All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

POV: RileyThe response came forty-seven minutes later.I was at the skating rink when it arrived. Not practicing. Just sitting in the stands in the dark with my camera in my lap and the ice quiet below me under the low emergency lighting, the blue-grey glow that had become, over the course of this semester, the colour I associated with the truest versions of things. Ray had walked me here without asking why and sat beside me without talking, and we had been sitting like that for forty minutes when my phone lit up in my jacket pocket.My father's personal email address. The subject line was blank. No subject. Just the email itself, and even before I opened it I understood from that small detail something about what was inside. A man who spent his professional life constructing careful subject lines had sent this one with nothing in that field because he had not been able to find words that were honest enough and contained enough simultaneously.I opened it.Ray looked at me. I did not

POV: RileyI read the letter again at the north window table while Amara typed.Not all of it. The third page. The part I had moved past quickly in the rink because Amara's call had arrived and pulled me forward before I could sit fully inside what the last paragraph contained. I had filed it somewhere in the back of my processing, the way you file things that require more quiet than you currently have, and now in the library with the recorder off and Amara working and Ray beside me with his coffee going cold, I read it again slowly.The last paragraph was three sentences.Declan Morrow came to me two months ago. He told me that a case was being built. I chose to do nothing because I believed I could contain it. I understand now that I could not.I read it three times.Then I said: "Ray."He looked up from his own phone."Read the last paragraph again," I said. I held the screen toward him. "Third page. Bottom."He took the phone. Read it. His jaw went tight in the specific way that m

POV: RileyAmara finished with Clara at two-forty in the morning.I knew because I watched the call end from across the library table, watched Amara set the phone down and sit back in her chair and exhale slowly with the particular quality of someone who has just received the last piece of something they have been building for three years. She did not speak immediately. She looked at her notes. She looked at the screen. Then she looked at me with an expression that was not the journalist's precision and not the source-management warmth. "She's remarkable," Amara said."I know," I said."She talked for forty minutes without once making it about herself. Everything she said was about the students. About what the system did to them. About what needed to change." Amara paused. "She mentioned you twice. Both times she said your name like it meant something specific.""What did she say.""First time she said you were the one who made it possible to finish." Amara looked at me steadily. "Se

POV: RileyNinety minutes.I skated back to the boards slowly after the call ended, not the purposeful drive of someone working through something but the unhurried glide of a person who has done what needed to be done and is letting the doing settle. The ice was soft at the edges where the overnight cycle had not yet restored it to full hardness. My blade found the give of it and I adjusted without thinking, the body knowing what the surface required before the brain finished the instruction.Ray was still at the boards. He had not moved."Ninety minutes," I said."I heard," he said. He was looking at me with the particular attention that meant he was seeing something I had not yet said out loud. "What are you thinking.""Amara asked me something," I said. "Whether I had thought about the version of my future that exists after this." I stepped off the ice through the gate and sat on the penalty box bench to unlace. "I realized I haven't.""You've been thinking about what needs to happ

POV: RileyThe placement review notice arrived at seven forty-eight in the morning.Not to my phone. To my university email, which I had stopped using for anything sensitive weeks ago but had kept open for exactly this kind of official correspondence. A formal notice from the skating program's administration board, three paragraphs of institutional language that said very little directly and everything indirectly. My placement was under review pending an inquiry into the circumstances of my original admission to the team. All practices and assignments would continue normally during the review period. I would be contacted with further information within five to seven business days.I was still at the rink when it arrived. Ray had gone to get actual food from the dining hall at seven-fifteen and Naomi had gone back to her room to shower and change and I had stayed on the ice, moving through slow back edges and long curves that required nothing from me except attention and balance, exact