The Hockey Star's Forgotten Baby Mama novel · Chapter 16 of 32
Chapter 16: The Grievance
The team meeting room had sixty chairs and a whiteboard nobody had erased since October.
By nine on Thursday there were a hundred people in it.
Players along the back wall in practice sweats. Trainers. Both cooks. The ushers who'd come in on their day off.
At the front, at a folding table, sat the arbitrator the league had flown in.
She had reading glasses on a chain and the face of a woman who'd heard every excuse ever invented.
The union's lawyer sat on one side.
My father sat on the other, with a lawyer of his own and Kinsley in a cream suit beside him.
The security man stood by the door in his gray suit.
He didn't look at me.
I sat in the front row in my navy staff fleece.
"Ms. Vanderhoff," the arbitrator said. "You were suspended for conduct with a player. Would you like to respond?"
I stood up.
My knees were shaking. I locked them.
"I spent one night with Johnny Castelli," I said. "On my own time, in his home, by my own choice. I'm twenty-eight years old."
Somebody in the back said, "Yeah, she is."
The captain smacked him.
"There was no policy against it when I did it," I said. "The policy was written at seven the next morning. By the brand office. After the photo was posted."
My father's lawyer half stood. "The club has every right to set..."
"I'm not done," I said.
He sat.
"For three years I've fed this team. I've never missed a morning. I fed them on my own budget when ownership cut it. I fed four hundred kids on the first Ice Box Night." I looked at the arbitrator. "My work is the only thing anyone's ever been able to fault me for, and nobody's tried."
The arbitrator wrote something down.
"Does anyone want to speak to Ms. Vanderhoff's work?"
The head coach stood up before she'd finished the question.
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