Power Play

Chapter Two: The Vance Name

Priya Anand had a theory that most of Ironbrook's problems could be diagnosed the way she diagnosed everything else in her life — systematically, with a differential, ranking possibilities from most to least likely.

"Okay, so," she said, sliding into the booth across from Rae at the Ironbrook Diner, stethoscope still looped around her neck from her early clinical rotation, "differential diagnosis for why Beckett Vance had his hand on your hip for a full ten seconds at six a.m. Option one: genuine coaching correction, zero subtext, you're imagining things because you haven't been laid since sophomore year."

"Priya."

"Option two: he's a repressed control freak whose id is finally cracking through four years of very expensive emotional discipline, and you happened to be standing there when it did." Priya poured too much syrup on her pancakes with the confidence of someone who had never once regretted a decision in her life. "Option three, and I want you to sit with this one — he likes you, and hates that he likes you, and the only vocabulary he has for that feeling is being an asshole about your stance."

"It was ten seconds because he was making a point about hip rotation."

"Ten seconds is a long point."

"You weren't there."

"I don't need to be there, I have ears, and half the team was in that locker room afterward telling anyone who'd listen that Vance had his hands all over you at practice, which, incidentally, is the kind of sentence that starts rumors that get girls kicked off teams, so." Priya's voice dropped out of its teasing register into something more serious, the switch she made without warning that had made her, over three years of friendship, the person Rae trusted most in Ironbrook. "You need to be careful. You know that, right?"

Rae looked down at her coffee. "I know."

"Whitfield's not going to protect you if this turns into a thing. He'll protect the program. That's what coaches do."

"It's not a thing."

"Rae."

"It's not." She said it firmly enough that she almost believed it herself, which was, she was coming to understand, the exact problem. "He can't stand me. That's not a secret, that's not subtext, that's just — the actual, stated fact of our relationship. He didn't want me on this team. He's said so. To my face. Multiple times."

"People say a lot of things to cover for other things."

"Since when are you a therapist?"

"Since I did my psych rotation and realized ninety percent of human behavior is just people lying to themselves about their own feelings in increasingly elaborate ways." Priya pointed her fork at Rae. "You, for example, currently in the middle of a very elaborate lie."

Rae didn't answer that, because there wasn't a good answer, and because the diner door chimed just then and half the hockey team spilled in — Bear first, then two of the sophomore defensemen, then, a beat behind them like he'd been trying to time his entrance to avoid exactly this, Beckett.

He didn't sit near her. He never did, not in public, not anywhere with more than four people in it, which Rae had clocked months ago as its own kind of tell — the way he managed his proximity to her like a stat he was tracking, careful never to let it drift into a range anyone could comment on. He took a booth on the other side of the diner with Bear and the sophomores, ordered the same thing he always ordered, and did not look at her once in the twenty minutes that followed, which was, itself, a kind of looking.

"See," Priya said quietly, following Rae's gaze. "That's not indifference. That's a man working very hard at indifference. Different thing entirely."

Rae's father called that night, the way he called every Sunday, the connection thin and crackling because the bar's wifi had never worked right and neither of them could afford to fix it.

"How's the knee," he asked, no preamble, because Danny Callahan had never once in his life led with small talk when there was a real question sitting right there.

"Fine, Dad."

"Rae."

"It's fine. I taped it. I'm fine." She sat on the edge of her narrow dorm bed — she still had the dorm room technically, though she spent most nights on Priya's couch because the dorm was on the wrong side of campus and the walk back from late practice was longer than she liked in the cold — and pulled her knee up to her chest, an old habit, checking the joint the way other people checked their phones. "How's the bar?"

"Slow. It's always slow in October." A pause, the particular pause that meant he was working up to something. "You know if you needed to come home for a bit — knee, school, whatever — there's no shame in it."

"I'm not coming home."

"I didn't say you had to. I said there's no shame in it."

