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All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

171 Chapters

Chapter 71: The Memo

POV: RileyI read the name Ray said twice in my head before I let it land.The assistant coach. Someone who had been in the Falcons locker room every week this semester. Someone whose presence in the program was unremarkable and continuous and who had a specific reason to protect the man who had protected him six years ago. Not a stranger. Not someone in a building across campus. Someone who had been standing thirty feet from Ray at practice while all of this was assembling itself around us."How long has he been in the locker room this semester," I said."Since September," Ray said. His voice was flat. "Every Thursday. Sometimes Tuesdays.""Does he have access to the team's scheduling systems," I said.Ray looked at Liam."He does the practice plan uploads," Liam said quietly. "Pete set him up with coordinator access at the start of the season.""Coordinator access," Naomi said. She was already typing. "What does coordinator access include.""Schedule uploads, equipment room bookings

Chapter 72: Running

.POV: RileyWe went to Naomi's room because it was the most defensible space we had.Not defensible in any dramatic sense. Just the room where we had built everything, where the whiteboard had held the names and the second monitor had found the spyware and the door latched properly when you pulled it all the way closed. The room that had been our actual operational center for weeks while the library table had been where we met. I had confused the two this morning and sitting in a public space with an open sightline while a provost was making phone calls seven minutes after a document moved had been careless.I did not intend to be careless again.Naomi locked the door behind us. All five of us in her room was tight but functional. Preethi sat at the desk. Liam took the floor with his back against the wall. Ray stood at the window, one hand on the frame, watching the path below without appearing to watch it. I stood in the center of the room and called Amara."We moved," I said the mom

Chapter 73: Please Stop

POV: RileyI read it twice standing in the corridor outside Naomi's room.Two words. Subject line and body both. Please stop. No salutation. No signature. No institutional language or legal framing or carefully worded administrative positioning. Just the two words in the plain text of a personal email sent from a private account by a woman who had spent the last two hours deploying every institutional resource available to her and had now, apparently, run out of those and was left with this."What does it say," Ray said.I held the phone toward him. He read it. His jaw tightened slightly and then released."She's scared," Naomi said, reading over his shoulder."She should be," Liam said."That is not the point," I said. "She sent this from a personal account. Not the university address. Not through her lawyer. Not through the communications office." I looked at all of them. "She sent it herself. Which means she is not acting institutionally anymore. She is acting personally.""What's

Chapter 74: The One Who Walked Out

POV: RileyHis name was Thomas Reidy.Naomi found it in four minutes through the university's staff directory cross-referenced against the list of administrative personnel who had processed withdrawal paperwork in the fall semester four years ago. His current title was senior administrative coordinator, Office of the Provost. His previous title, four years ago, was student records processor, Office of the Dean of Students.He had been in the room when Clara disappeared. He had processed the paperwork. And twenty minutes ago he had walked out of the provost's emergency staff meeting and had not come back."He knew," Preethi said. "Four years ago he knew what the withdrawal was.""He processed it," I said. "Which means he saw the memo. He saw both signatures. He saw that the standard welfare procedures had been waived." I looked at Naomi. "Does the staff directory show how long he has been in the provost's office.""Three and a half years," she said. "He transferred from the dean of stu

Chapter 75: Clara

POV: RileyI stepped outside to make the call.Not far. Just the dining hall's side exit, the one that opened onto the narrow path between the building and the maintenance storage unit, the path nobody used except as a shortcut that saved approximately thirty seconds. It was cold out there and slightly damp and completely private, which was what I needed.I called the unknown number. Clara's number. The one I now knew by memory.She picked up on the first ring."Riley," she said."Thomas Reidy walked into the oversight board's intake office forty minutes ago," I said. "He had fourteen emails. Correspondence between my father and the provost from four years ago. Beginning two days after you filed your original complaint."Silence.Not the strategic kind. Not the building kind. The kind that comes when something you have been waiting for for a very long time finally arrives and the weight of the waiting hits you all at once."Clara," I said."I'm here," she said. Her voice was steady bu

