Page 7 of Offside

Amusement moved through his expression, and he asked, “Are you excited to work with him?” His attention on me was making me nervous, and I needed to get away so badly so I could compose myself. Meanwhile, he was calm as anything, assessing me with those steely eyes.

“Oh, we won’t be working together much, unless he gets hurt—and if everyone does their job, he won’t.” I gestured loosely. “I’m mostly behind the scenes. Making sure the team stays functional. Physically. That’s the job. Injury prevention, rehab, coordinating with Dr. Mike Reyes, the day-to-day maintenance of keeping—” I stopped myself before I said your bodies again, which I had done in my head at least four times and was not going to do out loud. “Keeping the roster healthy. You know.” I pointed toward the training rooms. “My door is the one with the placard…” I trailed off and then said, “With my name on it.” No shit the door with your name on it is yours. Dear God, please just strike me down.

I held out my hand. “Good to meet you. Or—good to see you again, I suppose. Since we have technically met. A long time ago.”

He shook it and held onto it a beat past the standard duration. It was warm, inviting. “Really good to see you again, Maren,” he said. “Officially.”

He continued down the corridor. I walked as quickly as possible in the opposite direction. I made it fifteen feet before I stopped and addressed the ceiling for a moment. He’d said the last word differently—weighted, like he’d used it before in a context I wasn’t part of. I couldn’t place it. I filed it under things I wasn’t going crazy about and moved on.

Griffin’s best friend. You rambled at Griffin’s best friend about your job keeping his body healthy. Completely professional. Totally fine.

I continued to my meeting.

Nolan Mercer, the owner of the team, spoke for about five minutes at the start of orientation, which was fewer than I had expected from a man who had just spent two hundred million dollars on a hockey franchise.

He didn’t use notes. He stood at the front of the room with his hands in his pockets and said what he thought, which was that Phoenix had loved a hockey team once and lost it, and the loss still stung, and that he hadn’t bought this franchise to make money or to have something to put his name on. He’d spent the better part of two decades as one of the best players in the world. He had both.

“I bought it because someone had to,” he said, “and because I believe this city will love it again if we give them something worth loving.” He swept the room. “I played long enough to know the teams that meant something weren’t always the ones with the best rosters. They were the ones where everybody in the building, players, staff, front office, and the guy who sharpens the skates, understood what they were building and gave a damn about it. That’s what I’m asking from everyone in here. Not perfection. Just give a damn.”

He thanked us, said his door was open, and held eye contact a beat longer than the sentence required. I believed him.

I wrote give a damn in the margin of my notes and underlined it twice.

I sat between Dr. Reyes and Dom Caruso during the staff orientation which covered mostly stuff I already knew. Dr. Reyes was exactly what I’d hoped for in a team physician. Methodical, direct, a doctor who gave you information and trusted you to do something useful with it.

He’d been working with professional athletes for twelve years and spoke in assessments rather than opinions, which I respected immediately. We talked through the injury prevention protocol for forty-five minutes over a lunch that neither of us was eating and by the end of it I could have sworn we’d been working alongside each other for a year.

Dom Caruso, the strength and conditioning director, had fifteen years of experience and the unflappable quality that came from having seen everything go wrong at least once and surviving it. He was funny in a dry, offhand way that snuck up on me, and he knew every trap a new franchise could fall into because he’d watched other franchises fall into all of them. I liked them both immediately and without reservation, which was not how first days always went.

Across the room at the players’ table, Ryan was talking to Griffin and Coach Calloway, all three skipping the preamble, past the point where they needed it. I noticed, without quite deciding to, how the room arranged itself around him. Not through any effort on his part. He had natural authority he didn’t need to announce.

I turned back to Dr. Reyes and gave the injury prevention protocol my full attention.

Mostly.

The team family skate was technically optional but mostly expected, and I had decided before I started this job I was going to show up to everything in the category of optional but good for your career, because I was building something here and that meant being present for the parts that didn’t show up on the official schedule if it was good for the team.

What I had not fully thought through, standing at the boards in rented skates that fit the way skates that weren’t your own always fit, was the part where I would have to get on the ice.

I grew up in Arizona. The opportunities to learn to ice skate had been limited. Okay, I had not sought them out. Obviously my brother learned to skate and I supposed I could have as well, but I didn’t. And now, I was twenty-seven years old and I worked for a professional ice hockey team and I could not skate, and I was going to have to live with that in a very public way in about thirty seconds.

Griffin appeared at my elbow wearing the expression I recognized from twenty-seven years of being his sister, the one that meant he’d thought of something I was going to find deeply unfunny and was savoring the run-up to it.

“Don’t,” I said.

“You could use one of those,” he said, nodding toward the far side of the rink where a small child was navigating the ice behind a plastic penguin skate aid, pushing it ahead of her with great concentration and zero shame, because she was four years old and had earned the right.

“I will end you.”

“It’s very helpful. No judgment.” His smirk was well on its way to fully formed. “I’m actually shocked you came.” He was skating around within three feet of me in jeans and his Sidewinders jersey, gloating. Fucker.

“Griffin.”

“The penguin is non-judgmental by nature⁠—”

“I will tell Mom about Vancouver.”

He held up both hands immediately, caught and looking it, cornered by his own history.