. I check the clock in the corner of the screen, and I’m two minutes ahead of my own schedule, the way I almost always am. I close the laptop, pack my bag, and head out to the garage.
I’m fairly sure I’m the only person on this entire street who drives to campus.
Everyone else walks. I hate walking in the cold, and I hate it more than I care whether anyone finds that princessy, which is a word I have heard applied to me exactly once, knocked through plexiglass in a voice I’d recognize anywhere.
While the garage door grinds up and the engine warms, I open my notes and pour everything from this morning into the format my father likes — clean, labeled, no editorializing, just what I saw and where and how often.
The way he reads fastest. I give it two minutes, hit send to his email, and reverse out.
I wait for the door to seal shut behind me before I move, and his reply is already lighting up my phone.
Dad: The report is good. Thank you.
Dad: Don’t forget to make a report for the game on Friday and Saturday.
I roll my eyes so hard it almost hurts, reversing down the drive. How, exactly, would I forget? God forbid I miss a game. God forbid I ever stop watching the boy.
When I pass the hockey house –– or the lame infamous name of the Hawthorne House –– I keep my eyes forward.
I don’t look at the porch, or the road where I nearly killed him, or the door he disappeared through.
I don’t give it a single inch of my attention, and I refuse to think too hard about how much effort that’s taking.
Stanley Ermington is a problem.