Page 124 of Wild Card 13

Because she cared about the job.

Because she cared about doing things correctly.

Because some part of her, no matter how hard she tried to bury it, still paid attention to what my body needed after games and practices and travel weeks.

I wanted to say something.

That was the problem.

I always wanted to say something around Lucy.

The right thing.

The wrong thing.

Anything that might reach across all the years we had wasted pretending we were finished.

Instead, I said, “Appreciate it.”

Lucy’s eyes touched mine briefly. Something flickered there. Then she looked back at Sarah. “Two-thirty works.”

Sarah’s gaze moved slowly between us. “Two-thirty,” she said.

Alois stared at the ceiling like he was praying for strength. I kicked his shoe under the table. His eyes dropped to mine. That wasa mistake. I looked away first because I enjoyed having a functioning body.

The meeting went another twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes of check-in procedures, parking passes, donor lists, minor consent forms, PR restrictions, player movement, building access, and the kind of details that made me understand why Lucy looked five minutes away from murdering a printer.

But the longer it went, the more obvious it became.

This event mattered.

Not in the big flashy way. Not the gala way, with suits and cameras and rich people clapping at themselves for writing checks.

This mattered in a quieter way. The kind where one messed-up parking instruction could make a family’s morning harder. The kind where one player treating the event like a chore could ruin something a kid had been looking forward to all week. The kind where the smaller details really mattered.

Lucy knew that. Bea had known that too. And Charlotte had tried to turn it into something else.

I did not know the whole story, but I knew enough to feel my jaw tighten every time Charlotte’s name hovered near the conversation without being spoken.

At one point, Lucy lost her place in the packet. A single page had been duplicated, and the correct attachment was missing from her folder. It should not have mattered.

It did. Because she froze. Lucy drew in a quiet breath. “I apologize. The final family arrival list appears to be missing from this copy.”

“I have it,” I said.

She looked at me.

I slid my packet toward the center of the table, already open to the page. “Page nine. Mine’s clean.”

She hesitated. Just long enough that I knew she hated needing it.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I only read the important-looking words.”

Coach shook his head. Sarah sighed. Alois muttered something in German that sounded insulting. And Lucy, against every visible effort not to, let out a tiny breath that was almost a laugh.

She took the packet. “Thank you.”