All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

POV: RileyThe email had my mother's name on it, and my hands went cold before I opened it.But I did not open it right away. First there was the rest of the week.The semester ended the way every semester on this campus ended. Loudly, and all at once. Posters for study groups curled off the walls of the library. Coffee cups piled up in the bins by the doors. Students walked the quad with their hoods up and their eyes glazed, muttering definitions to themselves like prayers. The snow had turned to gray slush, and every morning it froze again into a thin crust that cracked under my boots.I moved through it with a quiet kind of focus.At six each morning I was on the ice. The rink was cold and nearly empty, the lights humming, my blades hissing long clean lines across the white. Skating was the one thing that did not change. My edges were steady now. The double axel came when I called it. I did not think about the landing anymore. My body simply knew.Then came the exams.I wrote my ps

POV: RileyI walked out of that restaurant and my legs forgot how to be legs.Three hours. My mother had hugged me at the door, short and careful, like a person touching something that might break. Then she had walked toward the train station with her green sweater going small against the gray. I stood on the curb and watched until she turned the corner.My hands would not stop shaking. Not from fear. From something I had no name for.I walked back across campus slowly. The slush had frozen into dull ridges that crunched under my boots. The wind pushed cold fingers down my collar. A bell somewhere rang four times, low and flat, and the sound rolled over the empty quad.The library was nearly silent. The ventilation hummed. A single lamp glowed at the table by the north window.Ray was there.He had a book open in front of him. He was not reading it. I could tell because the page had not turned in a long time, and because his eyes were already on the door when I walked in.He did not s

POV: RayThe banquet was in the athletics center's main hall.Round tables with white cloths. The team in their good clothes looking slightly uncomfortable the way hockey players always looked slightly uncomfortable when they were not in gear. The coaching staff at the front table. The athletic director's seat conspicuously occupied by the interim replacement, which everyone noticed and nobody mentioned.I sat at the captain's table because that was where captains sat and I was still the captain until the end of the season made that past tense. The role had felt different this year than I had expected it to feel. Not lighter. More honest. There was a distinction between those two things that I had learned to feel clearly.Coach Brannigan spoke for twelve minutes.He said things about leadership that were true. That I had led with consistency. That the team had followed because they trusted me. That the season's results reflected the specific quality of a group that knew how to be acco

POV: RileyNaomi told me on a Thursday evening.Not with preamble. Not with the specific energy of someone who has been waiting to say a significant thing and has built up pressure around the saying. She just told me, the way she told everything, like she was reporting a fact that existed in the world and I deserved to know it."Coach Farrow offered me a student coaching position," she said. "On the skating team. Starting next year. First time the program has created the role."I was sitting across from her at her small table. Tea between us. Her room organized the way it always was, everything in its place, the second monitor dark for once, the whiteboard clean. The investigation had been in this room and had now left it and what remained was just Naomi's actual life, which was orderly and precise and exactly itself."How did she offer it," I said."She called me into her office after practice," Naomi said. "She said the program needed someone who understood both the technical and th

POV: RileyThe sunflowers were still on my desk, and I finally understood why I could not throw them away.It was the last night of the semester. Ten at night, and the window glass was cold against my forehead. The quad lay below me, pale under the lamps, so quiet I could almost hear the snow melting off the branches. No music. No shouting across the paths. Boxes sat stacked outside a few doors down the hall, and somewhere a suitcase zipper rasped, long and slow, like a held breath being let go.Tomorrow people would leave.The campus would empty out and then fill again in the fall, with new faces and new noise and no memory of this year. The paths would stay. The oak near the junction would stay. Everything else would be rearranged.I watched a single figure cross the quad with a bag over one shoulder, hood up, walking slowly. Nobody followed him. Nobody watched from the shadows. I noticed that. I noticed how long it had been since I checked.My phone lay on the bed behind me, face u