Novels by Folu Oyewumi

[ Cade POV ]Media day was a performance I'd been running since I was sixteen years old and I treated it the same way I treated game prep: the night before, I broke it into components. Likely angles. Expected questions. Which ones got real answers and which ones got something that sounded like an answer but contained nothing a journalist could use against me or the team. I was good at it in the way that you got good at something by doing it dozens of times under real pressure. I didn't particularly enjoy it. That was not the point.The point was control. The media room was the one place in my season where the wrong word from the wrong player could do damage that no amount of ice time repaired.She was better at it than I was. I figured that out in the first fifteen minutes.Not flashier. Not more polished in the way of someone who'd been media-trained into a persona. Better in the specific way of someone who was completely, uncomplicatedly themselves under pressure, which was rarer an

[ Scarlett POV ]The problem with a new place is that it never belongs to you at 3am. Everything is fractionally wrong, the wrong quality of dark through the wrong curtains, the refrigerator hum at the wrong pitch, the floor creaking under your feet in the wrong sequence of boards. My body knew it wasn't home. My body kept waking up to inform me of this fact with great urgency every forty minutes, as though I might have forgotten in the interval.I'd been awake since one. I'd read three chapters of a book I'd borrowed from Jade before the move, retaining none of it. I'd checked my phone. I'd done the breathing exercise a sports psych consultant had given me two years ago that worked approximately forty percent of the time. I'd stared at the ceiling long enough to trace the hairline crack in the plaster from the light fixture to the far corner and back.At 3:17am I gave up and went downstairs.He was already there.Standing at the kitchen counter in a grey t-shirt and shorts, bowl in o

[ Cade POV ]The list was practical. Necessary. A straightforward operational framework for a living situation that had been created by a housing coordinator who apparently did not understand the concept of gender-separated team housing, and a coach who I was increasingly certain had not only known about it but had arranged it on purpose. I would deal with that later. For now: the list.I'd printed it. Not written, printed, because printed conveyed a different level of seriousness, conveyed that this had been thought through and formalised rather than scrawled as an afterthought. Seven items. Font size eleven. Margins even on both sides. I set it on the kitchen table at 5:45am and had my coffee made and my bag ready before she came downstairs.The rules were reasonable. Separate bathroom schedules, she had mornings at 6:00am, I had 6:45am, no overlap, no ambiguity. No shared meals unless team events required shared attendance. No personal conversations beyond basic household logistics

[ Scarlett POV ]There is a specific kind of silence that settles over a room full of athletes when they've collectively decided to wait for you to fail. I'd grown up inside that silence. I'd learned to skate in it, learned to read the ice through it, learned to locate exactly where it lived in my body, just below my shoulder blades, a tightening that I breathed through until it became nothing, just air, just background. I'd been doing it since I was the only girl at my first hockey camp at age nine and every boy in my group had looked at me with that same particular expression: patient, almost kind, absolutely certain.First full team practice. Eleven skaters plus Cade Harlow, who had said exactly nothing to me since the locker room and was currently running drills on the far end of the ice with the focused intensity of a man performing the very specific act of pretending I did not exist.Fine. I didn't need his acknowledgment. I needed ice time.I found my place in the line drill an

[ Cade POV ]Her stats were a problem.I'd been staring at them for four hours,broken down by game, by period, by zone entry, by every metric our analytics team ran on every player in the conference,and the numbers weren't lying. Scarlett Voss was fast. Not fast for a left wing, not fast for a woman, not fast with qualifying clauses of any kind. Fast. Shot percentage in the top four percent of the position nationally. Zone exits cleaner than any forward we currently had in uniform. Assists-to-goals ratio that put her in a category of players who understood the ice architecturally,not just where the puck was, but where it was going to be in three seconds, and how to be there first.She was twenty-two years old.The problem was not her stats.I closed the laptop. Pressed both palms flat against the desk and stared at the ceiling, which offered nothing useful. Then I got up, went to the window, came back to the desk. Sat down again. This was not how I handled problems. I identified them,

[ Scarlett POV ]The locker room smelled like men's deodorant and old ambition, and neither of those things was going to stop me.I stood in the doorway for exactly three seconds. Long enough to take inventory, short enough that nobody could call it hesitation. Metal lockers, rows of them, every hook already taken by someone who had not expected company. Fluorescent light buzzing overhead like it had something to apologise for. Through the far wall I could hear a shower running, and underneath that,underneath the white noise of water and the distant clang of something metallic,I could hear voices cutting off the precise moment my door opened.They knew I was here.My locker was number seven. Coach Briggs had told me this three times in our last phone call, with the careful repetition of a man who understood that information delivered under stress didn't always land. The assistant equipment manager had confirmed it twice when he'd handed over my kit. The campus newspaper had run a phot