My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Forty

The story breaks two mornings later, while Mara is still asleep, and by the time she wakes and checks her phone, it's already gone further than she has any way of containing.

EXCLUSIVE: TEAM CAPTAIN'S TRAGIC PAST WITH REPORTER GIRLFRIEND — SOURCES REVEAL LOST PREGNANCY, HOSPITALIZATION.

Mara stares at the headline for a long moment, feeling something cold and total drop through her chest, before she can even bring herself to open the article itself. The details inside are fragmentary, clearly secondhand, some of it wrong in small, telling ways that suggest a source close to the story rather than either of the two people who actually lived it — but enough of it is right, devastatingly, invasively right, that there's no mistaking what's happened.

Someone talked. Someone who knew real details — the pregnancy, the hospitalization, fragments of the truth Mara only spoke out loud for the first time in a courtyard two nights ago — sold or leaked enough of it to a tabloid outlet that the story now exists, permanently, publicly, stripped of all the context and care she'd given it when she finally told Adrian herself.

Her phone is already flooding with notifications — Callum, urgent and multiple; a handful of other reporters, some sympathetic, some clearly fishing for confirmation; Priya Okonkwo, a single message that reads simply, I'm so sorry, I promise this wasn't me, please call if you need anything.

She calls Adrian first, hands shaking so badly she can barely manage the screen.

He picks up on the first ring, and his voice, when it comes, carries the same shock and horror she's feeling. "You've seen it."

"I've seen it. Adrian, how — who would even know enough to—" She can't finish the sentence, the violation of it too large to fully articulate.

"I don't know. I've been trying to think of everyone who could possibly have known any part of this. My parents wouldn't — they might be many things, but I don't believe they'd do this, not after everything we just went through together. I don't know who else could have—" He stops, something dawning in his voice, horrified. "The video call. My laptop's camera light was on the whole time, but I never thought to check if anyone else had access to that connection. Team IT sets up all our calls through the federation's system. If someone on staff had access, or if the call was somehow recorded—"

"Oh God." Mara feels sick, imagining a private, devastating conversation somehow captured and monetized by someone who had no right to any of it. "Adrian, this is—"

"I know. I'm so sorry. Whatever happened, however it happened, I am so sorry this is public now. You didn't consent to any of this being shared beyond me."

Mara sits with the horror of it, the specific violation of having her most private grief reduced to a tabloid headline, stripped of context, available now to anyone with an internet connection and a morbid curiosity about a hockey captain's personal tragedy.

"I need to call Callum," she says, finally, numb. "Before this gets even further away from me."

"I'll call team PR. We need to figure out how to respond, together, if you're willing. I don't want to make any decisions about this without you."

The next several hours pass in a blur of increasingly difficult phone calls — Callum, torn between professional concern and the uncomfortable awareness that his own newsroom will likely want to cover the story now that it's out; team PR, cautious and careful, working through crisis messaging with the specific practiced language of people who've managed scandals before; a brief, devastating call from Selene, who'd seen the headline before Mara could even warn her, her voice tight with fury on Mara's behalf.

"Whoever did this needs to be held accountable," Selene says, fierce. "This isn't gossip, Mara, this is someone violating the most painful thing that ever happened to you for profit. I want to fly out there. I want to help however I can."

"I don't know what help looks like right now. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do next."

"You don't have to know yet. You just have to survive today, and then figure out tomorrow tomorrow." Selene's voice softens, though the fury underneath remains evident. "I'm here, whatever you need. Even if what you need is just someone on the phone while you figure out how to breathe through this."

Mara stays on the phone with Selene for a long while, grateful for the steadiness even as the rest of the world outside continues its uncontrolled escalation — more outlets picking up the story now, some more responsible than others, a few reaching out directly for comment that Mara has no intention of providing.

Adrian calls again in the early afternoon, his voice carrying a controlled, careful calm that Mara recognizes as him working very hard to hold something together for both their sakes.

"I want to make a statement," he says. "Not detailed. Not exploiting any of it further. Just something that asks for privacy, that confirms nothing beyond what's necessary, and that makes clear this was a violation, not a story either of us chose to share this way."

"Okay," Mara says, exhausted. "I trust you to find the right words."

"I want you to see it before I send anything. I'm not doing this without you again. Not this time."

The statement, when he sends it to her twenty minutes later, is careful and dignified, acknowledging that "recent reports contain private details shared without consent" and asking media to "respect a genuinely painful chapter of both our lives rather than treating it as entertainment," without confirming or denying specific details, without giving the story any further fuel than it's already generated on its own.

It's good, Mara texts back. Thank you for including me in this.

Always, he writes back, and Mara feels, even amid the chaos of the day, something steady in that single word — a promise, however small, that whatever comes next, he intends to face it beside her rather than around her.

That evening, exhausted and raw, Mara sits alone in her hotel room, the day's chaos finally quieting into something more like grief — not just for the violation itself, but for the specific loss of something that had, for one brief, precious night in a quiet courtyard, belonged only to the two of them.

Her phone buzzes. Adrian again.

Can I come over? I don't want either of us to be alone with this tonight.

Mara looks around the small, impersonal hotel room, and feels, for the first time all day, something other than dread settle in her chest.

Yes, she types back. Please.

He arrives twenty minutes later, and when she opens the door, neither of them says anything at all — he just pulls her into his arms, and she lets him, both of them standing in the doorway for a long moment, holding onto each other against a day that tried, in its own ugly, uninvited way, to take something precious away from them before they'd even had the chance to fully claim it as their own.

"We're going to get through this," Adrian says, quiet, into her hair. "Together, this time. I promise you that."

Mara believes him. For the first time in five years, she believes him completely.