Page 84 of Player Misconduct
The headline hits like a slap:
Mystery Father Alert: Tarron McCoy’s ex-wife glows, Hints of Baby On Board
Below it, a photo of me leaving my prenatal clinic yesterday with my hand on my bump, sunlight catching my hair. It’s not scandalous, just intimate. I’m too far along to hide it now but this can’t be real news. No one’s reading this… right?
The image loops across every sports outlet within hours. Someone even zoomed in far enough to catch the hospital badge on the folder I’m carrying. By noon, the story’s everywhere.
I scroll through the comments because I’m a masochist.
Are they really back together?
It has to be Tarron’s right?
She’d really go back to her cheating ex? No way.
Wild theory—it’s someone on the Hawkeyes!
My stomach knots until it aches.
The comments don’t stop; they mutate. More photos. A slow-mo video of me stepping off a curb.The same zoom on the Hawkeyes logo. Then side-by-sides of Tarron in Seattle this week, shorts and a cut-off Sentinels tank at practice.
They’re trying to stitch a story out of scraps because the last photo of us together was months ago at a restaurant doorway. The mystery isn’t evenwho—it’show.How did anyone know what clinic, what hour, which exit? Why care at all?
Then again: if I know anything about my ex and his agent—two men who can sniff out forms leverage in the back of a fish market’s dumpster—they’re either behind this or ready to profit from it. The blog tone is half coy, half claws. Even if wewerereconciling, the piece reads like bait. Not the sunshine spin an agent usually buys. The media is a monster that likes to be fed, and this morning they’ve been handed steak.
Tarron’s name always comes with drama: cheating with a cheerleader, totaling a rental house in New Orleans after a Super Bowl win, bankrupting himself after partying too hard, getting kicked out of two rehab clinics… which I’ve heard is actually hard to do.
There’s always a new headline, always a mess to clean up, and the press never misses a chance to cash in on it. So it’s no surprise that his ex-wife showing up pregnant after a very publicdivorce, and in the same city he just moved to, has the vultures circling again.
I set my phone face down on the desk in the trainers’ room and exhale. Theo glances over the top of his inventory sheet, pen between his teeth.
“That doesn’t sound good. Want to talk about it?”
Theo’s a steady teammate. We don’t hang out off-hours, but I’d trust him with my life on game nights.
“Only if you have the power to mute the world.”
He huffs a laugh. “If I had that power, I’d be using it already. So… what’s up?”
My phone buzzes, vibrating the wood. Then again.
Penelope Matthews, GM.
“I’d love to chat,” I tell Theo, “but the boss is calling.”
I step into my office, close the door, and swipe to answer. “Penelope?”
“Are you seeing this?” Concern lives under the even tone.
“The pictures at the clinic? Yeah. I have no idea how they knew I’d be there. It’s…” I hunt for a word that isn’tviolating“... weird.”
“No,” she says, crisp. “The video the Seattle Sunrise got with Tarron this morning as he left practice.”
“Wait—what?” I’m already bracing. “What video?”
“Sending now.”
The link lands and I tap as if my whole life depends on it… and at this moment, it might.
