OVERTIME WIFE

Chapter 1: The Benching

"Bracken. Bench. Now."

Coach Ricci didn't yell at him. That was the problem. He said it flat, quiet, the way you'd tell someone their dog didn't make it and the whole bench heard it anyway, because the whole bench had been waiting for it since the puck dropped.

Cole didn't move at first. His skates were still cutting shallow grooves into the ice, his lungs still burning from the shift, and for half a second he told himself he'd misheard. Then he saw Marcus Voss's face at the other end of the bench, and Marcus wasn't even trying to hide it. Marcus was smiling.

"Cole." Ricci again. Louder this time, because now people were watching.

He skated off. Twenty thousand people in Ashford Arena and somehow the loudest sound in the building was his own blades on the ice, the boards rattling shut behind him, the sudden overwhelming quiet of a bench that didn't know where to look.

He sat. He didn't ask why. He already knew why he just didn't know how they'd found out so fast.

His phone was in his bag, screen lighting up before he'd even unlaced a glove. Nine missed calls. Ellis, six times. His publicist, twice. A number he didn't recognize, once, which was somehow worse.

He opened the top one anyway. A sports blog, posted eleven minutes ago, headline stacked in bold red letters like a car crash you couldn't look away from:

BRACKEN'S BENZ NIGHT: New Video Surfaces of Ashford Captain in Alleged Bar Altercation Sponsor Pulls Endorsement Within the Hour

Cole's stomach dropped somewhere past the ice.

It wasn't even the video that scared him. He knew exactly how bad it looked, exactly how little context anyone was going to give it. What scared him was the second half of that headline. *Sponsor pulls endorsement.* That contract was the number his agent used to talk about trade value. That contract was the reason three teams still wanted him instead of one.

The reporter on press row was already looking his way. He didn't look back.

"Bracken." Ricci again, low, standing over him now instead of shouting across the ice. "You good?"

"I'm good."

He wasn't good. He watched the rest of the period from the bench like a stranger watching someone else's disaster, the score sliding sideways without him on the ice, Marcus taking his shift, taking his minutes, playing like a man auditioning for a role he'd been rehearsing for years. Cole didn't blame him for that. He'd have done the same.

The buzzer went. 2-4, Ashford losing at home, and somehow that wasn't even the story anymore.

Ellis was waiting in the tunnel before Cole had his skates off. Not outside the locker room where he usually waited *inside*, past security, which told Cole everything about how bad this actually was before his agent said a single word.

"Don't talk to anyone," Ellis said. No hello. "Not press, not teammates, not your own reflection. You understand me?"

"I understand you own a suit that costs more than my rookie contract and you're using it to tell me not to talk."

"Cole." Ellis didn't laugh. That was the second thing that scared him. "The Benz account pulled in the last hour. Not paused. Pulled. Full statement, publicly, citing conduct concerns. Which means every other sponsor on your list is currently deciding whether they want their name next to yours."

"It's not what it looks like."

"I don't care what it is. I care what it *looks* like, because that's the only thing that's for sale right now, and right now, nobody's buying." Ellis pulled his phone out, thumb already moving. "I have one idea. You're not going to like it."

"Try me."

Ellis turned the screen around. A headshot. A woman, mid-twenties to thirty, dark hair, the kind of composed, unreadable expression that told Cole absolutely nothing except that she'd had a lot of practice giving nothing away.

"Reese Kellan," Ellis said. "Run's image accounts for half the athletes in this city who've needed a second chance. She's good. She's fast. And she owes her firm a win badly enough that I think she'll take this."

Cole looked at the photo a second longer than he meant to. Something about the name snagged, familiar in a way he couldn't place yet, buried somewhere under three years of trying very hard not to think about it.

"Kellan," he said slowly. "As in "

"As in her firm's about to lose its biggest client if she doesn't land a new one this month, yes. Focus, Cole. That's the part that matters."

"I know that name from somewhere else."

Ellis didn't answer right away, and that, more than anything else that night, more than the headline, more than Ricci's flat voice, more than Marcus's smile, was the thing that told Cole he already knew.

"Her brother's Danny Kellan," Ellis said finally, quiet now, watching Cole's face. "I know. I looked into it before I called her. I looked into it *because* of that, actually figured you'd want a heads-up before I say what I'm about to say."

"Say it."

"She already told my assistant no. Twice." Ellis put the phone away. "I need you to convince her yourself."

Cole sat back against the cold cinderblock wall of the tunnel, skates still on, sweat cooling on the back of his neck, and understood, with the particular clarity that only comes after a very bad night, that Ellis wasn't asking him to fix his image.

Ellis was asking him to sit across from the one person in Ashford who had every right to hate him, and convince her to save his career anyway.

"She's not going to say yes," Cole said.

"No," Ellis agreed. "Probably not. But you're going to ask her tomorrow morning regardless, because tomorrow afternoon three teams are going to call about a trade, and I would very much like to have something to tell them besides the truth."

Cole closed his eyes. Somewhere above them, muffled through concrete, the arena was emptying out, twenty thousand people filing into the cold going did you see the headline, and somewhere across the city a woman he hadn't spoken to in three years was about to get a phone call from his agent's assistant for a third time.

"Fine," he said. "Set it up."

Ellis was already walking away. "Already did. Nine a.m. Her office. And Cole " He stopped at the end of the tunnel, didn't turn around. "Try not to mention the hit before she does."

Cole sat alone in the tunnel a long time after that, staring at nothing, thinking about a play three years old that he still saw sometimes with his eyes closed, a name he was about to have to say out loud to a woman who'd spent three years learning to hate the sound of it.