Chapter Three
JUNIE
Rich had set out pastries. That was my first warning.
GMs do not set out pastries for good news.
There were kolaches from the good place on Airport Boulevard, arranged on a plate like an apology in advance, and Coach Barb was already there, standing by the window, chewing gum at the skyline like she’d caught it slacking.
“Junie! Sit, sit. Kolache?”
“I’ll take one hostage while you tell me what this is.”
“Ha! Funny. She’s funny,” Rich told Barb, who did not confirm. He clasped his hands on the desk. “Junie. Yesterday I said some numbers to Lars. I’m going to say them to you with additional numbers, because you’re the one who’ll understand them.”
He turned his monitor around. I did understand them.
I’d built half those dashboards myself. Follower growth like a hockey stick, which felt thematically on the nose.
Ticket inquiries, merch, engagement rate up so far the graph needed a taller box.
Two years I’d been trying to make this franchise matter to a city with forty thousand other things to do on a Friday, and one accidental clip of a large man being gentle had done it overnight.
“The league viability review is April thirtieth,” Rich said.
“Attendance and engagement. We hit the targets or we start learning to like Hartford. And for the first time in two seasons, we have a live path, and the path is, well.” He gestured at the screen, where a fan edit of the taping played on loop, set to a love song, seventeen million combined views. “The path is you.”
“The path is a scheduling error, Rich.”
“The best things in my life have been scheduling errors. I met my wife at the wrong wedding.” He leaned forward.
“Nobody’s asking you to say anything untrue.
We’re asking you not to correct anyone. Be seen together.
Content days, some appearances, let the story breathe through the playoff push.
That’s it. Come May, you drifted apart, amicable, everyone cries, everyone renews their season tickets. ”
He pulled up one more window, because Rich never had one graph when five would do. A fan account, eleven hours old, forty thousand followers already, bio: “documenting the love story saving texas hockey.” The banner image was me on that bench looking up at Saint like he’d invented arms.
“They made this overnight,” Rich said, reverent. “We’ve had a marketing agency on retainer for two years, Junie. Two years, and their big idea was a punch card.”
“You’re asking me to fake date the goalie.”
“I’m asking you to not deny dating the goalie. Legally distinct. I checked.”
And here is where I need to be honest about the meeting, because two things happened in it, and I only said one of them out loud.
The thing I said out loud was a joke, obviously. “So my job description now includes girlfriend experience. Does that come with a stipend or just the kolaches.”
The thing I did not say out loud happened when Rich, gently, and to his credit with visible discomfort, mentioned that my contract renewal came up in May, and that the renewal case “writes itself if the engagement targets hold.” He wasn’t threatening me.
Rich couldn’t threaten a pi?ata. He was just saying the true thing, which was that I was a one-woman department the franchise had never fully committed to, and this was the version of events where they finally did.
I wanted it so much my teeth hurt. That was the problem. Wanting things loudly was how you ended up as a story someone else tells on a podcast.
Because here’s the résumé I don’t post: eight months ago I ran talent strategy at a Dallas influencer agency, and I was good at it, and I was dating my boss, Deacon Vale, which I know, I KNOW, and when he fired me, he did it in a calendar invite titled “Quick sync.” And three weeks later, on his podcast, laughing with a guest, he described his ex-employee, unnamed but not really, as “a lot. Like, a LOT.” And the clip did numbers.
And I have been, since that day, professionally, aggressively, meticulously delightful, because delightful is what “a lot” looks like when you file down its edges every single morning before work.
I don’t talk about Deacon. Hazel knows, obviously, Hazel was there for the three weeks I alphabetized our spice rack instead of crying, and my mother knows a weather-report version.
But at work I’d filed the whole year under “creative differences” and moved to Austin and built a job out of making a struggling team lovable, which a therapist would have a field day with, if I’d kept going to the therapist, which is a separate bullet point.
Fake dating, at franchise scale, on camera. What could possibly find me there.
And there was one more thing, the thing I’d never say in that office: the work was good.
