31. Maren
Maren
The photo of Rhett kissing me in the press box runs everywhere, exactly like I always warned him it would, and it turns out I spent a whole season terrified of the wrong headline.
Because the headline isn’t Scandal. The headline, once Caden walks the September memo to the league and the board removes Brunner for cause and the whole rigged-from-the-start story comes out, is Coach and the Woman Who Wouldn’t Let Them Cheat Him Out.
I’m not the comms lead who slept with the coach.
I’m the one who caught the owner building a guillotine and threw herself across it.
The internet, which I have feared professionally for eight years, decides it loves me.
There are fan accounts. Somebody makes a shirt.
A morning show wants me and Rhett on a couch and I say no, because some things you keep, and the keeping is the whole point now, the keeping is the thing I learned.
I manage exactly none of the rest of it, which is the first time all year the story tells itself, and it tells itself true.
Caden offers me my job back on a Tuesday, in the office with no hockey on the walls, except there’s a hockey thing on the wall now, one framed photo, his father with the team at center ice the night they clinched, and I notice it, I don’t say anything and we both know I noticed it.
“I’d understand if you don’t want it,” he says.
“After what this place did to you. But I’m asking.
Properly. Not coordinator. Director of Communications, your own department, you build it how you want it.
And —” he pushes a second page across the desk, and his executive face cracks into something younger, “— a conflict-of-interest waiver, signed by the board, that says the franchise is fully aware its head coach and its comms director are in a relationship and considers it none of its business. No more hiding. I made them put it in writing. It’s the least I owe the two of you. ”
“Caden.” I make myself say the part that’s true and unflattering, because I’m done managing the truth for people.
“I falsified twelve official documents and submitted them to ownership under my name. The context was a kill file and I’d do it again tomorrow, but I want it said in this room, by me, that there’s no clean version of what I did.
You don’t get to hand me a department and pretend the doctoring was nothing. It wasn’t nothing.”
He’s quiet a second. “The board said roughly the same thing. There was a review, a real one, not a formality. I had to fight for you, and so did my father, and the falsification is on the record, noted, not erased. You came out cleared in context, not cleared like it never happened.” He taps the offer page.
“This isn’t a gift. You’re getting it because you’re the best comms mind I’ve ever worked with and because the review found you acted to stop a fraud, not because anyone’s pretending you didn’t break a real rule to do it.
You’d walk back in with the asterisk, and you’d earn it off over time.
That’s the honest deal. It’s the only deal I’m making anymore. ”
“Good,” I say, and I mean it down to my shoes. “I don’t want the clean version. The clean version is a lie, and I’m done with those.”
And here’s the thing I get to do now, the thing the whole season taught me how to do.
I don’t take it because I’m grateful. I don’t take it because being useful is the only way I know how to be wanted.
I sit with it, and I ask for two more things I want, and I get them, because I’m negotiating from the one place I’ve never negotiated from in my life, which is the knowledge that I’d be fine if I walked away.
I take the job because I want it. Not because I need them to need me.
There’s a whole universe in the difference, and I lived my entire life on the wrong side of it until a man brought me ginger ale and refused to let me disappear.
“Okay,” I tell Caden. “Director. The waiver. And the two other things.” I shake his hand. “Welcome to working with me properly. I’m very good and I’m going to be a nightmare and you’re going to be glad.”
“I already am.” And then, because we’re something like family now, the strange stitched-together kind: “He’s happy. My dad. I’ve never seen it. Whatever you did to him.” He shakes his head. “Thank you doesn’t cover it, so I won’t insult it by trying.”
The department I'm inheriting is one person short.
Camila's gone. She landed on her feet the way her kind always does, a title with "Senior" in front of it at an expansion team two time zones away, a fresh building full of people who don't know she once tried to win a chair by handing it to the wrong man.
I don't wish her ill, which surprises me a little.
She wanted exactly what I wanted, and she went after it the cutthroat way, the way everyone kept warning me I'd have to if I wanted to survive this business.
It cost her. She bet on the owner, and the owner lost, and the machine doesn't keep you warm on its way down.
I bet on a person. That turned out to be the only difference between us, and the whole difference.
***
Tobin retires in May, on his own terms, the clincher his last shift, which is an ending the game almost never gives anybody. At his sendoff he hugs me too hard and says, “Told you not to write the ending yet,” and I cry into the shoulder of a thirty-eight-year-old enforcer in a good suit.
Rhett finds me in the crowd the way he always finds me.
He’s lighter now, all season into the playoffs and beyond it, a man who got his life back at fifty-three and can’t quite believe the building let him keep it.
We didn’t win the Cup. We went two rounds and lost to a better team and he was, to my genuine shock, fine about it, because the Cup was never the thing, I was the thing, the staying was the thing, and a man who finally learned that doesn’t grieve a second-round exit the way he’d have grieved it a year ago.
“You’re doing the thing,” he murmurs, arm around me, watching Tobin hold court one last time. “Standing at the edge of the room running everyone else’s night.”
“It’s my job.”
“It’s your habit.” He turns me to face him.
“But you came home to me at the end of it last night, and you’ll come home to me at the end of this one, and that’s the part that’s new.
You can run the edges of every room in this city.
You just don’t live there anymore. You live with me.
At the table.” He pauses. “I bought the table, by the way. It’s enormous.
And round. It’s absurd. Seats ten. We are two people. ”
“We’re not always going to be two people,” I say, and watch it land on him, watch the silver fox go still and then go soft, and I didn’t plan to say it, it just came out of the un-running part of me, the part that stopped being afraid of wanting the whole thing.
“No,” he says, rough, and his hand comes up to my face as if he has to check I’m real, the same way he did on the couch the night he chose me. “We’re not.”
Here is where I end up, a year after a stranger broke into my press room and rearranged my entire life by telling me my second paragraph was doing too much.
I am the Director of Communications for the Chicago Crowns, which I earned, twice, the second time the hard way.
I am in love with a fifty-three-year-old silver fox who learned to stay in the room right when it counted, and who tells me he loves me out loud, in the building, in the open, in front of cameras, because he spent thirty years keeping the true thing hidden and he’s done.
His son is something like my brother now, reserved and decent and slowly thawing.
There's a banner in the rafters with his name on it, the one the whole city looks up at, and I'm the one who gets to take the man under it home.
There's a too-big table in a condo on the lake, and a stuffed mascot on a shelf that's seen the whole thing.
I spent my whole life being the most useful person in every room so that nobody would ever have to choose me, because being needed felt safe and being chosen felt like a thing that could be taken back.
And then a man chose me out loud, in public, at the worst possible moment for both our careers, and didn’t take it back, and isn’t going to.
I’m not the reliable one anymore. I mean, I am, I’m extremely good at my job, it’s still my best quality. But it’s not my whole personality now. There’s a second thing now. There’s a man, and a table, and a life I’m in instead of a life I manage from the edge of.
He’s across the room, my silver fox, my boss’s father, the worst idea I ever had and the only one that ever mattered. He catches my eye over a crowd the way he caught it over an empty press room a hundred years ago. He doesn’t look up at his banner anymore. He looks at me.
I look back. I don’t manage my face. I let him see all of it.
No more hiding. No managing. Just a woman who finally let herself be chosen, and the man who'd burn down a building before he'd let her disappear, and a whole loud life ahead of them, out in the open, where everyone can see.