There’s nothing clean about her. It should feel better than it does.
The team feels it anyway. Less space. Faster reads. Cleaner decisions. Nobody says anything. They don’t need to.
Nova’s working the room the way she always works it — Brody first because Brody has never met a microphone he didn’t want to marry, then Sebastian, then Caleb, saving the harder ones for after she’s already got what she needs from everyone else.
I’ve watched her do this enough to know the pattern. She doesn’t know I’ve mapped it. I didn’t mean to.
She gets to Liam.
Liam gives press exactly nothing. Four on-record quotes this season, three of them about ice conditions. She says something and he turns and actually answers. Full sentence. Maybe two.
I feel something move through my chest I don’t like. I don’t look at it.
I stop a shot from Caleb that he had no business thinking would get through.
Liam skates up at the water break. Gives me the silence first — he always does, so you can’t pretend you don’t know what’s coming.
“She asks good questions,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Asked about the penalty kill structure. Not the goals against.” He drinks. “She thinks about the game differently.”
I don’t say anything.
He looks at me. “Figure out what you’re doing before Riley has to figure it out for you.”
Then he skates away. No follow-up. Just drops it and goes like it costs him nothing to be right.
Unfortunately accurate.
She comes to me last.
Always comes to me last. I don’t know if she does it for me or for herself, but either way it’s right and I find respecting it annoying.
She stops at the boards. Recorder out. Pen in hand.
“One question.”
“One,” I say.
“How do you reset after a bad goal? In your head. What’s the process?”
I look at her for a second.
“Same as before it,” I say. “You don’t carry it.”
She writes it down. Doesn’t push. Doesn’t ask the follow-up I can see her not asking for. Caps the pen and moves on.
I watch her go.
I don’t let anything through for the rest of the session.
Locker room.
I hear it before I’m through the door.
”—I’m just saying, statistically speaking, a woman that looks like that, asks questions like that, laughs like that—” Brody, holding court, zero awareness of volume. “I’m not saying I have a shot. I’m saying a man’s gotta respect the situation.”