Page 36 of Her Coach

"End of day," I said. "You'll have it."

I hung up. Looked up.

Colton had just put Frank through a contact drill so precise it looked choreographed, except Frank’s expression said it absolutely was not, and something about watching a six-foot-six man move that quietly on ice made my brain go completely offline.

I set my phone down on the seat beside me.

Right. Work.

I had stopped pretending to work somewhere around minute ten.

This is a problem, I thought, watching Colton tap the boards twice to end the session. This is a real problem.

Because the hot coach who had walked into The Hideout last Friday ago was one thing. That I could manage. That I had a plan for. But a man who showed up on a Wednesday morning to quietly fix something in a player nobody else had bothered looking at, that was a different category entirely. That was the kind of thing that got past your defenses before you noticed it was moving.

Dad used to do that. Show up early. Stay late. Find the guy nobody was paying attention to and pay attention to him.

I closed my laptop.

Colton came off the ice and spotted me immediately, because of course he did.

“Get what you needed?” he asked.

“For community relations,” I said. “Yeah.”

He almost smiled. “Good.”

He picked up his clipboard and headed down the hallway without looking back, and I sat there in the empty stands for another minute staring at the ice.

15

COLTON

Thursday practice ran long.

That was on me. I’d mapped out a two-hour session and somewhere around the ninety minute mark Jett had done something with the puck that I hadn’t seen coming and I’d stopped everything to run it back three times, because you didn’t ignore something like that when it happened by accident. You found out if the kid knew what he’d done or if he’d just gotten lucky.

He’d gotten lucky. But he was coachable enough to understand why it worked once I showed him, and that was worth the extra thirty minutes.

The guys were dragging by the time I let them off the ice. Good. That was the point.

I was reviewing film in my office at twelve-thirty when Dave called.

“How’s Vegas?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Fine like actually fine or fine like you’re white-knuckling it and don’t want to talk about it.”

I turned my pen over in my hand. “Team’s better than the record says. Defenseman named Frank has instincts nobody’s developed. Jett’s going to be a problem in the best possible way once he stops performing and starts playing.”

“That’s coach talk,” Dave said. “I asked about Vegas.”

“I know what you asked.”

A pause. “You drinking?”

“No.”