14. Lucy
LUCY
NOW – MONTHS LATER
Ishoved my phone into the pocket of my blazer before it could ring again. It had been vibrating almost continuously for the last forty-five minutes.
League inquiries.
Sponsor questions.
Media requests.
Three different attorneys.
Two board members.
One very enthusiastic local morning show asking if Alois and Bea would be available for "a quick exclusive."
Absolutely not.
The hallway outside the media room had finally emptied enough that I could hear my own footsteps again as I crossed the polished concrete toward the executive offices.
A janitor pushed a wide mop slowly across the concourse below, the citrus scent of fresh floor cleaner drifting faintly upward through the open atrium.
Somewhere deeper inside the building, equipment carts rattled over concrete while the last handful of media members packed expensive cameras into hard plastic cases.
The building sounded tired.
So did I.
The elevator chimed softly when the doors slid open. I stepped inside alone, pressing the button for the administrative level before leaning back against the wall.
For the first time since Alois had stepped behind that podium, I was still.
The silence should have felt like relief.
Instead, it gave my brain room to replay everything. The questions. The cameras. The way the entire room had shifted the second Alois walked past Bea instead of letting her take the podium.
Every crisis-management instinct I'd developed had screamed at me to stop him. Players weren't supposed to freelance press conferences.
Especially not players with reputations like Alois Müller. Especially not after someone inside our own organization had handed the media exactly the ammunition they'd been waiting for.
Our organization. The thought slipped in so naturally that it took me a second to catch it.
Three months ago, I never would have thought of the Frosthawks that way.
Three months ago, I was standing in a park across from Ty Burns, telling myself that staying in Northbend was temporary. That this was just a job. A favor. A transition period before I figured out what came next.
We made rules. Boundaries.
I thought keeping distance from Buzz would be the hard part.
I never considered the possibility that the thing I would accidentally fall back in love with wasn't a person.
It was this.
The early mornings walking into Talon Arena with Dottie trotting beside me like she owned the place. The operations meetings that somehow became second nature. The staff members who stopped asking if I knew where things were because they started asking me where things belonged.
Sarah's late-night strategy texts.
Bea showing up in my office without knocking.
My father trusting me with decisions before I realized he had stopped checking my work.
Somewhere between fall and the dead of winter, temporary stopped feeling like a timeline. It started feeling like a lie.
And tonight, with the entire organization threatening to crack open because someone we trusted had decided our private lives were worth more as headlines, I wasn't thinking about leaving.
I was thinking about protecting it.
I had been preparing for another disaster. Instead, Alois had dismantled the entire narrative in under five minutes. Not because he'd outperformed the reporters. Because he'd refused to play their game at all.
Then he'd proposed.
I rubbed both hands over my face.
No communications textbook in existence covered spontaneous marriage proposals during active organizational crises.
The elevator doors opened again.
The administrative floor felt almost unnaturally quiet after everything downstairs.
Soft carpeting replaced concrete. Muted artwork lined the walls.
The smell shifted from coffee and sweat and hockey equipment to polished wood and expensive candles Lo insisted made the offices "feel less corporate and more human. "
Sarah Yu stood outside the conference room with a tablet tucked against one hip, already looking ready for tomorrow instead of wrecked by yesterday. Her dark hair remained perfectly in place despite the longest night either of us had worked in weeks. She looked up as I approached. "You survived."
"Barely."
One corner of her mouth lifted. "I've seen worse."
"I don't think either of us has."
She fell into step beside me. "Fair."
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. We'd worked together long enough hours over the last few months that silence wasn't uncomfortable anymore.
Months ago, I barely knew Sarah beyond her title and the intimidating efficiency that followed her through every hallway in the building.
Now I knew she preferred green tea after lunch because coffee made her hands shake.
I knew she alphabetized everything except her desktop because she claimed visual chaos helped her think.
I knew she kept emergency protein bars in the second drawer of her desk because she forgot to eat whenever trade deadlines approached.
Funny. The things you learned when people became part of your everyday life.
Sarah glanced sideways. "What?"
