All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

POV: RileyThe phone was still on Naomi's floor. I stared at it. The screen had gone dark. My father's name was gone from the display but the call had ended and what he had said was sitting in the room with us, taking up all the air.Naomi picked it up. She ended the call herself, because I was not moving. She set it face down on the desk and turned to look at me. Not pity on her face. Something more careful. The expression of a person who has just delivered a blow and is now watching it land and does not know what shape it will take when it does.I was sitting on the floor. I did not remember sitting down. At some point my legs had stopped doing their job and the floor had come up to meet me without any decision on my part, and my back was against the side of Naomi's bed, and the floor was cold through my leggings, and I sat there and stared at the phone that was now face down on her desk.Naomi crouched down in front of me. She said my name.I laughed. It came out of nowhere, short

POV: RayNeither of us moved. The engine idled. Hartwell looked at Riley first and then at me, and his expression carried that practiced warmth, the version he deployed when he needed something and wanted the other person to feel like they were receiving rather than giving.Riley turned back to me like the car was not there."Tell me about the file," she said. "Right now. Everything in it.""Riley..." Hartwell called from the window. Smooth. A fraction tighter underneath it.She did not look at him."The file," she said to me.I kept my voice low. She needed this before he got out of the car."Your schedule. Full week. Every course, every building, every time slot." I watched her face. "Your skating practice schedule. Your dorm building and room number. Emergency contacts, your father first, then an aunt." I paused. "A campus map with your regular routes between buildings marked in yellow highlighter."Something moved through her expression. A fast flinch that did not quite complete

POV: RayI did not sleep. I lay in the dark for an hour and then moved to the desk because lying in the dark was accomplishing nothing except giving my brain an unlit room to run laps in.My laptop was open. The cursor blinked at me from a blank search field. I had been sitting there for twenty minutes and had not typed anything that led anywhere useful.Declan Morrow.I typed it and pulled up what I had already looked at three times. University graduate student directory. Clinical psychology, second year. Advisor listed as Professor Crane, who had a faculty page and publications and an office in the psychology building. Enrolled eighteen months ago. Three credit hours this semester, one incomplete from the semester before. His photo was the standard institutional headshot that told you nothing about a person except that they had once sat in front of a camera.I pulled up his advisor's page. Professor Crane. Six years at the institution, two recent publications, nothing that flagged a

POV: RileyCoach Farrow ran us through the showcase sequence four times before she called us in. We gathered at center ice, seven skaters in a loose arc, breathing steam into the cold air, and she looked at each face the way she did before something that mattered."Adjustments," she said. "Effective today, the lead position in the synchronized sequence goes to Riley."The arc went quiet. Not the quiet of people with nothing to say. The quiet of people making decisions about what to say and how loudly.I kept my eyes forward. I had learned early that the moment you scan a room for reaction, you have already surrendered the higher ground. You scan when you are uncertain. When you are certain, you look straight ahead.Coach Farrow continued. New entry formations. Modified timing on the second transition. A change to the closing position. I filed it all into the part of my brain where instruction turned directly into muscle memory.When she sent us back to practice I went immediately into

POV: RayPractice ran until almost noon. Defensive zone coverage, taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up, which required arguing about every piece before putting it back together slightly differently. Useful and exhausting in equal measure.I was pulling off my skates on the bench when Liam dropped down beside me.He had the look. I knew that look. I had been on the receiving end of it twice in three years and both times it had preceded a conversation I had not wanted but had needed."Talk," he said."I am taking my skates off.""Talk while you take them off."I kept working at the laces."You have been somewhere else for two weeks," he said. "You missed film review. You have been taking routes across campus that go nowhere. Derek said you came out of the east corridor yesterday and nobody takes the east corridor.""I was walking.""Ray.""I was.""You have been walking to specific places you do not want anyone to know about," he said. "And whatever is happening there has been get