28. Iveline
Iveline
Jenna: Good morning, sunshine.
Jenna: I made muffins. They’re terrible, but they exist.
Jenna: Come steal one before the interns eat them and die.
* * *
I’m half propped against my pillows, laptop balanced on my thighs, the room dim except for the screen burning into my eyes.
There are think pieces written by people who have never set foot inside a professional locker room, people who have never stood behind a bench during a double-overtime game, and people who have never had to earn authority one grueling inch at a time.
They stitch together a narrative they like better than the truth because it’s easier to sell. It’s cleaner. It’s more entertaining than the reality of a woman simply doing her job.
Power imbalance. Inappropriate. Predictable.
That one word—inappropriate—feels like a physical stain on my skin.
It is the word they use to dismiss every hour I’ve spent in the dark watching grainy film until my eyes burned. It suggests that my presence in this organization isn’t a result of my intellect or my work ethic, but a result of a massive lapse in judgment.
I look at my reflection in the dark, glass screen of my phone.
I see the woman who memorized the rule books of three different professional leagues by the age of twelve. I see the woman who can recite the Corsi ratings for every defenseman in the Eastern Conference from memory.
But the internet doesn’t see her.
They see a “situation.” They see a headline that fits into a neat little box labeled Professional Failure.
The injustice of it makes my blood run cold.
I’ve spent my entire life being the most professional person in the room, and all it took was one stumble and a pair of steady hands to turn me into a cautionary tale.
My chest tightens until breathing feels optional, like something indulgent I haven’t earned. Like air is a luxury I don’t deserve today.
I spent eight years clawing for an ounce of credibility in this sport.
Eight years of being sharper, quieter, and better than everyone else.
I arrived first and left last. I never gave anyone a single excuse to doubt me.
And it only took eight minutes of shaky cell phone footage to unravel all of it.
I force myself to breathe. One. Two. Three.
I remember the first time control saved me.
I was at my first coaching clinic years ago. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to fail. I stayed quiet. I mapped the room, anticipated their reactions, and redirected the conflict before it could break into an argument. Every choice and every movement was measured. Control was my shield.
And it worked.
That day, I walked out unscathed and respected—not because anyone liked me, but because I refused to be shaken.
Control is my armor. It is my tether to safety.
And now, I can feel it slipping through my fingers in real time.
***
The morning after feels like panic.
It’s in the emails stacked in my inbox before I’ve even managed to brush my teeth. The subject lines pile up like threats on a screen. My phone vibrates nonstop on the counter while the coffee machine sputters uselessly, refusing to cooperate.
There’s a low, electric hum under my skin—a constant, vibrating awareness that something fundamental has shifted, and there’s no undoing it. There is no clean reset button for this. There is no way to rewind the clock to the moment before the cameras surged forward.
I don’t open the articles. I don’t need to read them to know what they say. I’ve been in the hockey world long enough to recognize the shape of a scandal.
When I arrive at the arena, everything feels too alert.
Conversations dip into whispers when I pass by—it’s not dramatic or openly hostile, but it’s enough to notice.
People straighten their backs unconsciously.
Some glance up and then look away quickly, their faces a mix of sympathy and morbid curiosity as they try to reconcile my actual face with the headlines they consumed over breakfast.
I give them nothing.
I put my coach face on and ensure the armor is sealed tight.
Sam O’Rourke is the first person to speak to me like nothing is wrong.
“Morning,” he says, rolling a heavy crate of pucks down the hallway toward the ice.
“You want the blue line drills set up first, or should we—” He stops. He looks at me, really looks at me. “…You good, Iveline?”
“Yes.”
He nods, though he looks entirely unconvinced. “People are being weird today. Just ignore them.”
I keep moving before my throat can tighten, before gratitude can turn into something fragile that might break.
Rick’s office is already occupied when I get there.
Jenna and one of her interns are sitting with their laptops open. Their screens are glowing with graphs, pulled quotes, and sentiment analysis scrolling too fast for me to follow.
“The internet didn’t sleep,” Jenna says briskly, her fingers never stopping their rhythm on the keys. “Neither did we. We’ve been running damage control since midnight.”
Rick slides a printed statement across the desk toward me. I scan the words.
…At no point was there inappropriate conduct between staff and players. The organization maintains strict professional boundaries…
I read it once, the clinical language feeling like a slap in the face. Then I push the paper back toward him.
“This protects him more than it protects me.”
