Chapter 7

Jace's POV

The trainer had my shoulder wrapped and iced before I’d even made it out of my gear, and I sat there on the edge of the training table half listening to him list off words like strain and inflammation and no contact for at least a week, none of which mattered to me nearly as much as the one piece of information nobody had said out loud yet.

“Where’s Whitlock?” I asked, cutting him off mid sentence.

He didn’t answer right away, which told me everything before he actually opened his mouth.

“She left,” he said finally, not looking at me, focused very intently on the tape he was wrapping around my shoulder. “Right after it happened. Didn’t stay for the rest of the drill.”

Something cold settled into my stomach and stayed there. “She left.”

“Jace—”

“She flew out here to watch one drill and she left.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, man. I just wrap shoulders.” He finished the tape and stepped back, and I sat there staring at a wall of framed team photos going back thirty years, half listening to the ice machine hum somewhere behind me, trying to convince myself that this didn’t mean what I already knew it meant.

Coach found me twenty minutes later in the equipment room, and one look at his face told me the trainer’s version had been the gentle one.

“My office. Now.”

I followed him down the hall past a handful of teammates who suddenly found their lockers extremely interesting the moment I walked by, which is its own kind of confirmation, the specific silence of people who already know something and don’t want to be the ones who tell you.

Coach shut the door behind us, which he almost never did, and sat down hard behind his desk like his knees had given up on him sometime in the last hour.

“You want to explain to me what the hell happened out there?”

“Some girl came through a side door at full speed, I didn’t see her in time, we collided. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

“That’s not the whole thing, because the whole thing is currently sitting at eighteen thousand views on some gossip account, and Dana Whitlock’s assistant already called the athletic director twice in the last hour.” He rubbed a hand down his face, and for a second he looked less like a coach and more like a man doing math he didn’t like the answer to. “You know what she told him? She said, and I’m quoting here, that she came out to see a player with poise under pressure, and instead she watched him get taken out by a civilian in a hallway collision and then react like a kid having a tantrum on camera. Her words. Poise under pressure.”

I didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t anything to say that would make that sound better.

“She’s not writing you off completely, not yet, but she’s not walking back into this building next month either. She said she’ll be watching tape instead. Tape, Jace. Not you. Tape of you, from a safe distance, because apparently showing up in person is a liability now.”

It landed the way certain hits land, not in the moment but half a second later, once the adrenaline clears and you realize exactly how much it actually hurt. I had spent four years building a version of myself specifically designed to survive scrutiny like this, controlled, composed, unbothered, the guy who never let anyone see him rattled, and it had taken one collision and nine seconds of footage to strip all of that off me in front of the one person whose opinion had actually mattered.

“I need her back in this building,” I said, and I heard how it sounded even as I said it, less like a request and more like something closer to desperate.

“That’s not up to me anymore.” Coach leaned back, arms crossed, studying me in a way that made me feel about fifteen years old. “It’s up to the athletic department now, and the athletic department is currently in full panic mode because this thing is spreading a lot faster than any of us would like, and half the comments on it are asking who the girl is and why nobody’s addressed it.”

“So address it. Say it was an accident. Move on.”

“They’re working on something.” He said it carefully, the way you say something you already suspect somebody isn’t going to like. “I don’t have the full details yet, but I got a call twenty minutes ago from the communications office, and the phrase controlled narrative got used more than once. Something about turning this into a story instead of letting it stay a mess.”

“What kind of story?”

“I don’t know yet. But I do know they’ve already been in contact with the dean’s office about the girl, since apparently she’s on some kind of financial aid case that’s already active, and there was talk of some sort of arrangement. Public facing. Something that shows accountability instead of just letting this die out on its own.”

I felt my stomach drop somewhere around my knees. “An arrangement with who?”

“With her, Jace. The girl.”

I stood up so fast the chair scraped hard against the floor. “I’m not doing a photo op with the person who just cost me the one shot I had this year.”

“Nobody said photo op.” Coach’s voice sharpened, the tone he used maybe twice a season when he actually meant something. “Sit down.”

I sat.

“I don’t have specifics. What I’ve heard, unofficially, is that they’re looking at something structural, not a photo. Something ongoing. The kind of thing where you’d actually have to be around her, regularly, in a way that looks like the university handling this like adults instead of hiding it.” He tapped his pen against the desk, watching me carefully, like he already knew how badly I was going to hate whatever came next. “I’d get used to the idea now, because if it comes down from higher up, it’s not really going to be a conversation. It’s going to be an assignment.”