The Goalie's Gamble

The tape rips free from the roll with a sound like tearing skin. Declan O'Leary wraps the first strip around the butt of his goalie stick, palm flat, measuring the tension by feel alone. Three rotations. Two inches up, diagonal cross, spiral to the knob, and a final loop that overlaps the start by exactly half a centimeter. He has done this five hundred times. Maybe a thousand. His grandmother's rosary hangs from the hook inside his stall. He has kissed it before every game since he was twelve. Then the door to the coaches' office clicks open, and a woman he has never seen before says his name. *Tessa Brennan. The new sports psychologist.* Declan did not sign up for a sports psychologist. He wants the net clear and his defence to stop letting guys walk across the slot. What he gets is a stranger who looks at his hands for the length of one wrap and tells him that because he holds the stick in his right palm while he tapes, he is thinking about his catch-glove side. She is not wrong about him. That is the problem. Four seasons in the ECHL. Two in the AHL. One call-up that lasted exactly three games, twelve goals on forty-one shots, a .707 save percentage, and then a trade to a paper-mill town for a seventh-round pick and future considerations. His glove hand has a tremor. It never shows in practice. It shows when the pressure comes, and the backup goalie has already started saying *the old choker's back* loudly enough for him to hear it in the equipment room. Tessa's read is that none of this is mechanical. Her complication is her surname: her father bought this team, her brother runs the equipment room and has debts he keeps calling under control, and she came here to prove a program works rather than to be anybody's daughter. Her father is not persuaded by any of it. *One save in a regular-season game in November doesn't erase Game Seven.* So Declan has to choose between the mask that has kept him upright and the one person who has asked what is behind it. Tessa has to choose between the thing she came to Port Mills to prove and the player she is not supposed to want. And the tremor is still there, and the season keeps coming. This is an enemies-to-lovers hockey romance in a small Ontario mill town: a goalie with a ritual, a psychologist with a surname, a backup waiting for the crease, and a family that keeps its worst business at the dinner table. Closed door.