I hadn't realized I'd smiled. "Nothing."
"Liar."
I huffed a quiet laugh. "I was just thinking."
"Dangerous."
"So I've been told."
She reached for the conference room door but paused before opening it. "They're both okay."
The words came quietly. Not as my coworker. As someone who understood why I'd spent the last hour worrying about people more than press releases.
I nodded. "I know."
"Convincing." She studied me for another second. "You still feel responsible."
Because I had trusted Char. Because somewhere along the way I'd convinced myself I could read people well enough to know who belonged inside these walls. Apparently, I had blind spots.
"I keep replaying it," I confessed. "Trying to figure out when I missed it."
Sarah rested one hand lightly against the conference room handle. "You didn't."
"I had to."
"No." Her voice stayed calm. "Charlotte didn't wake up one morning planning to become a liability. She made a series of choices. Those belong to her."
"It still happened on my watch."
Sarah's expression softened almost imperceptibly. "You know what I think?"
"What?"
"I think you're starting to sound like Ezra."
I blinked. "I'm going to pretend that wasn't an insult."
"It wasn't." She smiled fully now. "It was an observation turned compliment."
The words settled in deeper than I expected. Somewhere between reorganizing departmental workflows, fixing scheduling conflicts, mediating player issues, learning which sponsors needed handwritten thank-you notes instead of emails, I'd stopped thinking like someone filling in temporarily.
I'd started carrying the organization home with me. The realization sat strangely in the back of my brain. Heavy. Itchy. Dangerous.
Sarah pushed the door open.
My dad already sat at the head of the conference table, jacket draped neatly across the back of his chair, reading glasses balanced low on his nose as he studied a stack of legal documents.
Beside him, Bea looked exhausted. Her eyes were swollen beneath fresh makeup, and although she wore her usual composed expression, I recognized the subtle tells now.
The way her fingers stayed wrapped around her tea mug even though it had long since gone cold.
The slight tension through her shoulders.
The careful, deliberate control she held over every breath.
Across from her, Alois sat unusually still. Which, considering the man could make an entire room uncomfortable without saying a single word, probably should have felt more intimidating than it did.
But tonight, there was nothing cold about him.
His attention wasn’t on the paperwork spread across the conference table.
It wasn’t on my father sitting at the head of the room, or Sarah organizing the fallout, or me trying to mentally rebuild a department that had started crumbling forty-five minutes ago.
It was on Bea. Like the rest of us existed somewhere outside the boundaries of whatever promise he had silently made when he stepped behind that podium.
Months ago, I would have described Alois Müller as terrifying. Tonight, he looked like a man who had finally found something worth protecting.
The silence settled over the room. Like everyone understood this meeting wasn't about cleaning up the aftermath anymore. It was about deciding what came next.
Alois finally broke it. "What are you going to do about her?" His voice stayed low, but there wasn't anything casual about it.
My father looked up from the folder in front of him, his reading glasses sliding. "That's what Lucy is going to figure out."
I frowned, settling into the chair across from him. "What does that mean?"
Dad leaned back slowly, folding his hands together over the edge of the table. "It means," he said evenly, "you're going to need someone from Human Resources sitting beside you."
My stomach tightened. "Why?"
Sarah answered before he could. "Because Charlotte Anderson is being fired."
The statement sucked the air out of the room. Even though I'd known. Even though every piece of evidence pointed to termination. Even though she'd admitted enough over the last several hours that there really wasn't another option.
My eyes dropped to the legal folder sitting open in front of my father. Termination paperwork. Confidentiality agreements. Documentation. Nothing about it looked dramatic. Just paper. Ink. Signatures. The kind of paperwork that quietly changed someone's entire life.
"I wanted to believe there was another explanation," I huffed.
Dad nodded once. "So did I." No anger. No disappointment.
"The internal investigation confirmed she knowingly provided confidential organizational information to members of the media.
" His voice remained calm, almost clinical.
"She violated her employment agreement, breached organizational trust, and jeopardized both this hockey club and the people sitting in this room.
" His gaze drifted toward Bea for only a moment. "I won't overlook that."