Semua Bab The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Bab 91 - Bab 100

POV: RileyPatricia Osei was not the only one.By noon on Monday three more people had called the oversight board's intake office. Dr. Venn's assistant sent me a message at eleven forty-five, not the formal notification channel, a direct text from a number I recognized from the weeks of real-time information, telling me simply: Four calls this morning. All pre-Clara. All with documentation.I read it at the north window table while Ray set actual coffee in front of me and sat across from me and read my face before I said a word."More calls," he said."Four," I said. "This morning. All of them from before Clara."He sat with that. The coffee steamed between us. Outside the north window the campus moved through its ordinary Monday, students with backpacks and the flat winter light making everything sharp-edged and clear."Amara," he said."She is already moving," I said. "She told me this morning she was going to try to reach the people in the earlier records." I looked at my phone. "B

POV: RileySaturday arrived the way significant days always arrived. Quietly. Without announcement. Just the alarm at seven and the ordinary morning light coming through the curtain and the specific knowledge that today was different sitting in my chest before I was fully awake.I lay still for three minutes. Ran the inventory the way I always ran it. What I knew. What I did not know. What I needed today and what could wait.What I knew: her name was in my contacts now. Her actual name. She had called my father eleven years of silence breaking in one morning because she needed to hear him say out loud what I had done. She had texted me about the skates. She made good tea. She laughed and it sounded like something I recognized in myself.What I did not know: everything else. The shape of her in person. The specific way she moved through a room. Whether the warmth on the phone translated into the warmth of a shared table. Whether nineteen years of absence would sit between us like furni

POV: RileyI was on the ice when it published.Six-fifty in the morning. The rink before anyone else arrived, the overhead lights at their early setting, the ice clean from the overnight resurface. I had been there since six-thirty because the piece was publishing at seven and I had decided deliberately that I wanted to be somewhere that did not have a screen when that happened.The ice did not care what was being published. It just required the correct edge and rewarded the correct weight.I ran back edges until six fifty-eight. Then I came off through the gate and sat on the penalty box bench and picked up my phone.The student paper's website. Front page. My name above the piece in the clean bold font Zara used for features.I read it once. My own words, which I had written two nights ago on the floor of my room, now public and permanent and no longer mine in the way that private things are yours. They were still true. That was the thing I checked first. Still true. Still the hones

POV: RileyThe messages were still arriving on Friday morning.I had stopped counting after two hundred. Not because I was indifferent to them but because counting them had started to feel like measuring something that was not meant to be measured. Each message was a person. A specific person who had read the piece and recognized something in it and had found the contact form on the student paper's website and typed something true. Counting them made them into a statistic and they were not a statistic. They were people.I read every one.Not all at once. In the spaces between the ordinary things. Before practice. During breakfast. On the bench in the rink corridor after the session ended and my legs were warm and my mind was clear. I read them the way I read anything that mattered, completely and without rushing, letting each one land before moving to the next.Most of them said a version of the same thing. Not the same words. The same recognition. I grew up inside someone else's need

POV: MarvelI read the piece on a Sunday night.Not because someone sent it to me. Because it was everywhere. My teammates were talking about it in the group chat. A girl in my economics seminar had mentioned it twice. The national publication link had appeared in four separate conversations over the weekend and I had kept scrolling past it the way you scroll past something you know is going to require something from you that you are not ready to give.Sunday night at eleven I stopped scrolling past it.I was in my apartment. The development contract paperwork was on my desk, signed and returned, the best professional thing that had ever happened to me sitting in an inbox somewhere being processed into a future I had been working toward since I was fourteen. Tomas had taken me to dinner when I told him. Liam had texted from across the campus rivalry line because apparently Liam knew everyone and everything and had decided that news worth celebrating crossed team boundaries.The contra