Chapter 5 THE ASSIGNMENT I DIDN'T FIGHT

Marlow's POV

I was still standing in the hallway outside the media room when Bettina caught my arm.

"There you are! I've been looking everywhere." She was out of breath, clipboard pressed against her chest like it held state secrets. "Good news. I just got off the phone with the network. They loved the idea; they want the full season, one reporter, one athlete, exclusive access the whole way through."

My stomach dropped before she even finished the sentence, because I already knew exactly where this was going.

"Marlow, you're it. You're covering Truett Sorensen one-on-one for the entire championship run. Every practice. Every game. Home and away. This is a huge opportunity. Do you understand what this could do for your byline?"

I understood exactly what it could do for my byline. I also understood that ten minutes ago, that same boy had stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor and told me to meet him alone after practice because he had something to say that he didn't want recorded.

I opened my mouth to ask for a different assignment. The words were right there, sitting on my tongue, easy enough to say. Actually, Bettina, can someone else cover him? I think there might be a conflict. Four seconds. That's all it would have taken to end this before it started, to protect myself from whatever was about to happen after practice ended, to go back to being a normal reporter with a normal beat and a normal, boring, uncomplicated life.

I didn't say it.

"That's great," I said instead, and my voice came out steady even though nothing inside me felt steady at all. "I won't let you down."

Bettina beamed as I'd just handed her a trophy. "I knew you were the right pick for this. There's just one more thing." She flipped a page on her clipboard, her voice dropping a little, like she was about to tell me something that mattered more than it sounded. "The sponsors are very particular about this piece. Merriton Sports Group is basically bankrolling half this season, and they've made it clear they want Truett's story to look one specific way. Focused. Clean. No off-brand angles. If your piece brings up anything that makes him look distracted, or complicated, or anything other than a hundred percent dedicated to winning, it could actually hurt his standing with them."

"Hurt his standing how?" I asked, even though something in my gut already had a bad feeling about the answer.

"They could pull the sponsorship entirely. I heard his family's counting on it pretty heavily." She said it casually, like she was talking about the weather, completely unaware that she had just handed me a piece of information that rearranged everything I thought I understood about the boy sitting across from me in that interview room twenty minutes ago.

His family needed this. Not wanted. Needed.

Suddenly the way he'd shut down when I asked about his disappearance made a different kind of sense, a colder kind, one that had nothing to do with me at all and everything to do with pressure I hadn't even known existed. I felt something twist in my chest, something that wasn't quite sympathy and wasn't quite guilt but sat somewhere painfully in between.

"I'll be careful with how I frame it," I said, and I meant it, even though I wasn't totally sure yet what careful even looked like.

Bettina squeezed my shoulder like we'd just sealed some kind of deal and walked off toward the rink, leaving me standing alone in the hallway with my heart doing something complicated and fast against my ribs.

I checked the time. Practice would be ending in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes until I had to walk out to wherever Truett was and hear whatever truth he'd been carrying around for three years, a truth he apparently thought was big enough that he needed a private room and no recorder to say it.

I told myself I was going because it was my job now, officially, on paper, assigned by Bettina herself. I told myself curiosity was a professional trait, not a personal one. I told myself a lot of things standing in that hallway, and none of them were true, and somewhere underneath all the lying I knew exactly why my hands wouldn't stop shaking. It had nothing to do with my byline and everything to do with the fact that in fifteen minutes I was going to be alone with the one person who had broken something in me that had never fully gone back together.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I pulled it out expecting a text from Ellery, something teasing, something that would make me laugh and loosen the knot in my chest before I had to face him. It wasn't Ellery.

It was a number I didn't recognize, no name attached, no explanation. Just five words that landed like a slap.

Don't believe what he says.

I stared at the screen so long the words started to blur together. My first thought was that it was a wrong number, some mistake, some message meant for somebody else entirely. But then it buzzed again in my hand, a second message from the same unknown number, and this one made my whole body go cold.

Ask him about the money. Ask him why he really left.

I looked up from my phone, down the long hallway toward the rink doors, my heart pounding so loud I could hear it in my own ears.

Somebody out there already knew exactly what Truett was about to tell me.

And they wanted me to hear it from them first.