Page 73 of Knottingley Ever After
I take a breath.
“The team can survive with any coach, Kavanagh.”
He does not answer immediately. He leans back, folds his arms across his chest, and lets the silence work for him. Then he tilts his head, deliberately, and his eyes track up to my wall of plaques.
I follow the look without meaning to.
“You are right, Coach,” he allows, slow and even. “The team can survive with any coach.”
A beat.
“But we both know there are only so many coaches in this country who can get a roster to come together and play dirty enough on that ice for the whole world to want to watch. You are one of them. There are maybe four others, two of whom are retiring this year. So pardon me for asking, but losing you would not be a small inconvenience. It would be a foundational one.”
He pauses. The next part comes out quieter.
“And it looks like O’Shea is now on that very short list as well.”
The corner of my mouth, the same one Jude’s does almost nothing with, betrays me by lifting half a notch.
“Even though she hates me.”
“So I heard.”
We share a look. The look is enough. Rémi has, in his own quiet way, made sure his captain knows about a strawberry shake down a black coach’s jacket at five in the morning, and probably made sure Matteo knows, too, which means the entire sector-two wing of the house is, by now, fluent in the incident.
Nosey fuckers…
“I am not going to ask,” Jude says, mildly. “Unless it becomes a problem. So hopefully it is not a problem.”
I do not answer.
I do not answer because I do not, in fact, know whether it is going to be a problem. The honest answer is that the entire architecture of my professional ambition this season — the entire ten-year project I have been quietly running since the morning Iris O’Shea was sixteen years old and I first saw her save a top-shelf rocket with the back of her glove in a barn in West Yorkshire — hinges on the unproblematic delivery of the first openly Omega goaltender to a sanctioned televised conference playoff in this country’s history.
If we pull that off, the doors do not get pried open. They get torn off their hinges.
If we do not, every administrator who has been quietly stalling Omega applications at the inbox level for the past decade gets to point at us and saywe tried, it did not work, do not ask again.
And the dangerous, inconvenient, professionally embarrassing truth, which I will not be sharing with my captain, my colleagues, or any other living soul this side of a confessionalbooth I do not intend to enter, is that the unproblematic delivery part is the part I have absolutely no faith in.
Because I have known Iris O’Shea since she was thirteen years old.
And truthfully, anything with O’Shea involved, is doomed to cause trouble.
CHAPTER 14
Essentials
~IRIS~
“Pinky.”
“Mmh.”
“Pink-y.”
“Mmh-hmh.”
“What are you doing to our kitchen table.”
