My Hockey Heartthrob: A Promise in Overtime

Chapter Three

Mara wakes before her alarm, the way she always does on assignment days, some old internal clock from her earliest years in the business refusing to let her sleep past six no matter how late she was up the night before.

For a moment, lying in the gray Prague morning light with the unfamiliar ceiling overhead, she doesn't remember why today feels different from every other credentialed morning of her career. Then she does, all at once, the way you remember a bruise the second you roll onto it, and the day arrives in her chest before it's even properly arrived outside her window.

She lies still for exactly ninety seconds. She has learned, over the years, that ninety seconds is about the right amount of time to let herself feel something before she has to get up and be a professional about it — long enough to actually feel it, short enough that it doesn't metastasize into something she can't put down again. She counts, silently, the way she used to count laps in a pool she hasn't swum in for years. At ninety, she gets up.

The routine, when it comes, is almost a comfort in its familiarity. She showers with the water hotter than it needs to be, because Selene once told her that heat resets something in the nervous system that cold never quite manages, and Mara has trusted Selene's advice on matters of the nervous system unconditionally since she was nineteen years old. She dries her hair fast and efficient, not fussing over it, because fussing is for people who need to look a particular way for a particular person, and she is going to a press conference, not a reunion, whatever her body seems to think this morning as she stands in front of the mirror doing up the buttons of the blazer she chose specifically for its total lack of anything that could be read as an attempt.

Navy. Structured. The kind of blazer that says I am here to do a job in every language a hockey federation's press liaison might speak. She checks herself in the mirror by the door — the habit from her first television producer, still intact after all these years — and finds a woman who looks exactly like what she needs to look like today: competent, unbothered, entirely professional.

It is, she thinks, a remarkably convincing performance, for someone who spent four minutes last night with a six-year-old promise ring sitting in the palm of her hand.

She eats breakfast in the hotel restaurant alone, at a small table by the window, working through a bowl of muesli she doesn't taste and half a cup of coffee she drinks mostly for the ritual of it. The restaurant is half full of press and federation staff, all of them wearing some version of the same laminated credential she has clipped to her own bag, all of them, she suspects, running through some version of the same morning calculus — what to ask, what to avoid, who to corner in the mixed zone before someone else gets there first.

She recognizes a few faces from last night's arrivals hall. A broadcast reporter from one of the big networks catches her eye and lifts a coffee cup in vague collegial greeting; Mara returns the gesture and hopes it reads as friendly rather than as the placeholder it actually is, because she does not currently have the bandwidth for small talk, not this morning, not with the day she has ahead of her.

Her phone buzzes on the table. Callum, early even for him.

Reminder: opening pressers start 9am local, all teams. Get me color from the room even if Cole doesn't say anything usable. Editors want a scene-setter for tomorrow's edition.

On it, she types back, and means it, because a scene-setter is a piece of writing she can produce with her eyes half closed after five years of doing exactly this — describing a room, its temperature, its noise, the particular quality of tension in a space full of athletes who'd rather be anywhere else and reporters who need them to be exactly here. It is the safest possible assignment for a morning like this one. She is grateful for it in a way she doesn't examine too closely.

She finishes her coffee. She does not eat the muesli. She goes back up to her room to collect her recorder, her notebook, the folder with the roster sheet still tucked face-down inside it like something sleeping, and she stands for a moment at the mirror by the door one final time before she leaves, doing the thing she does before every difficult interview of her career, which is not, technically, a prayer, because she stopped believing in anyone listening a long time ago, but which functions like one anyway.

Whatever he says. Whatever his face does. You do not have to feel it here. You can feel it later, alone, on your own time. Not here. Not in front of him.

It has worked for five years. She has no reason, standing in a hotel room in a city she's never been to before, to think today will be any different.

The venue is a twenty-minute walk from the hotel, along a river she now knows is called the Vltava, past a scattering of tourists photographing bridges and old men feeding pigeons with the unhurried devotion of people who have absolutely nowhere else to be. Mara walks fast, the way she always walks on assignment mornings, less because she's actually in a hurry and more because moving quickly gives her hands and legs something to do that isn't shaking.

The arena rises up out of the riverside like something built for exactly this occasion — banners already hung along its curved facade, national flags from a dozen countries snapping in a wind that smells faintly of the river and faintly of somebody's cigarette. Security checks her credential twice before she's fully inside, the second guard scanning her badge with a handheld reader and waving her through into a corridor already loud with the particular chaos of a major tournament's opening morning: camera crews wheeling equipment carts, a federation staffer arguing cheerfully into a walkie-talkie in three languages, a knot of players from some team she doesn't recognize walking past in matching tracksuits, headphones on, faces blank with the specific pre-tournament focus of people about to be watched by the entire hockey-following world.

She finds the media room without much trouble, following the signage and the flow of credentialed bodies, and steps into a space that is, she has to admit, genuinely impressive — tiered seating for what must be two hundred reporters, a stage at the front dressed with sponsor branding and a long table, a wall of cameras already assembling at the back like something out of a nature documentary about migratory birds.

She finds a seat near the middle, close enough to ask a question if the moment calls for it, far enough back that she isn't in anyone's direct sightline from the stage. She sets her recorder on the little fold-out desk in front of her, opens her notebook to a blank page, and writes the date at the top, and the city, and the words TEAM USA — OPENING PRESSER in block letters, the way she always starts, the way she has started a thousand assignments before this one that had absolutely nothing riding on them beyond the work itself.

The room is filling fast now. Somewhere behind her, someone is speaking rapid Finnish into a phone. Somewhere to her left, a photographer is testing a long lens, the click of the shutter oddly loud in the swelling noise.

Mara keeps her eyes on her notebook, on the blank page, on the pen in her hand, and does not look up at the door at the side of the stage — the one marked STAFF ONLY, the one federation staff have been ducking in and out of for the last ten minutes, the one through which, any moment now, an entire national team is going to walk out and take their seats at that long table under the lights.

She keeps her eyes down. She keeps her breathing even. She has done this a thousand times.

She has never once done it like this.

The room goes very slightly quieter, the way a room does right before something it's been waiting for finally happens, and Mara, despite every ounce of professional discipline she has spent five years building, feels her whole body go still.