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All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

171 Chapters

Chapter 131: The Second Piece

POV: RileyI wrote it in one sitting on a Saturday morning.The idea that had arrived Thursday night after Naomi left, the four sentences in my notes application, had been developing quietly all day Friday while I skated and ate breakfast and attended the last committee meeting before the formal findings would arrive. By Saturday morning it was ready. Not assembled. Ready. The specific readiness of writing that has been living inside you longer than you realized and simply needs the hour to come out.I sat on the floor of my room with my back against the bed and the laptop on my knees. The same position. The same approach that had produced the first piece.This one was different from the first.The first piece was about the inside of control. What it felt like to live within someone else's need to manage you. Personal and specific and written from the only position I actually had, which was my own.This one was not about me.It was about Clara, who found an anomaly in a departmental b

Chapter 132: The Findings

POV: RileyThe email arrived on a Tuesday at eight-oh-three in the morning.I was at the rink. Not skating yet. Sitting on the penalty box bench with my skates half laced, the specific ritual of preparation interrupted by my phone lighting up on the bench beside me.Oversight Board of Hartwell University. Formal Findings. Your name appears in this document as a cooperating party. Please review.I looked at the notification for exactly three seconds.Then I finished lacing my right skate. Then my left. Then I stood up and stepped onto the ice and skated for twenty minutes before I opened the email.Not avoidance. The opposite. The findings existed whether I read them immediately or after twenty minutes on the ice. The ice was what I needed first. The specific clarity that came from full weight on the correct edge, the body doing what it knew, the mind clearing itself of the anticipation that had been living in the background for three weeks.Twenty minutes. Back edges. One spin. No dou

Chapter 133: Forty Minutes

POV: RileyThe call lasted forty minutes.I know because I checked the time when it ended, not because I was tracking it but because I needed to know how long I had been sitting on the floor of my room with my back against the bed and the lamp on and the January night pressing against the window.Forty minutes. The length of my oversight board testimony. The length of Clara's first hearing appearance. Some things measured themselves in that unit without my choosing it.She did not explain the years at the beginning. She did not open with the apology or the context or the careful framing that letters allowed. She just picked up and said my name and then was quiet for a moment, and I understood that the quiet was her collecting herself, and I waited, because waiting was something I had gotten good at this semester."I read the second piece," she said. "The one about Clara and Preethi and David.""Yes," I said."You wrote about what it costs to come forward in a system designed to make c

Chapter 134: The Door

POV: RileyI did not plan to go to the dining hall.I walked out of my room after the call because sitting in the same space where the call had happened felt like staying inside it, and I needed somewhere ordinary that had nothing to do with what had just occurred. The dining hall at nine-thirty on a Monday night was quiet and warm and full of students doing the ordinary things of a Monday night, studying and eating and existing without awareness of anything significant having happened to anyone in their vicinity.I found the small corner table. The one near the back where the light was slightly dimmer and the foot traffic was minimal. I ordered coffee at the counter and sat down and did not open my laptop or my notebook.I stared at nothing specific.The coffee went cold while I was staring.I noticed it had gone cold and did not do anything about it.Ray texted at nine forty-seven.Where are you.I looked at the message for a moment.Dining hall. Corner table.He arrived eight minut

Chapter 135: Terminated

POV: RileyThe final findings came on a Wednesday.Not the preliminary findings. Not the expanded twelve-year review documentation. The final formal findings of the oversight board's complete investigation, published at nine in the morning with the specific weight of something that had been building since September and had now arrived at its permanent form.I read them at the north window table.Ray was across from me. We had both been there since eight-thirty, not because we planned to be but because the north window table had become the place where significant things arrived and were received, and we had both understood without discussing it that this morning required being somewhere real together.He had actual coffee. Mine was going cold again the way it always did when something required more attention than a cup.I read every page.It took thirty-five minutes.Hartwell terminated from his faculty position.The sentence sat on the page in the specific plain language that institut

