Todos los capítulos de The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

POV: MarvelThursday came like Thursdays always came. Ordinary on the surface. The alarm. The shower. The specific ritual of getting ready for something that mattered without letting the mattering make you rigid.I had been here before. Not this exact meeting. But the experience of preparing for something significant while knowing that preparation could only take you so far. The puck drops and then it is just you and the ice and what you actually are.My agent met me in the hotel lobby at one forty-five. He was in his good coat. He looked at me when I came through the door with the assessment of someone who had been managing athletes for fifteen years and knew the difference between a player who was ready and a player who was performing ready."How are you," he said."Ready," I said."Good," he said. "Morrison called me back yesterday.""I know," I said. "You texted.""He did not withdraw the meeting," he said."I know," I said."Marvel," he said. He stopped walking. Turned to face me

POV: RileyGordon's suspension was announced on a Tuesday.Not with fanfare. Institutional suspensions rarely arrived with fanfare. They arrived the way most significant things arrived in university administration, as a brief email from the interim coordinator, three sentences, matter-of-fact language, effective immediately, systems access revoked, investigation ongoing. I read it in the dining hall over breakfast and felt something I did not immediately have a name for.Not satisfaction. Satisfaction would have required the situation to feel finished and it did not feel finished. The investigation was still running. The twelve-year record review was still active. Dr. Venn was still pulling threads.Not relief either. Relief was what I felt when Ray's scholarship email came through. When the formal findings published. When my mother said Wednesday at seven and then appeared through the restaurant door.This was something quieter than either of those. The specific feeling of a mechanis

POV: RileyThe oversight committee met on a Thursday.Room 204 of the administrative building. Third floor. A room I had walked past forty times this semester without once going inside because I had no reason to go inside. Meeting rooms in administrative buildings exist in a specific kind of institutional invisibility, known only to the people who need them, furniture for people with the right credentials.I had the right credentials now.The letter from Dr. Venn's office had arrived Monday. Formal. On oversight board letterhead. Student Representative, Active Investigation Committee. My name. The meeting schedule. The confidentiality parameters. The specific language about what could and could not be shared outside the room.I had read it twice. Filed it in the folder I had started keeping for oversight board correspondence. Put on my jacket. Gone to practice.Now it was Thursday at nine in the morning and I was standing outside Room 204 with my notebook and my pen and the specific f

POV: RileyThe hearing room was on the second floor.Larger than Room 204 where the committee met on Thursdays. A formal space, the kind that had been designed to hold significant proceedings, with a long table at the front for the board members and a single chair positioned across from it where the witness sat. The walls were institutional cream. The overhead lights were bright and even. The windows looked out over the campus's east quadrangle, the bare December trees visible through the glass, the grey morning pressing against the panes.I was in the room as student representative. Not as a witness. My chair was at the side, slightly set back from the main table, the specific positioning of someone present and acknowledged but not the center of the proceeding.Dr. Venn was at the head of the table. Four board members to her left and right. The two external reviewers at the far end. The recording secretary at a small separate table with her equipment.The chair across from the board

POV: RileyNaomi brought it to me on a Monday.Not urgently. The way she brought things that required consideration but not immediate action, setting the information down between us at breakfast with the same matter-of-fact delivery she used for everything that was significant and did not require performance around it."Someone wants to make a documentary," she said.I looked up from my oatmeal."About what," I said."The university crisis from the student perspective," she said. "She is in the media communications program. Second year. She has been filming since the first article published." Naomi poured her tea. "She approached me yesterday after the skating team's afternoon session. She wants to include the skating program's experience of the Hartwell situation.""Peripherally," I said."Her word," Naomi said. "Not the investigation itself. The experience of being a team inside an institution while the institution was going through something significant." She held my gaze. "She is