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Chapter 15: Naomi Knows Everything
publish date:
2026-06-21 21:16:57
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The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 79: The Next Morning
POV: RileyI slept for nine hours.No alarm. No three in the morning reckoning. No phone buzzing with messages from numbers I had to learn to recognize. Just nine hours of sleep so complete and so ordinary that when I woke at seven-fifteen and lay still for a moment taking inventory, the first thing I noticed was the absence of the specific tension that had been living between my shoulder blades since September.Not gone entirely. Just quieter. Settl ed into something that was not emergency anymore.I lay there for a few minutes. The room was the same room it had always been. My desk with my camera on it. My skating bag by the door. The window with the east path visible below, the same path where someone had stood with a long lens three days ago, which already felt like a different chapter of a different semester.I got up. Made tea. Sat at my desk.Then I opened my laptop and read the national piece.Twenty-two thousand words. I had expected it to feel large. It was large in the way
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 78: Evening
POV: RileyWe stayed at the rink until six-thirty.Not because anything required us to be there. Because leaving meant walking back into whatever the campus had become in the last twelve hours and the rink with its full lights and clean ice and penalty box bench was the only space on campus that felt like it belonged entirely to the person I was rather than the situation I was inside. I was not ready to give that up yet.At six-twenty Ray said: "Are you hungry.""Yes," I said."Real food," he said. "Not dining hall.""There is a place on Garfield," I said. "Two blocks past where Amara and I met.""Not Lena's," he said."No," I said. Not Lena's, where he had followed Declan and Riley to dinner and sat alone with untouched coffee watching her laugh in a mirror. "The Greek place. I have walked past it eight times and never gone in.""Tonight we go in," he said.We went in.It was small and warm and smelled like garlic and something baking and had exactly four tables, all of them occupied
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 77: The Decision
POV: RileyThe rink with the lights fully on was different from every other version of it.Not worse. Just different. The blue-grey emergency quiet was gone and in its place was the clean bright fact of the space, the overhead panels casting even white light across the ice surface, the boards showing their true colours, the penalty box bench worn and ordinary rather than mysteriously shadowed. It looked like a place where people worked. Where people practiced and fell and got up and practiced again. It looked like exactly what it was.I liked it better this way. I had not expected that.Ray sat beside me on the penalty box bench, close enough that our shoulders touched, and we both looked at the ice in the full light and said nothing for a few minutes."This is better," he said eventually."Yes," I said."You can see the whole surface," he said."Yes.""No surprises," he said."Fewer," I said. "There are always some."He almost smiled.I took my phone out of my bag. Not to read the no
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 76: Four O'clock
POV: RileyI slept for thirty-seven minutes.Not the sleep of someone who has resolved anything. The sleep of a body that had been running since three in the morning on bad coffee and adrenaline and had reached the point where it simply stopped negotiating. I lay on my bed in my clothes with my shoes still on and closed my eyes and the next thing I knew my phone alarm was going off and the light in the room had changed from pale noon to the slightly warmer tone of mid-afternoon.I sat up. My head was clear in the specific way it gets after unplanned sleep, not refreshed exactly but reset, the fog of the last several hours lifted enough to see the shape of things again.I checked my phone.Forty-seven notifications. I looked at none of them. I went to the bathroom, washed my face, changed into my practice gear, laced my shoes in the correct order, and picked up my skating bag.Then I texted Ray.Awake. Going to practice. You don't have to come.His response arrived in eleven seconds.I
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 75: Clara
POV: RileyI stepped outside to make the call.Not far. Just the dining hall's side exit, the one that opened onto the narrow path between the building and the maintenance storage unit, the path nobody used except as a shortcut that saved approximately thirty seconds. It was cold out there and slightly damp and completely private, which was what I needed.I called the unknown number. Clara's number. The one I now knew by memory.She picked up on the first ring."Riley," she said."Thomas Reidy walked into the oversight board's intake office forty minutes ago," I said. "He had fourteen emails. Correspondence between my father and the provost from four years ago. Beginning two days after you filed your original complaint."Silence.Not the strategic kind. Not the building kind. The kind that comes when something you have been waiting for for a very long time finally arrives and the weight of the waiting hits you all at once."Clara," I said."I'm here," she said. Her voice was steady bu
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter 74: The One Who Walked Out
POV: RileyHis name was Thomas Reidy.Naomi found it in four minutes through the university's staff directory cross-referenced against the list of administrative personnel who had processed withdrawal paperwork in the fall semester four years ago. His current title was senior administrative coordinator, Office of the Provost. His previous title, four years ago, was student records processor, Office of the Dean of Students.He had been in the room when Clara disappeared. He had processed the paperwork. And twenty minutes ago he had walked out of the provost's emergency staff meeting and had not come back."He knew," Preethi said. "Four years ago he knew what the withdrawal was.""He processed it," I said. "Which means he saw the memo. He saw both signatures. He saw that the standard welfare procedures had been waived." I looked at Naomi. "Does the staff directory show how long he has been in the provost's office.""Three and a half years," she said. "He transferred from the dean of stu
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter Five: The Assignment Begins
POV: RayMonday came like a punishment. I stood outside the athletics media room with my hands in my jacket pockets, telling myself I was calm. I was not calm. I'd barely slept. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the photograph on Hartwell's desk, the girl with the laughing eyes and the swinging hai
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter Four: He Said Walk Away
Riley The Rink Bar was everything I hated about hockey culture crammed into one sticky, overheated room.Blue and gold jerseys clashed everywhere I looked, Falcons and Eagles pretending to be civil while shooting daggers at each other over red plastic cups. The music was too loud, the bass vibrati
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter Three: I Need To Find Her
Riley's Pov Marvel,” I said, the word coming out as a relieved sigh.He didn’t smile. His eyes, usually so warm when they landed on me, were hard. “What’s going on?”“I was looking for you. I came down to… I saw the end of the game.” I took a step toward him, wanting to bridge the gap, to get us a
The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits Chapter Two: You Were Saying?
RileyI had done exactly one thing in my entire life without my father’s approval, and I was determined not to mess it up.Figure skating.It was my secret rebellion, planned and saved for in silence. While my father graded papers and muttered about “frivolous pursuits,” I watched old Olympic routi
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