NOVA
We were still in Detroit. The team had a morning skate before the flight home, and I had spent the first hour of the day in my hotel room reviewing session notes and pretending last night hadn’t happened. The bar. The stools. The space that closed. The thing I wasn’t naming.
I was good at pretending. I had built an entire career on it.
The hotel was a sprawling Marriott with conference rooms on the second floor that the team had commandeered for pregame meals and meetings. I took the stairs from my room on the fourth floor because the stairwell was quiet and I needed two minutes of quiet before I walked into a room full of hockey players and performed the role of a woman who had her life under control.
I was between the third and second floor landings when I heard the voices.
The