Anger flares in my gut—a flash of betrayal, sharp and sudden, prickling under my skin. For a moment, I think of every time I’ve had to fight to be seen on my own merit, and now, just like that, my work and my reputation are secondary to protecting the captain.
Silence settles over the room, thick and uncomfortable.
Rick nods slowly, acknowledging the truth in what I said. “We’ll revise it, Iveline. Jenna, change the wording.”
“And make it clear I wasn’t rescued,” I add, my voice hardening. “I didn’t need saving. I tripped, and a player assisted. That is the extent of the story.”
Jenna is already typing, her face set in a mask of professional focus.
The meeting bleeds time. Every word is weighed for its impact. Every phrase is parsed for potential loopholes and optics. By the end of the hour, my jaw aches from holding the tension in my face.
When I finally step back into the hallway, my phone buzzes again.
It’s my father.
I duck into an empty, darkened corridor and answer the call.
“This is dangerous, Iveline,” he says without any preamble. No greeting, no “how are you.” Just the bottom line.
“Because perception matters more than the truth to you,” I reply evenly, leaning my back against the cold brick wall.
“You need to distance yourself from him immediately,” he says, ignoring me. “Completely. If he’s in a room, you leave it. If he’s on the ice, you speak to him through Rick.”
“No.”
There is a long pause on the other end of the line. Then his voice comes back, sharper and colder.
“You’re being emotional. That is a mistake you cannot afford.”
I feel rage flare in my chest, hot and immediate, and then a hollow numbness creeps in to take its place.
Emotional.
When my father says it, he isn’t just criticizing my choice; he is revoking my clearance. He is telling me that I’ve proven everyone right—that I let my heart interfere with the machine of the organization.
I close my eyes tight.
“I’m being careful, William,” I say, and I hang up before he can respond.
I lean my head against the cool brick, the silence of the arena pressing in on me.
He doesn’t understand that being ‘careful’ is exactly what got me here. I was so careful that I didn’t even realize I was falling until Callahan caught me. And now, the only way to satisfy the man who gave me my name is to become a ghost, to treat the man who saved me like a complete stranger.
***
Practice is horrible.
I don’t look at Callahan. Not even once.
I feel his attention anyway—it’s like a physical pressure between my shoulder blades, like a heat I refuse to acknowledge. Every instinct in me wants to explain myself to him, to clarify what is happening, to anchor us both.
Instead, I do what I’ve always done best.
I control the distance.
When he finally approaches me near the bench—his movements careful, measured, and painfully professional—I can feel the air around us turn static.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
“Yes.”
My chest tightens with a fresh surge of guilt and a small, sharp flare of longing.
He nods once and skates away, accepting my answer at face value because that’s what professionals do.
I can see the tension in the way he holds his stick—the tightness in his forearms and the way he doesn’t chirp at Cash or joke with Nico during the drills.
He’s mirroring my distance, but he isn’t doing it because he wants to. He’s doing it because he respects me enough to follow my lead, even when that lead is taking us both off a cliff.
Every time our paths cross on the ice during the scrimmage, the air feels heavy, as if it’s saturated with all the things we aren’t allowed to say.
I see Callahan at the top of the circles, his jersey billowing as he stops, and I realize the silence I’m imposing on us is a different kind of violence.
I’m asking him to be a ghost in the one place he’s most alive.
I want to tell him I’m sorry. I want to tell him that my father’s voice is stuck in my head. I want to tell him that seeing his hand on my waist in that video didn’t make me feel ‘compromised’—it made me feel safe for the first time in years.
But I say nothing.
I blow the whistle for the next drill. I point to the whiteboard and draw lines that look like a cage. I act like the ice between us isn’t melting into a dark, freezing pool that could swallow both of our careers.
By the time I leave the rink, the arena is nearly empty. I check the parking lot from the window; his car is gone.
Good, I tell myself. This is how I protect what I’ve spent my entire life building.
I pause by my car, letting the freezing air fill my lungs, trying to ground the swirl of adrenaline, shame, and reluctant tenderness in my chest.
I know there is no undoing the surge. There is no soft landing back in the real world where we are just a coach and a captain.
But somewhere beneath the panic, I can still feel the bond we’ve built—a trust, a tether, an awareness that even in the middle of this chaos, he would still meet me halfway if I just asked.
I turn toward the street, the cold creeping under my coat, and for the first time in days, the panic loosens its grip. Because even with the distance between us, I know he hasn’t checked out. He’s steady; he’s present; he understands more than I can say right now.
And for the moment, that has to be enough.