The Center's Weakness

A single orange pill bottle sits in the third locker from the left, behind a rolled-up towel. Declan Cross palms it and slides it into his warm-up jacket in one motion. It is muscle memory from six seasons of doing exactly this. Then Coach Hart calls him into an office that smells of coffee and stale cigar smoke and says the two things Declan has been going out of his way not to hear. *"You been favoring your left side in practice."* And: *"Doc says your EKG came back with an irregularity."* Declan is thirty-two. He snaps the ball for the Jaguars. His father was forty-seven, so he knows exactly what an irregularity can mean, and he has decided not to know it. The appointment card went in the bin, past the coffee grounds. On the field after the win, a reporter with a press credential and a tiny silver football charm at her throat comes through the confetti with her hand out. Nora Brennan is writing a series on how the league's concussion protocols get enforced, and how they do not. She watched him take a hit in the second quarter. She watched him skip the protocol at halftime. *"And how's your vision right now, Declan?"* She has a reason that is not going in the article. Her brother died three weeks ago on a practice field. He was thirty-one. An undiagnosed cardiac condition, cleared by the same team doctors who keep clearing Declan. The charm at her throat was his. What she finds in a locker room bin is an orange bottle with a half-peeled label, a name smudged down to three letters, and the word Metoprolol. What Declan finds, through a cracked door two rooms from his own locker, is a memo addressed to the general manager from a team physician, documenting a recommendation that Declan Cross be placed on medical leave effective immediately. The majority owner is shopping the team, and a medical scandal cuts the sale price. Which means almost everybody in that building has a reason to want him on the field on Sunday. Declan included. A sports romance between a veteran offensive lineman and the reporter who could end his career with one phone call, and who has the best reason in the world to want him out of the game alive. The romance is closed-door.