Chapter 76: Four O'clock

POV: RileyI slept for thirty-seven minutes.Not the sleep of someone who has resolved anything. The sleep of a body that had been running since three in the morning on bad coffee and adrenaline and had reached the point where it simply stopped negotiating. I lay on my bed in my clothes with my shoes still on and closed my eyes and the next thing I knew my phone alarm was going off and the light in the room had changed from pale noon to the slightly warmer tone of mid-afternoon.I sat up. My head was clear in the specific way it gets after unplanned sleep, not refreshed exactly but reset, the fog of the last several hours lifted enough to see the shape of things again.I checked my phone.Forty-seven notifications. I looked at none of them. I went to the bathroom, washed my face, changed into my practice gear, laced my shoes in the correct order, and picked up my skating bag.Then I texted Ray.Awake. Going to practice. You don't have to come.His response arrived in eleven seconds.I

Chapter 77: The Decision

POV: RileyThe rink with the lights fully on was different from every other version of it.Not worse. Just different. The blue-grey emergency quiet was gone and in its place was the clean bright fact of the space, the overhead panels casting even white light across the ice surface, the boards showing their true colours, the penalty box bench worn and ordinary rather than mysteriously shadowed. It looked like a place where people worked. Where people practiced and fell and got up and practiced again. It looked like exactly what it was.I liked it better this way. I had not expected that.Ray sat beside me on the penalty box bench, close enough that our shoulders touched, and we both looked at the ice in the full light and said nothing for a few minutes."This is better," he said eventually."Yes," I said."You can see the whole surface," he said."Yes.""No surprises," he said."Fewer," I said. "There are always some."He almost smiled.I took my phone out of my bag. Not to read the no

Chapter 78: Evening

POV: RileyWe stayed at the rink until six-thirty.Not because anything required us to be there. Because leaving meant walking back into whatever the campus had become in the last twelve hours and the rink with its full lights and clean ice and penalty box bench was the only space on campus that felt like it belonged entirely to the person I was rather than the situation I was inside. I was not ready to give that up yet.At six-twenty Ray said: "Are you hungry.""Yes," I said."Real food," he said. "Not dining hall.""There is a place on Garfield," I said. "Two blocks past where Amara and I met.""Not Lena's," he said."No," I said. Not Lena's, where he had followed Declan and Riley to dinner and sat alone with untouched coffee watching her laugh in a mirror. "The Greek place. I have walked past it eight times and never gone in.""Tonight we go in," he said.We went in.It was small and warm and smelled like garlic and something baking and had exactly four tables, all of them occupied

Chapter 79: The Next Morning

POV: RileyI slept for nine hours.No alarm. No three in the morning reckoning. No phone buzzing with messages from numbers I had to learn to recognize. Just nine hours of sleep so complete and so ordinary that when I woke at seven-fifteen and lay still for a moment taking inventory, the first thing I noticed was the absence of the specific tension that had been living between my shoulder blades since September.Not gone entirely. Just quieter. Settl ed into something that was not emergency anymore.I lay there for a few minutes. The room was the same room it had always been. My desk with my camera on it. My skating bag by the door. The window with the east path visible below, the same path where someone had stood with a long lens three days ago, which already felt like a different chapter of a different semester.I got up. Made tea. Sat at my desk.Then I opened my laptop and read the national piece.Twenty-two thousand words. I had expected it to feel large. It was large in the way

Chapter 80: Voicemail

POV: RileyHe called at two in the afternoon.I was at the library. Not the north window table, which had become associated with operational urgency in a way I needed a break from. A different table, near the east stacks, quieter, where I had been working on the seminar paper that was due tomorrow and had been existing in the background of the last two weeks like a small patient obligation waiting for the emergency to pass.The paper was on identity formation under conditions of extended stress. Aldine had assigned it before any of this semester became what it became, and sitting with it now felt like reading a map of terrain I had just crossed.My phone lit up on the table beside my notebook. My father's number.I looked at it for three rings. Not deciding. Just looking.Then I let it go to voicemail.He called again four minutes later. I let that one go too. Not because I was refusing the conversation. Because I was not ready for the real-time version of it. I needed to hear what he

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