"I know what you said." She closed her eyes. Danny Callahan had rebuilt his entire understanding of parenting around the accident two years ago — the ice, the other car, three surgeries and a summer she didn't like to think about — and every conversation since had this same shape to it, love disguised as an escape hatch she had no intention of using. "I made this team, Dad. I earned this. I'm not walking away from it because my knee complains a little in October."

"A little."

"A little." The lie came easily now; she'd had two years of practice. "I'm playing Saturday. Come watch if you can get someone to cover the bar."

"I'll try." He wouldn't; they both knew he wouldn't, not with the bar bleeding money the way it had been since the highway rerouted traffic three towns over, but the offer mattered more than the follow-through, in the specific economy the two of them had worked out since her mother left and it had just been the two of them and the bar and, eventually, the ice. "Be careful out there, kiddo."

"Always am."

She was not, in fact, always careful, and they both knew that too.

Marcus Vance's visits to Founders' Arena had a particular texture to them, one that Beckett had learned to identify from three floors up before the man had even parked. It was in the way the equipment manager suddenly found something urgent to do in the supply closet. It was in the way Whitfield's shoulders climbed half an inch toward his ears. It was in the specific hush that fell over the front office, not unlike the hush that fell over the locker room when Rae walked in, except this one was built entirely of deference instead of hostility.

"Beckett." His father found him in the weight room, alone, doing the extra reps nobody had asked for because doing extra had always been the only currency Beckett trusted. Marcus Vance looked, at fifty-one, exactly like what he was: a man who'd spent a decade as an NHL defenseman and the two decades since turning that into something harder and more permanent — money, boards, influence, the kind of quiet institutional weight that didn't need to raise its voice to be obeyed. "Good practice this morning, I hear."

"Whitfield's been talking to you."

"Whitfield knows who signs the addition to the west locker room." Marcus said it without malice, the way he said most things — as simple fact, the kind of statement that didn't invite argument because it had never occurred to him that argument was an available response. "I hear the girl's finding her footing."

"Her name's Rae."

"I know her name." A pause, weighted, the kind his father specialized in. "I also know she's the reason two boosters pulled their commitments this year. Old-school guys. Don't like the optics."

"That's not her fault."

"Didn't say it was." Marcus leaned against the squat rack, arms crossed, watching his son with the particular scrutiny he reserved for anything that touched Beckett's draft stock, which was, as far as Beckett could tell, the only lens his father had left to see him through anymore. "I'm saying scouts talk to boosters. Boosters talk to scouts. Everyone's watching how this season plays out, and you're the face of it whether you like it or not. You're the captain. Whatever happens with her — good, bad, controversial — it reflects on you."

"Nothing's happening with her."

"Good." Marcus's eyes narrowed, just slightly, the particular sharpening Beckett had learned as a kid meant his father had noticed something he hadn't said out loud. "Keep it that way. You've got one season left to make this program's decisions look inevitable instead of experimental. Don't let a distraction cost you that. I didn't build this family's name so you could hand a scout a reason to write you off."

He left the way he'd arrived, without waiting for a response, because in Marcus Vance's experience, responses were rarely necessary when the point had already been made.

Beckett finished his set. Racked the bar. Sat on the bench with his forearms on his knees, breathing hard, and thought — against every rule he'd just been handed — about the exact weight of Rae Callahan's hip under his palm, the exact way her breath had caught when he'd corrected her stance, the exact, unbearable fact that some small traitorous part of him had wanted to keep his hand there far longer than any drill required.

One season, he told himself. Keep it clean. Keep her at arm's length. Don't be the reason this falls apart.

He believed it about as much as she'd believed her own version of the same lie, three miles away, wrapping tape around a knee neither of them knew the other was hiding.

The email arrived Thursday, buried in a stack of athletic department notices Rae rarely read past the subject line — schedule changes, compliance reminders, the endless bureaucratic hum of Division I athletics. This one, though, made her sit up straight at her desk.

