Page 112 of Wild Card 13

"I had to."

"No." Her voice stayed calm. "Charlotte didn't wake up one morning planning to become a liability. She made a series of choices. Those belong to her."

"It still happened on my watch."

Sarah's expression softened almost imperceptibly. "You know what I think?"

"What?"

"I think you're starting to sound like Ezra."

I blinked. "I'm going to pretend that wasn't an insult."

"It wasn't." She smiled fully now. "It was an observation turned compliment."

The words settled in deeper than I expected. Somewhere between reorganizing departmental workflows, fixing scheduling conflicts, mediating player issues, learning which sponsors neededhandwritten thank-you notes instead of emails, I'd stopped thinking like someone filling in temporarily.

I'd started carrying the organization home with me. The realization sat strangely in the back of my brain. Heavy. Itchy. Dangerous.

Sarah pushed the door open.

My dad already sat at the head of the conference table, jacket draped neatly across the back of his chair, reading glasses balanced low on his nose as he studied a stack of legal documents.

Beside him, Bea looked exhausted. Her eyes were swollen beneath fresh makeup, and although she wore her usual composed expression, I recognized the subtle tells now. The way her fingers stayed wrapped around her tea mug even though it had long since gone cold. The slight tension through her shoulders. The careful, deliberate control she held over every breath.

Across from her, Alois sat unusually still. Which, considering the man could make an entire room uncomfortable without saying a single word, probably should have felt more intimidating than it did.

But tonight, there was nothing cold about him. His attention wasn’t on the paperwork spread across the conference table. It wasn’t on my father sitting at the head of the room, or Sarah organizing the fallout, or me trying to mentally rebuild a department that had started crumbling forty-five minutes ago.

It was on Bea. Like the rest of us existed somewhere outside the boundaries of whatever promise he had silently made when he stepped behind that podium.

Months ago, I would have described Alois Müller as terrifying. Tonight, he looked like a man who had finally found something worth protecting.

The silence settled over the room. Like everyone understood this meeting wasn't about cleaning up the aftermath anymore. It was about deciding what came next.

Alois finally broke it. "What are you going to do abouther?" His voice stayed low, but there wasn't anything casual about it.

My father looked up from the folder in front of him, his reading glasses sliding. "That's what Lucy is going to figure out."

I frowned, settling into the chair across from him. "What does that mean?"

Dad leaned back slowly, folding his hands together over theedge of the table. "It means," he said evenly, "you're going to need someone from Human Resources sitting beside you."

My stomach tightened. "Why?"

Sarah answered before he could. "Because Charlotte Anderson is being fired."

The statement sucked the air out of the room. Even though I'd known. Even though every piece of evidence pointed to termination. Even though she'd admitted enough over the last several hours that there really wasn't another option.

My eyes dropped to the legal folder sitting open in front of my father. Termination paperwork. Confidentiality agreements. Documentation. Nothing about it looked dramatic. Just paper. Ink. Signatures. The kind of paperwork that quietly changed someone's entire life.

"I wanted to believe there was another explanation," I huffed.

Dad nodded once. "So did I." No anger. No disappointment. "The internal investigation confirmed she knowingly provided confidential organizational information to members of the media." His voice remained calm, almost clinical. "She violated her employment agreement, breached organizational trust, and jeopardized both this hockey club and the people sitting in this room." His gaze drifted toward Bea for only a moment. "I won't overlook that."

Neither would I. Not long ago, I had been worrying about finding my next job. Now, I was preparing to end someone else's career.

I wasn't sure when my responsibilities had become this big. Or when people had started trusting me with them.