Not the fraud, the work. Two years I’d been shouting into a canyon, making a hundred small perfect things a week for a team nobody watched, and suddenly the canyon was shouting back.
People were quoting my captions to each other.
A kid had shown up to Saturday’s game in a homemade SUNSHINE jersey, number 00, “because she doesn’t play, she just wins.
” You can know exactly how a machine works, run the machine for a living, and still feel it when the machine finally turns toward you.
“I want it in writing,” I said. “Terms. Boundaries. An exit ramp. If I’m producing this show, I’m producing it properly.”
Barb spoke for the first time all meeting. “Good,” she said, and moved her gum to the other side. “The last person in this building who did anything without a system was Rich.”
“That’s fair,” Rich said.
“It wasn’t a compliment to either of you,” said Barb, and left.
Saint texted me that afternoon. Rich had briefed him separately, which I appreciated, because whatever this was, I did not want to watch his face while a sixty-four-year-old man in a novelty tie proposed our relationship.
Saint: he showed me a graph. Junie: he showed me FOUR graphs and kolaches.
i outrank you. Saint: I haven’t said yes.
Junie: me neither. i’m drafting terms tonight.
if we do this, we do it like adults. professionals.
two colleagues soberly committing light fraud for attendance purposes.
Saint: send the terms. Junie: you’ll have them by morning.
sleep well and don’t tape anything without me.
I put the phone down and did not analyze why the last line had felt less like a joke leaving my hands than it looked on the screen.
That night I sat cross-legged on our couch with my laptop and opened a fresh doc, and Hazel made queso, because in our apartment queso is how you mark a document of consequence. She read over my shoulder in scrubs, eating chips with the detachment of a court stenographer.
“Walk me through the crime,” Hazel said, settling in with the bowl between us like a hearth.
“It’s a controlled narrative with a fixed end date and full internal transparency.”
“So a fake boyfriend.”
“A content partnership with romantic staging.”
“June. I’m going to be on my feet for twelve hours tomorrow holding things for surgeons. Call it what it is so I can enjoy my queso.”
“Fine. A fake boyfriend. A large, contractual, fake boyfriend.” I cracked my knuckles over the keyboard. “But documented. Whatever else this is, it’s going to be the best-documented fraud in the history of the sport.”
I titled it: OPERATION SWEETHEART: TERMS AND CONDITIONS.
“Operation Sweetheart,” Hazel said. “You’ve named the fraud after the crime.”
“Branding is my job, Hazel.”
Rule 1 came first and easiest, because I’d learned it the hard way in Dallas, where everything was managed and nothing was true: Rule 1: Nobody lies to the team.
The locker room knows everything, always.
Whatever we performed for the cameras, the twenty-three people in that room would get the truth, because I’d worked in a building full of beautiful liars once and I was never doing it again.
Rule 2: Minimum two public appearances per week, schedule permitting. Content approval goes through Junie. All of it. Yes, all of it.
“Two a week,” Hazel said. “You saw this man weekly before the fraud.”
“At work. Professionally. Across a rink.”
“So the fraud is a raise.”
Rule 3: Hand-holding is permitted and Junie initiates, because Saint’s resting face makes children cry.
“Accurate,” said Hazel. “I’ve seen the clip. His face during the tenderness is the face of a man being audited.”
Rule 4: No kissing except where cameras are.
“Bold of you to plan the kissing on day one.”
“It’s a contingency, Hazel. Kiss cams exist. I schedule the kiss cam. I am not being romantic, I’m being thorough.”
“Those are your two settings,” Hazel said, and went to bed.
I sat with the document after she left. Rules one through six read like a person with her life together had written them.
Professional. Airtight. Funny in the footnotes, because I can’t help it.
And then I sat there with the cursor blinking and my wrist aching where the tape had been, remembering four seconds of a man holding my arm like it was worth being careful with, and I typed the last one slowly, both hands, like locking a door.
Rule 7: No real feelings. (This is a load-bearing rule.)
I read it twice. Then I made the font match, which is how you know a rule is serious.