Page 31 of Goalie and the Girl Next Door
I fish it out and glance at the screen. Time is ticking. Still, I swipe open my texts and type out a quick message to Mathieu.
Me: Hey. How are you holding up, mon frère?
The three dots pop up. Then they stop. They start again.
And stop.
I watch them for a long moment, thumb hovering.
Then I type:
Me: I understand, buddy. It’s going to be okay. We’re getting you out to Maple Falls ASAP.
A second later, his reply comes.
Mathieu: Merci, mon ami.
I want to help him, and Iwillhelp. Just not right this second. I have to get to practice, and if I’m late again, I will be demoted toteam water boy slash janitor slash emotional support mascot.
I rev the engine of my bike and peel away from Happy Horizons, Marcy’s smile still glowing in me.
Tomorrow, I’ll ask if she wants to grab coffee.
Or maybe not coffee. Maybe fresh milk.
CHAPTER 11
MARCY
He waved.
Well—technically,Iwaved first. But then he waved back. And smiled. It was a real one, too. Nothing smug or dazzling or I-know-you-want-me about it.
I close the cabin door behind me and let myself lean against it.
My mug is still warm in my hands as I take a long sip, hoping the caffeine will replace whatever part of me short-circuited out there.
Clément Rivière is tall, charming, and French—three strikes. I know it well from my softball days. Three strikes and Clément Rivière isout.
And yet, my stomach still does that embarrassing swoop when I think about the way his eyes crinkled when I handed him a glass of milk.
I set the mug down and pace to my small desk. The window lets in enough afternoon light to make everything on it look worse—my spreadsheet printouts, annotated maps, and the most recent zoning ordinances from the Maple FallsTownship archives.
I stare at them like they’re going to suddenly rearrange themselves into a lifeline.
They don’t.
I drop into the chair and exhale through my nose. There is no accounting solution to this.
I bought us time. A stay of execution, thanks to a filing discrepancy and one loophole buried in Washington State’s arcane tax abatement code. But time is all it was. A stall tactic. A well-placed speed bump on a road being paved by someone with more money than decency.
The billionaire owns a critical parcel just outside the downtown overlay district. If he gets a variance—and he will, because money always finds its own zoning—he’ll have every right to steamroll this town with condos, parking garages, and whatever soulless empire he’s planning.
I shuffle through the pages again. Numbers, names, dates—all meaningless without power to enforce them. There’s no elegant formula to save Maple Falls. No strategic pivot. Not when the enemy has already bought the chessboard.
I hate this.
I hate knowing that I can’t logic our way out of it. That I’ll have to watch a town I’ve slowly come to love get stripped and rezoned into something unrecognizable.