SUBJECT: Housing Reassignment — Action Required by Friday

Due to a dormitory renovation displacing residents of Kessler Hall, Athletics has arranged temporary off-campus housing for affected student-athletes. Assignments are based on availability and lease terms already in place through the Ironbrook Athletics housing partnership. You have been assigned to the two-bedroom unit at 214 Birchwood Ave, Unit 3. Please confirm receipt.

She read it twice, then a third time, the particular unease she'd learned to trust prickling at the base of her neck before she'd even gotten to the part that mattered. Birchwood Ave. She knew that address. Half the team did.

She scrolled down to the roommate assignment field, already knowing, with the specific dread of someone whose luck had never once in her life broken in the easy direction, exactly whose name she'd find there.

Assigned co-resident: Vance, Beckett J.

Rae set her phone down very carefully on the desk, the way a person sets down something that might go off, and stared at the wall for a long, silent minute.

"Priya," she said finally, into her phone, the second she'd dialed. "I need you to tell me this is a joke."

"What's a joke?"

"They're putting me in an apartment with Beckett Vance."

There was a pause on the other end of the line — a long one, the kind of pause that in Priya's professional life probably preceded very bad news — and then, unmistakably, the sound of her best friend trying and failing to smother a laugh.

"Priya."

"I'm sorry," Priya said, not sounding sorry at all. "I'm so sorry. This is objectively the worst thing that has ever happened to you and I am one hundred percent going to need to hear every single detail."

"This isn't funny."

"It is extremely funny. It is the funniest thing that has happened to anyone in the entire history of Ironbrook Athletics." Another laugh, badly hidden. "Okay. Okay, sorry. What are you going to do?"

Rae looked at the email again. Confirm receipt. Two boxes: Accept assignment or Request alternative placement, the second of which, she already knew from three years of navigating this athletic department's bureaucracy, meant a six-to-eight-week wait in a temporary dorm across campus while housing "reviewed options" — code, everyone knew, for good luck finding anything before winter.

She thought about her knee, and the extra fifteen-minute walk the far dorm would add to every practice commute in a New England winter. She thought about the rent on Birchwood already covered under the athletics partnership, money she didn't have to spare for an alternative. She thought, with real reluctance, about the fact that the apartment was three blocks from the rink instead of a mile and a half.

She thought, last and least willingly, about Beckett Vance's hand on her hip that morning, and the particular heat that had followed her home.

"I'm accepting it," she said.

"Oh, this is going to be incredible," Priya said. "I need updates. Daily. Hourly, if anything interesting happens."

"Nothing interesting is going to happen."

"Rae."

"Nothing," Rae said, with the flat, unconvincing certainty of someone who already knew, somewhere underneath the part of her that wanted to believe it, that she was lying.

Three blocks away, in his own apartment that he was, as of an identical email received twenty minutes earlier, about to lose to a stranger who turned out not to be a stranger at all, Beckett Vance read the same assignment three times, set his phone face-down on the counter, and said, to no one, in the empty kitchen, a single word that summed up the entire situation with more precision than anything else he could have come up with.

"No."

His phone buzzed. Bear.

Bear: dude did you get the housing email

Bear: BECKETT

Bear: you're rooming with CALLAHAN

Bear: this is the best thing that has ever happened to this team and I need you to know I already texted three guys

Beckett closed his eyes, pressed two fingers hard against the bridge of his nose, and thought about his father's voice from two days ago — don't let a distraction cost you that — and the specific, unbearable irony of the universe handing him, at the exact moment he'd been warned against exactly this, no possible way to avoid it.

He typed back a single word.

Beckett: Delete that.

Bear: never

Beckett set the phone down, looked around the apartment he was about to have to share with the one person on earth he'd been explicitly instructed to keep at a professional distance, and understood, with the particular clarity of a man watching a controlled system tip irrevocably into chaos, that this season had just become a great deal more complicated than a fraternization clause and a father's ultimatum.

It had just become impossible to survive with his discipline intact.

He accepted the assignment anyway. There was no version of refusing it that didn't cost him something worse than the risk of staying.