All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

POV: RileyI met Dara on Tuesday at ten.She was already at the library table when I arrived, laptop open, a small camera on the table beside it that she had not turned on, which I registered immediately as a deliberate choice. She was twenty, slight, with the specific focused energy of someone who had been working on one thing with complete attention for three months. She stood when I came in and extended her hand and looked at me directly."Riley Ashford," she said. Not nervously. Just confirming."Dara Osei," I said. I shook her hand and sat across from her and looked at the camera that was not turned on. "Thank you for leaving that off.""I never film a first meeting," she said. "The first meeting is for trust. Film comes after trust." She held my gaze. "I learned that from watching the wrong kind of documentary.""What kind is the wrong kind," I said."The kind where the filmmaker needs the story more than they respect the people inside it," she said. "You can always tell. The su

POV: RileyThe preliminary findings published on a Tuesday at nine in the morning.I was in the committee room when they went live. Not by accident. Dr. Venn had scheduled a special session specifically for the release, so the committee could review the document together before the public had it, so the student representative could read her own name in the acknowledgment section in a room with people who understood what the document contained rather than alone with a screen.That was a specific kind of consideration. I noticed it and filed it.Dr. Venn set the document in front of each committee member at eight fifty-five. Printed. Not digital. The weight of paper. The permanence of ink. Seven pages. The oversight board's formal letterhead at the top.I looked at it for a moment before opening it.Then I opened it.Seven counts of research grant misappropriation confirmed.I read that line three times. Not because I did not understand it. Because I needed to feel the full weight of th

POV: RileyWe talked for forty minutes.Not the strategic version of Clara. Not the woman on the phone who delivered information in careful measured doses, who chose what to release and when with the precision of someone who had been managing this operation for three years. This was the other version. The one that existed underneath the strategy.She was quieter. That was the first thing. The phone voice had carried authority and weight. This voice was more careful. Like someone who had been performing a specific role for so long that stepping out of it required conscious effort."How long have you been angry," I said. About twenty minutes in. When the conversation had found enough ground that the real questions had somewhere to land.A pause."Three years," she said. "Not consistently. In waves." Another pause. "Angry that I was the one who found it. Angry that finding it cost me a year of my life and a degree I had to rebuild somewhere else. Angry that I had to be the person who sta

POV: Ray Late practice ran until eight-thirty. The second-to-last week of the semester and Coach Brannigan was running us through defensive sequences with the specific intensity of someone who understood that the end of a semester was when attention drifted and attention drifting in defensive sequences cost games. Nobody complained. We were all too tired to complain. We just skated. By the final drill I was in my body the way I liked to be in my body, warm through and fully present, the specific grace of exhaustion that came from two hours of nothing except the ice and the play and the thing I had been doing since I was fourteen. We came off at eight-thirty. The locker room was its usual end-of-practice noise, equipment and voices and the sound of skate bags hitting benches. I sat at my stall and started unlacing and let the ordinary ritual carry me for a few minutes. Liam dropped down beside me. Not asking anything yet. Just sitting. The specific patience of someone who had

POV: RileyHe was in the corridor when I came through.Not waiting dramatically. Just standing near the wall with his hands in his jacket pockets, the specific stillness of someone who had been there a while and was comfortable being there a while longer. The corridor smelled like cold rubber and the particular athletic smell of a building that had held a lot of people working hard. The overhead light buzzed faintly above us.I was still in my skating dress. Hair still pinned. The cold of the ice still in my skin and the adrenaline of the performance still warm underneath it, the specific combination of those two things that existed only in the minutes immediately after. It made everything very clear. Very present.He looked at me the way he had looked at me from the third row. No performance. Just the real version."You came," I said."I was always going to come," he said.I looked at him for a long moment.Not building toward something. Not deciding. The decision had been made somew