Page 115 of Wild Card 13

"You did."

"I was supposed to?—"

"Lucy," Alois growled. The sound of my name in his low, steady voice cut straight through the list forming in my head.

I looked at him. He watched me with that same unsettling calm he had when everyone else was spiraling around him.

"You are doing the thing," he continued.

I frowned. "What thing?"

"The thing where you explain why everyone else is wrong about you."

My mouth opened. Nothing came out. Which was inconvenient. Because I loved having an argument prepared.

"I do it too, Don’t I?" Bea asked softly.

Alois looked at her. A little warmth returned to his expression. "All the time." The room settled around that admission. Because coming from him, it wasn't criticism. It was recognition. "You keep waiting for someone to tell you that you belong here," he continued, looking back at me. "But everyone already has."

My eyes burned unexpectedly. I hated that. Almost as much as I hated that he was right.

"Luce." Dad's voice softened. "No pressure. No obligation. No expectation because you're my daughter."

I looked back at him.

That was the one. The thing I hadn't said.

"Your last name got you into this building," he confirmed. "But it didn't keep you here."

A sharp breath caught in my throat. The room blurred slightly at the edges.

"You did that."

For a few seconds, I couldn't look at my dad. I looked at the folder instead. The clean edge of it against the polished conference table. The Frosthawks crest embossed in the corner. The careful, official weight of something I had spent three months pretending wasn't already happening.

Director of Player Operations.

Not acting. Not temporary.

"I need to think about it," I said finally.

Dad nodded once. "Of course." No disappointment. No pressure. "If you decide this isn't what you want," he continued, "I'll support that. Fully. But if it is," he said, quieter, "I don't want you minimizing what you've built here just because you're afraid people will think I handed it to you."

I swallowed. There it was. The thing I had carried into every hallway in this building. Every meeting. Every interaction with a player who looked at me and saw ownership before they saw competence.

"I don't know how to separate it," I admitted.

Dad's expression softened in a way that made him look less like the owner of the Minnesota Frosthawks and more like the man who used to check under my bed for monsters even after I was oldenough to know they weren't there. "You don't have to separate it," he said. "You just have to outwork the assumption."

Alois made a low sound that might have been agreement. I glanced at him. He looked back evenly. "People will talk."

"Comforting."

"They talk anyway."

Bea's mouth twitched despite everything.

Alois leaned back slightly, one hand still close to hers on the table. "You can make yourself small and they still talk. You can do the job and they still talk." His gaze held mine. "Only one of those is useful."