4. Chapter Four
Aspen
Did he…
Did he just…
Did this idiot — this NHL prince, this glorified dancing monkey on skates, this six-foot-four golden-retriever-shaped misuse of a first-round pick — just mock me?
In front everyone?
Did he take a perfectly ordinary goal and turn it into a private joke with me as the punchline, on broadcast television, with a camera pointed at the glass?
He can go to hell.
The whole rink is on its feet. Every single person in this building is standing and roaring.
I am the only one sitting, perfectly still, perfectly composed, a stone in a river of noise, because I learned a long time ago that the woman who doesn’t react is the woman who wins, and I will sit here like a marble statue of myself before I let him see one flicker cross my face.
My hand is around my phone, white-knuckling. I can feel the case biting into my fingers.
I make myself let go. One finger at a time.
Index, then middle, then the rest, slow, deliberate, the way I’d talk a tremor out of my own hand at a Tuesday meeting.
I keep my chin level. There is a camera on this glass, and I know it, and somewhere in a production truck, a director is wondering who the girl in row three is and why number eleven skated all the way across the ice to draw on the window in front of her.
I will not be the punchline and the reaction shot.
Pick one, Ermington. You don’t get both.
And then I lift the phone and open the note.
I type, in my hands that will not stay still. Player 11. Goal, 2nd period. Top corner, glove side. Off the rush — carry by Theo Marsh, drop pass, finishes clean. No hesitation on the release.
I type it because I am a professional. I am my father’s report-writer before I am anything else, before I’m even a person. I type it because the only other available option is homicide.
He’s back out for his next shift before my hands have settled, and I watch him, because that is the job my dad has me on. And the job doesn’t stop just because he humiliated me.
As I watch him, my throat closes up. Not only because he’s my archenemy, but because he’s good.
He’s good.
He plays the game in the future tense. I have spent my entire life being told I have a freakish eye for this sport, the read, the instinct, the thing that can’t be coached, and I am watching a boy carry the identical gift down the right wing at full speed.
The only difference between his gift and mine is what’s between our legs.
But my father downplayed my talent as a child. He put me on the couch next to him instead of in skates, and I wonder what I could’ve been if he believed hockey wasn’t just a man’s sport.
And the fury that comes up out of me is so much older than tonight.
If I had been born a boy, I would be on that ice.
I would be the one my father calls, the investment, the one he’s proud of.
I’d have the bench mob and the broadcast camera and the stupid signature in the air, and I would have earned every inch of it the same way I earn everything — and instead I got a girl’s body and a girl’s chair and a girl’s job, taking dictation on the boy my father treats like the son he didn’t have, while everything I am sits second. Permanently, structurally second.
And for one moment, in the bottom of all that heat, I catch a glimpse of the truth, that the man who decided I’d be in the chair instead of on the ice was never Stanley Ermington.
It was the man who sends me to watch him.
The man whose Cup photo sits on my desk at home.
The man whose two words on a text message can run my whole day uphill or down, and who I would set myself on fire for to make proud, and who has never once, not one single time, suggested that the eye in my head might be worth anything other than reports.
I think about that for exactly as long as I can stand it.
And then I push it away, hard, because that door does not open, we do not go in there — and it is so much cleaner, so much easier, to hate the boy. The boy is a bruise. You can press a bruise. You can’t press your own father.
So I press the bruise.
My hand is shaking too badly to type now, so I put the phone in my lap and breathe.
Then Ermington does something on the forecheck I’d note in any other game, some lazy-genius little stick lift that strips a defenseman clean. I pick the phone back up. Because I am a professional.
I don’t realize when it happens, but I’m not watching hockey anymore. I think about what I could do. Nothing public. I’m not a woman who makes scenes. Scenes are for people who’ve already lost control of the room. Nothing actionable. I would never in a million years damage his career.
It doesn’t have to be anything big.
But it has to be something.
Something small. Something stupid. Something he will know — instantly, with total certainty — that it was me, and not be able to do a single thing about.
The idea forms slowly, and I think I know just the thing.
The buzzer goes. The building loses its mind because Ermington just got another score two seconds ago. The boys mob him at center ice, a pile of them, helmets off, and he comes up out of it grinning and soaked and twenty feet tall. He’s not looking at me –– his point was already made.
I got my eye on you, Ermington.
I stand up and walk.
I know the security guard by his face, and he knows mine.
I know the photographers crouched at the tunnel.
I know the family entrance, the press level, the way the corridors curl around the bowl, and the staging room behind the home bench where the equipment manager racks the sticks while the team is still out on the ice, grinding through the handshake line.
I also know that he won’t be in the locker room for another five minutes. That’s all I need.
I lift two fingers at a faculty member from the athletics office. Great game. I let them see exactly the girl they expect to see — NHL coach’s daughter, ops assistant, here in some official-adjacent capacity, nothing to look at twice.
Nobody looks at me twice.
I walk until I reach the home rack. I find the slot for eleven.
He’s got a whole row of hockey sticks, and they’re not the cheap kind.
I can thank my father for knowing that detail.
I noticed that he switched to a fresh one for the third period, which means this, the one that scored, the one that mocked me, is the gamer.
The one he reaches for. The one he’ll miss.
I touch it and immediately wonder if I’m out of my damn mind.
This is insane. Put it down, walk away, write the report, and don’t do this. What the hell are you thinking? He is going to freak out.
I lift it off the rack because that’s exactly what I want.
I don’t pause again. I tuck it against my side and walk out the same way I walked in.
I smile at the guard on my way through the gate.
“Thanks for getting that for me,” I tell him as he holds the door open.
I step out into the cold with Stanley Ermington’s hockey stick in my hand, and a euphoric happiness calms me. My hands stop shaking. Nobody caught me. If anyone asks, I’ve known Ermington since we were babies.
In my car, I lay the stick across the back seat.
I watch it in the rearview mirror while the heat rises and the windows clear.
This long black hockey stick lying across my leather seats like it pulled up a chair, Ermington facing the wrong way, so all I can see is the blade he scored with, and I feel something I have not done all night, which is smile.
Hawthorne Street is quiet when I pass the hockey house, but I’d put money on a party starting inside it within the hour, because God forbid that house take a single weekend off.
I don’t look as I drive by.
I park inside my garage, the garage door sealing the night out behind me.
I carry the hockey stick in through the front door from the garage. Bree is in the kitchen, Kirra’s right beside her, and they both glance at the stick then at me. Kirra has a glass of wine halfway to her mouth, and she’s looking at me like I have lost my entire mind, which, fair.
“Good game?” Kirra says carefully.
“It was a game,” I say and keep walking.
I feel like I’ve broken ten laws by taking his stick, and I’m joyous, maybe even giddy, as I enter my room and close the door behind me.
I lean the stick against my desk and grin. This is the bravest, most outlandish thing I’ve ever done. This — this –– is going to teach him. The stick leans right next to the framed photo of my father holding the Cup over his head.
I pick up the stick and lean it against the other wall instead, by the window, because I do not want to think about my father right now. I don’t want him in the frame for this. This one is mine, and it has nothing to do with him, and I am keeping it that way for as long as I can.
I look at it leaning there against the wall in the dark. Ermington. Number eleven. Stolen clean out of his own building, by me, while he was busy being mobbed at center ice.
Player 11. Goal. Top corner, glove side.
Stick: confiscated.
Eat that, Ermington.