Chapter 136: What Do You Want

POV: RileyThe investigator's email arrived on a Friday morning.State Education Authority. Office of Institutional Compliance and Student Protection. A name I did not recognize, a woman named Investigator Callahan, and a request phrased carefully in the specific language of someone who understood that the person receiving it had already been through a great deal and was choosing their words accordingly.She was not requiring my participation at this stage. She was inviting it. The distinction was made clear in the second paragraph. My documentation was already in the oversight board's record and had been transferred to the state authority as part of the criminal referral package. She had what she needed to conduct the preliminary assessment without me.But if I was willing to speak with her, my direct account would strengthen the evidentiary foundation of the assessment. It would make certain things clearer faster. It would potentially shorten the timeline.She closed by saying I sho

Chapter 137: The Complete Record

POV: RileyThe first question was the one I had been dreading."When did you understand that your father was not protecting you?"Investigator Callahan asked it at ten past ten on Monday morning. She asked it gently. She sat across a plain gray table with her reading glasses pushed into her silver hair and a small recorder between us, red light steady.I had rehearsed answers all weekend. None of them were the true one.A radiator ticked in the corner. Rain tapped the window in a thin, patient rhythm. The room smelled like old carpet and burnt coffee.I folded my hands on the table."I understood it on a Wednesday," I said. "In my friend's room. Looking at a screen full of dates."Callahan nodded and waited.So I told her.I started with the battery. The twenty percent that drained faster than it should have. I told her about Naomi's two monitors and the lines of code I could not read. I gave her dates. I gave her times. I gave her the four seconds of silence on the phone before my fa

Chapter 138: Accumulated

POV: RileyThe word prison did not appear anywhere on the page.Callahan had emailed the summary that morning, three short paragraphs in plain gray type. One count of illegal surveillance. A fine. Community service. A permanent bar from university employment.I read it at my desk with the sunflower vase pushed to one side. The radiator ticked. Frost crept along the corner of the window. My tea had gone cold an hour ago and I had not noticed.No trial.No courtroom. No witness stand. No moment where a judge looked at my father and said what he had done out loud.I closed the laptop and sat very still.Was this justice?I had asked myself so many hard questions that year. This one sat heavier than the rest. I pulled my knees up onto the chair and wrapped my arms around them, the way I had in a penalty box at two in the morning.Part of me wanted more. I could admit that. Part of me wanted a loud ending, a door slammed so hard the whole building shook.But another part of me remembered w

Chapter 139: Allowed

POV: RileyI read his letter again at midnight, and it was worse the second time.The first time I had been braced. This time I was not. The drawer slid open with a dry scrape, and the cream paper lay where I had left it, one page, the corners still sharp. I carried it to the bed and sat with my back against the wall.Eventually.That word again. He had written it so carefully, as if he knew it was the only honest one he had.The heater hummed. Snow ticked against the window like tiny fingers asking to come in. Down the hall someone laughed, a door shut, and the building settled back into quiet.I read every line. I read his signature last, the small tight loops, and my chest ached in a place I could not name.He asked for nothing. And somehow that was harder to hold than a demand.I got up and crossed the room to my closet. On the top shelf sat a plain blue folder I had not touched in weeks. I took it down and opened it on the desk.Inside lay his email. Three pages, printed, the pap

Chapter 140: The North Window

POV: RileyI had always imagined that real good news would arrive quietly.Not with a shout across the quad. Not with a phone ringing in a crowded hall. Just a person, a table, and a moment that did not need an audience.It came on a Thursday afternoon at the library, at the table by the north window.I was there early. The winter light fell flat and pale across the wood, and snow drifted past the glass in slow, lazy curls. The ventilation hummed. Somewhere behind me a student turned a page, and the paper whispered like a breath.I had a photo edit open on my laptop. I had been staring at the same frame for ten minutes without changing a single pixel.Then a chair scraped softly beside me.Ray sat down.He did not say hello. He set his phone on the table, screen up, and slid it two inches toward me with one finger. His hand was not quite steady.I looked down.An email. A university crest at the top. The first line began with the word Congratulations.I read it slowly. Admitted. Gradu

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