Faking It With The Hockey Star

Justin’s POV

I don’t remember driving.

One second I was leaving the rink, still pulling my jacket on. The next I was turning into Harper’s driveway with no memory of the roads in between. I barely put the truck in park before I was already out of it. The front door wasn’t locked. "Harper?" My voice echoed through the downstairs hallway.

"I’m upstairs!" she called back.

There was something in her voice that made my stomach twist immediately. Not panic exactly. Something quieter and more unsettling than panic. Real fear, the kind people get when something has happened that they can’t immediately explain away.

I took the stairs two at a time.

Her bedroom door was open. She was sitting in front of her laptop surrounded by what looked like every piece of equipment she owned. Three external hard drives were scattered across the desk. Sticky notes covered the wall beside her monitor. A production notebook lay open with pages folded back. Memory cards were spread out in a loose arc like she’d been sorting through them frantically. She looked up the moment I walked in. Her eyes were red, not from crying, but from staring at screens for too long. The kind of red that came from squinting at footage timelines at close range.

"What happened?" I asked, pulling a chair beside her without waiting for an invitation.

She immediately turned the laptop toward me. "My footage," she said.

I frowned. "What about it?"

"My interview with Coach Reynolds." She clicked through folder after folder, each one opening and closing faster than I could read the filenames. "It’s gone."

"What do you mean, gone?"

"I mean," she opened another folder, then another, "gone. I uploaded everything. I organized everything. I backed everything up across three different locations. I logged every single interview in this notebook." She clicked faster now, her jaw tight. "I don’t understand how this is possible."

I put my hand on her wrist gently. "Slow down," I said. "Walk me through it."

She inhaled sharply and forced herself to stop clicking. "I filmed Coach Reynolds a few days ago. You remember? The long interview. Almost two hours."

"I remember," I said. "He talked for forty minutes before you even had to prompt him with a second question."

She almost smiled at that. Almost. "Exactly. I broke the recording into sections afterward. Leadership. Recruitment. Team culture. The pressure of college hockey on young players." She flipped open her notebook to a page covered in color-coded notes. "I was going to use pieces from that interview throughout the whole documentary. It wasn’t just one scene. It was the connective tissue holding everything else together."

I looked back at the screen. "And now?"

"I can’t find a single frame of it." She swallowed hard. "It’s not on my laptop. It’s not in the cloud. It’s not on my backup drive. It’s not in my archive." She looked at me with an expression I’d only seen from her once before, the night she got that call about her mother. Helpless. Completely helpless. "Justin, it’s just gone."

I looked at the timeline on her screen. Every other interview was accounted for. Ryan. Mason. The assistant coach. The equipment manager. My own interview sitting right where it always had been. Everything was there. Except one thing.

A cold, specific feeling settled in my chest. "This wasn’t an accident," I said.

She nodded slowly. "I know. I checked the activity logs on the cloud." She pointed to a section of the screen I hadn’t noticed. "Someone accessed the project from a different device at one forty-three this morning. A different IP address. I was asleep. I hadn’t touched anything since before midnight."

I looked at her carefully. "You didn’t share your password with anyone?"

"No," she said immediately. "The only person who has legitimate access to the project files is Professor Silas, and he would never—"

"I know he wouldn’t," I said.

She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. "I called the university’s cloud support line an hour ago. They confirmed someone accessed the account. But they said they can’t identify who without opening a formal investigation, which could take days I don’t have."

Silence settled between us. I leaned back and looked at the storyboard pinned to her wall. Colour-coded sticky notes covered nearly every section. Blue ones, which she’d told me weeks ago represented interview segments from specific subjects, were spread across almost every Chapter marker on the board.

"Those blue notes," I said slowly.

She followed my gaze. "All of them use something Coach Reynolds said." Her voice was very quiet now. "Every single one. If I lose that interview, the entire structure falls apart. I’d have to rebuild sections from scratch."

She looked back at me. "And I can’t refilm it. The scouts arrive tomorrow. The team has media obligations, meetings, the game. There’s no version of the next forty-eight hours where Coach Reynolds has two free hours to sit down and give me the same interview again." She laughed once, a short, broken sound. "And even if he did, it wouldn’t be the same. That interview happened because he’d forgotten I was filming. You can’t recreate that."

I reached for her hand. "Hey." She looked up. "We’re going to figure this out."

Her eyes filled. "I’ve checked everything three times, Justin. I’ve gone through every folder, every archive, every backup. I even wondered if I’d accidentally renamed the files. There is nothing." Her voice finally cracked. "I can’t lose this project. I can’t."

I squeezed her hand. "You won’t."

She looked at me the way people look at something they desperately want to believe. "But how?"

An idea hit me. "Can I borrow your laptop for a second?"

She blinked. "What?"

"I know someone. The same guy who traced the anonymous account. Ryan." She frowned. "The cybersecurity guy?" I nodded. "If anyone can tell us whether someone genuinely broke into your files and where they accessed from, it’s him. He won’t stop until he finds something."

Hope moved across her face for the first time since I’d walked through the door. "You think he can actually help?"

"I don’t know," I said honestly. "But I know he’ll try." I stood and picked up her laptop carefully. She was already on her feet. I pulled out my phone and called before she could second-guess anything.

Ryan answered on the second ring. "What’s up?"

"Harper’s documentary was accessed remotely last night," I said. "Footage was deleted."

The line went completely quiet. Then his voice changed. The casual Ryan disappeared entirely. "Tell me everything. Don’t skip anything."

I gave him the short version. No interruptions from him. No jokes. When I finished, he spoke immediately. "Don’t touch anything else on that laptop. Don’t open any more files, don’t move anything around, and whatever you do, don’t let it connect to any new networks before I see it."

I looked at Harper. She’d heard every word. "Why?" I asked.

"Because if someone genuinely got into her project remotely," Ryan said, his voice tight, "every second you keep using that machine could be overwriting the access logs. You could accidentally destroy the only evidence you have."

I was already moving toward the door. "Where are you?"

"Engineering building," he said. "Room 204. I’m here for another two hours. Bring the laptop now."

I ended the call and looked at Harper. She grabbed her production notebook without being asked. "Ready?" I said.

She took a slow breath. "No," she said honestly. "But let’s go."

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