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“He’s not my boyfriend!”

“You know that. And I know that. But the world thinks that you fired the previous coach and gave the job to the guy you are now having sleepovers with.”

Rich Kopka, the coach I had fired, had already weighed in about that, and aboutTMZ.

“I didn’t know that if I’d given her a little sugar,” Kopka told Seth Dowd, “I could have kept my job.”

Thomas kept staring down at the empty field, coffee mug in his hands.

“In the end,” I said, “Danny managed to clip Ryan anyway. And me.”

I slapped my desk hard, nearly spilling coffee out of my own mug.

“Seriously? Are people dumb enough to think Ryan screwed his way into his job?”

“You want the short answer?” Thomas said. “Yes. Same game plan they were going to use against Ryan with those women. He’s the one who’s totally screwed once the accusation is out there. How it works these days.”

I angled my chair and took a closer look at Thomas. He looked the way Ryan had looked that morning at the house. As if he’d slept in his clothes.

I drank coffee that I wished had something stronger in it. It was the way my father used to drink it. I thought about reaching down for the bottle of Irish whiskey I’d taken out of the bottom drawer of his desk and put into mine.

“Somebody set Ryan up,” I said.

“Or had your house staked out without your noticing it,” Thomas said. “And guess what? It doesn’t matter. They wanted you both to look bad, and now you do.”

“Come on. Is it really worse than everything else they’ve hit me with?”

“Yeah, Sis, it is. You know why? Because it’s one more thing. I kept hoping we could get to the league meetings without one more thing. But now this.”

He turned and sat down on the windowsill.

“They’re never going to stop.”

“Well established,” I said. “But so is something else: I’m not quitting.” I managed a small smile. First of the day. “If we do, the terrorists win.”

We kicked around some ideas about how to respond—if we even did respond. I wasn’t on any social media platform. No Facebook. No Instagram. No Twitter. No TikTok. Somehow I’d managed to live my life to this point—even the life I’d now been thrown into—resisting the notion that having an unspoken thought was against the law.

Thomas, however, was all over social media, almost like it was his new drug of choice. He even had a presence on some platforms that I hadn’t previously known existed.

We finally decided to simply issue a statement on the Wolves’ official Twitter account denying that Ryan Morrissey and I were involved in a romantic relationship.

“I’ve managed to not dignify any of this so far,” I said.

“We’re making an exception on this one,” Thomas said.

So we kept it as simple as we could, without my sounding defensive in any way.

Ryan Morrissey and I are not now, and have never been, in any relationship other than the professional one we now share. Go Wolves.

Jenny Wolf

I had to be talked out of adding one additional sentence.

“But any personal relationship I do have is my business, and anyone who thinks otherwise can kiss my ass.”

“Very powerful imagery, Sis,” Thomas had said when I suggested adding the line. “But for now, let’s keep that one between us.”

Thomas went back to his office then and went to work on a couple of trades we were considering, one of them for another backup quarterback in case Ted couldn’t play against the Broncos. I did the same. I considered watching today’s Wolves’ practice from the field but didn’t want to turn it into another photo op for the masses.