3. Maren
Maren
Caden Mercer’s office is the only one in the building without a single thing on the walls about hockey.
I notice it while I wait for him to get off the phone.
Everybody else in this organization has the shrine going, signed sticks, framed jerseys, a puck under glass like a holy relic.
Caden’s got a whiteboard, two monitors, a window onto the practice rink, and a single photo on the desk turned just far enough away that I can’t see who’s in it.
The man runs a hockey team like he’s allergic to nostalgia, which is interesting, because I spent yesterday getting hijacked by the most nostalgic hire in franchise history, and the hire is his father.
I’ve gotten good, in eight months, at the first-ninety-seconds read.
Caden Mercer reads like a man who decided young that the safest thing to be was the most competent person in any room, then made himself exactly that, and now lives inside the competence like a bunker.
Twenty-nine going on forty. No ring, no plant, no clutter, nothing on the desk that could be used against him, except the one photo he’s turned away, which is the loudest object in the office precisely because he turned it.
I clock it and say nothing, which is half my job and most of my personality.
“Sorry.” He hangs up, doesn’t look sorry, waves me into the chair across from him. “Sit. How bad was the radio this morning?”
“Good, actually. The ‘B’ block walked back the nostalgia-stunt line. One of them used the word ‘statement hire.’” I pull it up on my phone to show him and he doesn’t look, which tells me he already saw it at six a.m., which tells me a lot about Caden.
“That’s you,” he says. “The clip of him saying he came back to win is at four hundred thousand views. That’s also you, even though it wasn’t your plan.”
“It was a collaborative —”
“It wasn’t, but it worked, so I don’t care.
” He leans back. He’s twenty-nine and he runs meetings like a man who’s tired of being the youngest person who’s right in the room.
“Here’s where we are, Maren. My father is the biggest story in this city.
Bigger than the team, which is its own problem, but we’ll take it.
Your whole job this season is that story.
You make him look good. You keep him out of trouble.
You make sure the only headline this franchise generates is about a comeback, not about anything else. ”
“That’s the job.”
“That’s the job, and the job is your career.
” He says it without heat, which is somehow worse than if he’d threatened me.
“You came over from corporate to prove you could run comms for a major franchise. This is the franchise handing you the highest-profile account it has. Do it well and you’re not a coordinator next year.
Do it badly and you’re a cautionary tale at conferences. ”
I keep my face pleasant. Inside I’m doing the thing where I want this so badly my teeth hurt, the thing I’ve never once said out loud to anyone but my sister at midnight, the thing where being good at this is the only proof I’ve ever trusted that I’m worth keeping around.
I don’t show him that. You don’t show people the soft place; they put their thumb in it.
Because here’s what I’d never say in this chair: being the reliable one is the only currency I’ve ever trusted.
Pretty fades, charm wears out, people leave.
Competence is the one thing nobody can take back once you’ve proven it, so I’ve spent my whole life proving it, building myself into the person every room needs, so that no room ever has to decide whether it actually wants me.
This account is the biggest proof anybody’s ever handed me.
I am not going to fumble it because the principal has a good jaw and worse manners.
“I can do it well,” I say.
“I know. That’s why you’re in the chair.
” He turns to his monitor, pulls something up, slides a printed sheet across the desk.
“One housekeeping thing. Ownership wants regular reporting on the coaching transition. Performance in media, locker-room temperature, anything that affects the public picture. Just a short write-up, weekly, straight to the front office.”
I pick up the sheet. It’s a template. Boring. Bullet points, a date field, a one-to-five scale for things like “media readiness” and “room cohesion.” It reads like every HR-adjacent document I’ve ever filled out and immediately forgotten.
“You want me to grade your dad,” I say.
“I want you to document a high-profile transition, like you’d document any high-profile account.” He’s already looking back at his screen. “It’s a formality. New coach, big investment, ownership likes paper. Fill it out, send it up, don’t overthink it.”
“Fine.” I fold the sheet into my folder. It’s nothing. It’s a TPS report with a Crowns logo. I will think about it for zero additional seconds. Right now it’s just paper. “Anything else?”
“Yeah.” He pauses, and for the first time the executive cadence slips a half-step. He picks up a pen, turns it over, sets it down. “However he is to work with. Whatever he does. You bring it to me first. Not ownership, not the media office. Me.”
It’s a strange thing to say. It’s also the first human sentence he’s said since I sat down, and I don’t know what to do with it, so I don’t do anything with it. Yet.
“You’re his son,” I say carefully. “If something comes up, isn’t ownership going to expect —”
“I’m the GM who hired him.” The wall comes back up clean. “It’s my hire. My risk. I manage it. That’s all that means.”
It is very obviously not all that means.
The photo turned away on the desk, the no-hockey walls, the way he said my father yesterday in the org-chart announcement like it was a job title and not a person.
There’s a whole country between these two men, and I just got hired as the only road through it.
Nobody told me that part in the interview.
“Okay,” I say. “You first. Got it.”
“Media training’s in ten. Studio C.” He’s back on his phone. “He’s already down there. He was early.”
Of course he was early.
On my way down to Studio C I cross the executive floor, and that’s where I meet the owner.
Hal Brunner is outside the boardroom with two men in better suits than mine, and Caden’s assistant introduces us in passing.
He takes my hand and holds it a second too long and looks at me the way you look at a line item, pleasant, total, somehow subtracting.
“The new comms hire,” he says, like he’s confirming an inventory.
