Chapter 121: His Decision

POV: RileyNaomi was already in my room when I arrived.Not because I had asked her. Because she had understood without being told that the night before a significant thing required a specific kind of company. She had her laptop open on my desk and a printed copy of the testimony structure on the bed beside her and two cups of tea already made and cooling to the right temperature.I looked at the room. At the organized evidence of a friend who had been inside this with me since the battery drain on my phone in October."Thank you," I said."Sit," she said. "We go through it once. Then you sleep."I sat.We went through everything in order.Not because the documentation was in question. Because going through it in order was its own kind of preparation. The act of moving through the sequence deliberately, one piece after the next, settled something in the nervous system that abstract readiness could not reach.The spyware documentation. Clean. Authenticated. Access log, installation fil

Chapter 122: Yes

POV: RileyI woke at five.Not the alarm. Just the body knowing. The specific early wakefulness of a significant day, the kind that had been true before competitions and before the first article published and before the morning I submitted the documentation at four-eighteen in the afternoon.I lay still for three minutes. Ran the inventory.What I would say: the true sequence. The specific account of what I found and what I did with it. No editorializing. No performance of distress. No looking at him while I said it. My testimony was for the record, not for my father.What I would not say: anything about the letter. Anything about the voicemail. Anything about the specific grief of understanding what something always was. That was mine. That did not belong to the formal evidentiary session of the oversight board's full hearing.How I would hold myself when I saw his face: the way I held myself in every room that tried to manage me. Chin level. Shoulders back. Full weight on the correc

Chapter 123: Testimony

POV: RileyThe hearing room was on the second floor.I had been in this building many times now. The committee room on Thursday mornings. The corridors I had learned to navigate without thinking. But the hearing room was different from Room 204. Larger. More formal. The specific architecture of a space designed to hold proceedings that mattered.I waited in the corridor outside at eight fifty-five with Naomi beside me. She had her notebook. I had mine. We did not talk. The waiting was its own kind of preparation and we had both learned that filling it with conversation was not the same as being ready.At nine-oh-two the door opened.The facilitator. A woman I recognized from Dr. Venn's staff, precise and efficient. She looked at me."Ms. Ashford," she said. "We are ready."The room was exactly what it was.Long table. Seven board members seated. Dr. Venn at the head, the same composure she brought to every room. The external reviewers at the far end. The recording secretary at her sep

All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 121 - Chapter 123

Chapter 121: His Decision

Chapter 122: Yes

Chapter 123: Testimony