THE PRESS CONFERENCE

[ 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 and harder to manufacture than any coaching. She answered questions directly, without hedging. She was dry without being dismissive. She gave the press enough to make a story without giving them anything that could be turned.

I was two seats down the table, answering a question about our neutral zone structure, when I tracked the shift in the room that meant a reporter on her end had decided to stop with the setup and try something sharper.

"Scarlett." The reporter's voice, a local sports journalist I recognised, known for going for the reaction shot. "Do you actually believe you're ready for competition at this level? Men's Division I is a fundamentally different game from what you've been playing."

The room changed. Not loudly. Just that particular quality of collective attention that falls when everyone present wants to see what comes next and nobody wants to be caught looking. I kept my eyes on the reporter across from me and tracked her in my peripheral.

She paused.

It was brief, three, maybe four seconds, and I watched her work through it the way I worked through things: fast, internal, systematic. She was sorting responses, evaluating, selecting the one that was most precisely true and least useful to the person asking.

"I've been ready for this level for two years, " she said. Flat. No defensiveness in it, no performance of confidence. Just the clean delivery of a stated fact. "The question is whether the level is ready for me." A half-beat, nothing theatrical about it, she just let the air sit for a moment, unhurried. "It's getting there."

The room gave her a small laugh. Not the sycophantic kind, the involuntary kind, when something lands precisely. The reporter recalibrated and moved on to the next question. She didn't react to having landed it. Didn't exhale, didn't let anything show. Just sat there with her hands flat on the table and waited for whatever came next with the patience of someone who had been answering questions like that since before she could drive.

Afterward I ended up in the corridor behind the media room. I always came here, the narrow hallway between the press room and the equipment storage, because it was one of the only places in this building where you could stand in silence for two minutes without someone needing something from you. I'd been doing it for three years. It felt like mine.

She was already there. Back against the wall, eyes closed, very still. The particular stillness of someone letting a performance leave their body.

She opened her eyes when she heard me. We looked at each other.

I had a number of things I could have said. Professional things. Team things. Things that fit neatly inside the operational relationship I had been trying to maintain. I opened my mouth to say one of them.

"Better answer than I would've given, " I said instead.

She looked at me for a moment the way she sometimes did, like I was a calculation she was running, and the answer kept coming out different than expected. I didn't move. I let her look.

Then she pushed off the wall and walked back toward the main doors. Her footsteps were even and unhurried. The corridor was long and they echoed for a while.

I stood there after they faded. Looking at the wall. Thinking about the exchange with the particular focus I usually reserved for film review, what had been said, what hadn't, which part of it I was going to be thinking about for the rest of the day.

I'd complimented her. Out loud. Without calculating it first. Without running it through the filter of what the team dynamic required, or what a captain's relationship with a contested player should look like, or any of the other considerations I was supposed to be running. I had just said the true thing because it was true.

That was new.

I didn't know yet if it was a problem. I had a feeling it might be.

***

I stood in the corridor after she was gone and stared at the spot on the wall where she'd been leaning. I'd given her an honest answer without calculating whether I should. That was the first time I'd done that since she'd arrived. I couldn't decide if it had been a mistake or the first thing I'd gotten right.