“You’ve got the Mercer rollout.” Not a question.
“Big swing, that one. Sentimental.” He says sentimental the way other men say mistake.
“Lot of nostalgia in this building. Banners and ghosts. Personally, I’m more interested in what a team is than what it used to be.
” He lets go of my hand. “Make him look good. That’s the job.
” He’s into the boardroom before I’ve gotten six words out, and I’m left with the cold little feeling of having been weighed on a scale the man owns, and I tell myself it’s nothing.
He’s the owner. I have a coach to go train.
***
He’s sitting on the edge of the little riser in Studio C when I come in, in a quarter-zip and expensive, casual pants that men like him think count as trying. He watches me cross the room with the exact unhurried attention I’ve spent all night telling myself I imagined.
I did not imagine it. Great.
“Coach Mercer,” I say. Professional. Bright. The voice that gets drunk donors out of suites.
“Ms. Hale.”
So we’re doing that. We’re doing the thing where we both know, and we both know the other one knows, and we are going to act like a man did not break into my press room twelve hours before I introduced him to Chicago, and like there wasn’t a moment in there where the air went sideways and I had to physically pick up a binder to keep my hands occupied.
We’re professionals. We’re going to be so professional about it.
The studio’s small and over-lit and smells like the hairspray they put on broadcast talent, and he takes up more of it than a man sitting still has any right to.
I’ve prepped a hundred principals in this room, players, executives, a mayor once, a goalie who cried, and not one of them ever made me aware of the exact distance between his chair and mine.
I’m aware of it now, down to the inch. It’s going to be a problem, and I’m going to manage it the way I manage everything, which is by deciding it’s a deliverable and giving it a deadline.
“You skipped your nine a.m. brief yesterday,” I say, setting my coffee down. “The one that would have meant neither of us got surprised on live television.”
“I did.”
“On purpose?”
“I sat in the garage and decided I’d rather not be prepped.” He says it like a weather report. No apology. “It worked out. You’re good under pressure.”
“I’m good under pressure because men like you keep generating it.
” I pull the chair around to face the riser and sit.
“So here’s how this season goes, since we didn’t get to do it yesterday.
We meet before every availability. I give you three messages, you hit at least two of them, and in exchange I don’t write you any lines that make you sound like you’re apologizing for existing. ”
Something flickers at the corner of his mouth. He remembers saying it.
“You took the note,” he says.
“I took the part of the note that was right. There’s a difference, and you missed it, so let me be clear.
” I cross my legs, lean back, match his unhurried thing right back at him because I’ll be damned if I let a fifty-three-year-old in a quarter-zip out-calm me in my own studio.
“Last night you got lucky. You read a room and it went your way and it’s at four hundred thousand views.
Some night this season you’re going to read the room wrong, after a bad loss, when you’re tired and your knee hurts and a reporter asks you something cruel, and you’re going to say the true thing instead of the smart thing.
And I’m the person who has to make the true thing disappear before it costs you the city. So we prep. Every time.”
He’s quiet for a second. He’s looking at me like I’ve surprised him, and I hate how much I like surprising him.
“My knee,” he says.
“What?”
“You said when my knee hurts.” He tilts his head. “How’d you know about the knee?”
Because I watched you cross a press room last night and you favored the left leg coming down the aisle and you hid it well but not well enough, and I notice things, it’s the entire job, it’s the entire me. I do not say any of that.
“It’s in your file,” I say instead.
“It’s not in my file.”
“Everything’s in your file. I built the file.” I hold his eyes. “Two messages an availability, Coach. That’s the deal. You give me that, I keep you out of the headline. You go rogue, and I stop being able to protect you, and then you’re just a great quote in a bad story. Do we have a deal?”
He considers me for a long moment, this man who clearly hasn’t agreed to anything he didn’t want to in about three decades.
“We have a deal,” he says. “Ms. Hale.”
“Maren’s fine,” I say, before I can stop myself, and I watch him file it away somewhere, the first name, like it’s worth keeping, and I want it back the second it’s out of my mouth.
“Maren,” he repeats, trying the shape of it. He doesn’t smile. He just lets it sit there between us like he’s deciding where to set it down. “Two messages an availability. You’ve got your deal.”
He stands, the knee again, the half-second of cost he covers so well I’d have missed it a week ago, and he’s most of the way to the door when I say the thing I shouldn’t, because I notice things, and sometimes the noticing gets out ahead of the sense.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “Caden’s the best executive I’ve worked for. He fought for this hire. Hard.”
He stops. Doesn’t turn around. “I know.”
“Then maybe tell him. Not me.”
It’s too far and I know it the instant it’s out, and the silence that comes back is the silence of a door I had no business leaning on.
When he does turn, the granite’s back, the warmth packed away somewhere I can’t reach, and I understand I’ve just brushed the live wire under all of it, the son in the glass box, the father in the quarter-zip, twenty years of something nobody in this building gets to name.
“You manage my press, Ms. Hale,” he says, quiet, even, final. “Not my family.”
“Understood, Coach.”
He goes. And I sit in my own studio with the lights too bright and my pulse going for the second time in two days over a man I’ve now agreed to spend an entire season beside, and I think about the way Ms. Hale slid back over me like a door easing shut, and how badly I already want, against every rule I’ve got, to get it to open again.
There it is, named on day one. I don’t want to manage him. I want to get past the granite. And those are the two things in this whole building I am specifically, contractually, on pain of my career, not allowed to want.