Page 32 of Like A Daydream
“You didn’t Google him?” Cara asks. “He’s the captain of one of the top teams in the league, and he—”
“Why would I Google him?” Danielle asks.
“If it’s all the same,” Andrew asks, “if you haven’t, I’d rather you didn’t. I can tell you what you need to know.”
“You should at least prepare her for the worst,” Cara spits, Raleigh accent mixing with something foreign in her anger. Russian, maybe?
Danielle shakes her head, focusing on Andrew again.
“There a lot of things, that you should probably be aware of,” Andrew says, looking at Danielle. “Just know that if it gets to the point where people start coming here just to harass me, I’ll leave. I know that this is a place of business.”
“Whatever Cara is worried about won’t be a problem,” Danielle says, “as long as you’re not a criminal—”
“In some circles, he is—” Cara mutters.
“— which seems unlikely,” Danielle says, voice firm so she can put an end to… whatever this is. “I’m not concerned. Now, if the two of you don’t mind, I’d like to go back to doing my job while you both do yours.”
“Yes ma’am,” Andrew says, saluting and heading back out to the sales floor, Roscoe trotting along next to him.
Cara hangs back.
“You should probably Google him,” she says.
“Anything else?” Danielle asks, raising a brow.
Cara shakes her head no, and follows the path Andrew just took to the sales floor. Danielle sighs, rests her head in her hands, and glances up at the picture of she and Emerson she has on her desk.
“You’ve been gone two weeks and this is what my life has become,” Danielle says to the picture, annoyed. “It’s like you want to keep me on my toes.”
She has to go clean out their house at some point. She just can’t bring herself to do it when Erick is living there, for the time being. Erick had already packed up Harper’s stuff and brought it to her house, moving her in and trying to adapt her to their new normal.
Her curiosity about Andrew is piqued, so she decides she can take a ten-minute break, and do something she never thought she would: listen to Cara and Google him.
She types his name into the search bar, clicks onto the ‘news tab’ and her screen is instantly flooded with NHL reports, scouting reports, opinion pieces, and gossip articles.
There’s so much she doesn’t know where to begin, so she clicks onto a recent podcast episode of a show calledPucks Away.
“Andrew Fisher from North Carolina has gone virtually off the grid,” one of the hosts says, voice tinny as it comes through the speakers. “No one has seen him since that disaster of a performance in June.”
“Well, Brad,” a second host says, “he’s probably sick of people talking about him.”
“Agreed, Chad,” Brad says, “but it’s all anyone wants to talk about, because it’s still fresh.”
“Or he got sent to an AHL team for the off-season.”
“Sending him to the AHL without a trade negotiation coming through the pipeline? Seems a little unlikely.”
“And we have to take into account fan conduct, as well,” Chad says. “They broke about eighty NHL Code of Conduct rules at the Stanley Cup Finals.”
“And the blow-out has been a little much,” Brad replies.
“A little much?” Chad says with a laugh, “it was Beckham missing that last goal for England bad.”
“You have to wonder when enough is enough,” Brad says, “we know the trading window is open, we know that he’s MIA, and we know that him missing the goal to tie made his team lose the Stanley Cup. At what point are we just talking to talk?”
“And at what point does it make him less than human?” Chad asks. “Poor guy had a good reason to run, if you ask me.”
“He thinks lost them the Stanley Cup?” Danielle asks, clicking a new tab open and searching for the footage. She finds the clip easily, and watches the play over and over again.
