The Winger's Secret

Third period, his team up by one, and Callum Devereux broke clean off the wing with the goalie down and the short side wide open. A shot he has made a thousand times. He wound up, let it go, and there was no pop and no snap, just a dull thud off a shoulder pad and the puck skittering into the corner. He slammed his stick against the glass afterwards, hard enough that the vibration detonated in his right shoulder like a firecracker in a closed fist. The cortisone shot was three weeks ago. The team doctor told him to take two weeks off and he took two days. The trade deadline is coming, his contract expires in July, and Declan O'Shea is three goals behind him in the scoring race and hungry for his ice time, so the pills stay at the bottom of the bag. He gives the press two minutes of nothing. *I'm fine.* He says it too fast, and a woman with a notebook writes something down. She catches him in the corridor on the way to the players' exit, recorder already in her hand, and recites his own number and his own missed chance back at him. Then: *Is that exhaustion or fear, Devereux?* Sloane Kendrick writes for a lifestyle site he has never heard of. She is also a two-time Canadian junior champion who blew out her knee at seventeen and never came back, which is how she can read a body that has stopped trusting itself from thirty feet away. Her editor wants a feature. Sloane asks for a week. What she turns up in the archive is a charity gala photo of Callum with an arm around his younger brother, and then, two years later, a shorter and more careful piece. A rainy night on the Sea-to-Sky Highway. A car hydroplaning into a guardrail. Liam Devereux, twenty-two. And a text from an old contact, off the record, that changes the shape of everything: Callum was driving. His older sister Nia has already made her opinion of this interview series extremely clear. A friends-to-lovers hockey romance about an injury nobody is allowed to see, a journalist whose own career ended on the ice, and two people who have each been carrying a car crash by themselves for years. The romance is closed-door.