The Winger's Sin

*"One more lap, Haines. You look like you're skating through cement."* Dexter takes the turn at the far boards too fast and his right shoulder goes with a wet, grinding pop that he feels in his teeth. He ends up flat on the ice counting the fluorescent lights in the ceiling to keep from passing out, which is when his coach tells him to get to medical, because there is a new physiotherapist and she will look at him. It is three weeks into the season. It is also eighteen months since a rink in Medicine Hat, where a doctor put the words career and ending in the same sentence. She is arranging bottles on a shelf when he comes in, tall to short, labels facing out. She washes her hands, dries them, pulls on gloves, and does not hurry a single movement. Maren Copley has her own reasons for being careful. Her predecessor believed in one-size-fits-all protocols; she believes in treating the individual athlete. She also has a sister called Holly, which stops being a private fact the moment a teammate mentions it to the coach, because Holly and Dexter broke up just over a year ago, amicably, except for the part where Holly got out of his truck at a red light. What Maren finds in Dexter's shoulder is one problem. What she starts noticing around it is another: the omissions, the flinch, the scar above his eyebrow that itches when he is about to fight somebody. Dexter's brother Caleb was eleven when he died. Dexter was seventeen. The family were told it was an accident, a fall, and it stayed that way for years, because their father burned the letter Caleb left behind explaining otherwise. Maren, for her part, has a sister who is three thousand short on a truck transmission and too proud to ask for a cosigner, an early shift at a diner she is not telling anybody about, and a job she has held for three weeks. A small-town hockey romance about an injury nobody wants written down, a family silence that has held for a very long time, and two people who each keep trying to fix somebody else first. The romance is closed-door, and the book deals with a suicide in the family's past.