Faking It With The Hockey Star

Harper’s POV

By the time I got home, my shoulders felt like they weighed a hundred pounds.

I dropped my backpack onto the dining table and stretched until something in my spine cracked satisfyingly. The house was quiet in the comfortable way it sometimes got in the early evening. Mom was helping Noah with homework in the living room, their voices drifting softly down the hallway. Emma was upstairs talking to a friend, laughing about something I couldn’t quite make out. For once, everything felt completely normal. Exactly what I needed after the day I’d had.

"I’ll be in my room!" I called.

"Okay, sweetheart," Mom answered without looking up.

I carried my laptop upstairs, shut the door behind me, and let out a long breath that felt like it had been waiting all afternoon to escape. Just one hour. That was all I needed. One quiet, uninterrupted hour to organize the day’s footage before everything else demanded my attention again. I placed my camera on the desk, connected the memory card, and watched the files begin transferring one by one.

Today’s clips appeared on screen. Mason untaping Justin’s freshly finished stick job and walking away looking entirely too pleased with himself. The team’s unified outrage over someone’s country music playlist. Coach’s operatic threat that had somehow unified the entire bus through laughter. The protein bar sculpture balanced on a sleeping Ryan’s forehead. I smiled at each one as it loaded. This was the footage I’d spent months trying to get. The real stuff. The unperformed, unguarded moments that turned a sports documentary into something people actually cared about.

Once the transfer finished, I leaned back in my chair. "Now," I said quietly to myself, clicking open my editing software, "let’s clean everything up."

The project loaded. Timeline. Media bins. Audio tracks. Everything looked exactly as I’d left it. At first.

I clicked into my cloud backup folder out of habit. Nothing appeared. I frowned. "That’s weird." Maybe the cloud hadn’t finished syncing. It happened sometimes, especially after large file transfers. I refreshed the folder. Still nothing. "No." I checked the internet connection. Fully connected. I refreshed again. The folder sat completely empty, staring back at me.

A small knot formed in my stomach. I logged out of the cloud service and logged back in, telling myself to stay calm. Nothing. My heartbeat picked up despite the instruction. I opened my local backup instead. Then a secondary external folder. Then yesterday’s archive. Everything looked mostly intact. Mostly. I stared at the screen trying to identify what felt wrong, because something did, sitting just below the surface of everything that appeared fine.

I opened the project timeline again and scrubbed slowly through the footage. Practice. The bus ride. Team interviews. The equipment room. The locker room. Everything appeared to be there. So why did something feel off?

I leaned closer to the monitor. Then stopped. The interview sequence. It was shorter than it should have been. Noticeably shorter. I clicked into the timeline and expanded it, counting the clips methodically. One. Two. Three. Four. My breathing slowed. There should have been another interview between those two clips. I was almost certain of it.

I grabbed my production notebook from the desk drawer and flipped to the interview log I’d been keeping since the beginning of the semester. Every interview I’d filmed was listed by date and name. Coach Daniels. Mason. Ryan. Justin. The freshmen. The equipment manager. The assistant coach. I looked back at the timeline. Then back at the notebook. Then back at the timeline again.

Coach Daniels’ interview was gone. Completely and entirely gone.

"No." I searched the media library. Nothing. I searched by filename. Nothing. I searched by recording date. Nothing. I opened the recycle bin. Empty. My hands started shaking. I never deleted raw footage. Never. Professor Silas had repeated that instruction from the very first week of the semester like a commandment. Never delete originals. Not for any reason.

I opened the autosave folder, hoping an older version of the project still had it intact. Version one. Gone. Version two. Gone. Version three. Gone. I opened the project history and scrolled back through it with growing dread.

Then I stopped.

A timestamp sat in the activity log that made no sense at all.

Project modified: 1:43 A.M.

I stared at it. At one forty-three this morning I had been asleep. I hadn’t touched my laptop since before midnight. I clicked deeper into the log.

Cloud access successful. Different device. Different IP address.

The room felt suddenly smaller. Quieter. The familiar sounds of my house, Mom’s voice downstairs, Emma’s laughter, all of it seemed to recede. Someone had logged into my editing software last night. Someone had opened my documentary project in the middle of the night, gone through every file with deliberate precision, and removed exactly one interview. Not Justin’s. Not the team captain’s. Not the most high-profile footage I had.

Coach Daniels’.

I grabbed my notebook again and flipped frantically to the page where I’d written interview summaries after each filming session. Coach Daniels. I’d noted his exact words. A real hockey team is built on trust. If your players stop trusting each other, you’ve already lost the season before the first puck drops. I read it twice. There was nothing controversial there. Nothing that should have mattered to anyone outside the documentary.

So why delete that specific interview? Why not Justin’s? Why not Mason’s, which had nearly five thousand views on the preview clip alone?

Unless it wasn’t about what Coach had said. Unless it was about something that had happened during the interview. Something visible in the background. Someone walking past a doorway. A conversation caught on the ambient microphone. Something I’d been too focused on the foreground to notice at the time.

My pulse hammered against my ribs. I searched every backup one more time. Every archive. Every external drive. The interview had been removed so cleanly, so completely, that it was as if it had never been filmed at all. This wasn’t a glitch. This wasn’t an accidental deletion. Someone had been inside my project. Someone who understood editing software well enough to remove footage without disturbing the rest of the timeline. Someone who wanted the absence to look like my own mistake.

My fingers hovered over my keyboard for a moment. Then I reached for my phone.

Justin answered before the first ring had even finished. "Hey, babe," he said.

I didn’t try to hide anything. There wasn’t enough left in me to manage it. "Justin." My voice came out smaller than I intended.

A pause. Then immediately, "Harper?"

"I need your help," I said.

Silence. Then the distinct sound of a chair scraping hard against a floor. "I’m on my way," he said, and the call ended.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!