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Jade didn’t have an adequate answer for that.

“Exactly,” he said, heated. “Because you knew it was way out of bounds. Not only were you out of line, but you went behind my back with it.”

“Coach, I may have been out of line, but I wasn’t trying to go behind your back. I was… I was trying to show some initiative.”

“So why didn’t you immediately come to me with what you found?”

Jade winced. “I was waiting for the right time…”

When she said it out loud, it felt ridiculously insufficient. In her head, she’d had it all figured out. She was going to approach him before practice one day this week and tell him what she’d found. She imagined showing him her notes, and after he realized that they had all the tools necessary to win against West Beaufort, he’d be so overcome with joy that he’d give her the job right then and there.

Instead, Landry sat in front of her turning progressively redder in the face and neck, and she realized that she’d made a huge misstep. She started to sweat as she speculated about what he would do next. Was he going to fire her?

“Coach.” Jade choked the word out. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”

Landry held up a hand to stop her in her tracks. “Go home, Dunn. Don’t come to poker tomorrow night. I’ll figure out what to do with you on Friday at practice. Just—just go for now.”

Throat thick and tears welling up in the corners of her eyes, Jade all but ran from the office. She didn’t stop to say goodbye to any of her coworkers as she rushed to her car. Despite her lack of tinted windows, she pretended like no one could see her as she finally let her tears fall, head against the steering wheel.

This entire time, she’d thought that it would be some outside force that would ultimately keep her from her dream. Lim’s mere presence, the opinions of the good ol’ boys up top, even Landry himself deciding she wasn’t ready. Instead, she had turned out to be the maker of her own demise.

Whathadshe been thinking?

She hadn’t had an answer to that question when Landry had asked her mere minutes ago, and she didn’t have one now, not really.

She supposed she’d just been trying to give herself and her team an edge. She hadn’t thought about the consequences. She hadn’t even anticipated that Landry would react in any way other than thankful.

She banged her forehead against the steering wheel a couple of times, only stopping when it seemed like she might do actual damage to the skin of her forehead. Pulling herself up, she sniffed, wiped her nose with one of the fast-food napkins she kept in her glove box, and blinked her tears away.

Jade spent the entire drive back to her house choking on her own bad decisions.

Later that evening, she sat in the living room of her little house, surrounded by her friends. Miri was next to her on the couch, Olivia sat in the patterned chair on the other side of the coffee table, and Aja sprawled out on the floor in front of them. They’d just finished massively overeating a large Chinese food feast, and Jade wasso full of dumplings and spare ribs that her tears had finally managed to dry up.

“I literally fucked my entire life up with a wig.” She spoke the words into a small tub of sweet-and-sour sauce. “And then had the nerve to wear it to the club like I’d really done something.”

“You did not fuck your life up,” Miri argued. “Nothing’s happened yet.”

“You should have seen the way Landry looked at me. I’ve never had someone be so disappointed with me in my entire life.”

Her friends exchanged a few knowing glances with one another before Miri took a big, heaving sigh. “Jade, you know you can’t actually do everything right, don’t you?”

Her brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“She means,” Aja interjected, “that fucking up is a natural part of life. You can’t avoid it.”

“I could have avoided this.”

Aja shrugged. “Sure, but the fact of the matter is that you haven’t actually ruined your life; you just feel like you have. Which, to be fair, is valid. But you didn’t hurt anyone. You didn’t scam anyone.”

“I could have hurt the team,” Jade said, distressed.

“We’re not saying that’s not true,” Miri cut in. “We’re not even saying you were in the right here. We just don’t want you to beat yourself to death over one little mistake.”

Jade bit down on her lip, unsure of what to say but almost completely disagreeing with her friends’ assessment of the situation. Her entire life, she’d been able to clearly see every option laid out in front of her. She could see the paths she would need to take to get where she wanted. Hell, a lot of the time, she could accurately predict the obstacles in her way.

Now when she closed her eyes and tried to imagine a way forward, it was dark. Nothing but blackness behind her eyes. Everything feltso bleak. Her heart had been in her stomach since early that afternoon, and she had no idea how to get it out.

Without this dream, she didn’t fully know who she was or what she was doing. This had been a lifelong goal, yes, but for the past five years, she’d been so single-mindedly focused on it that she hadn’t made much room in her life for anything else. She’d eschewed everything, choosing to eat, live, and breathe her dream. As a result, once the carpet seemed to be getting pulled out from under her, she was left to consider the fact that she had nothing to fall back on. Not love or romantic prospects, not even a real plan B.