The Goalie's Wager

The Zamboni has just scraped the ice clean when Finn Callahan skates out for warm-ups on opening night in Silver Lake. Fourteen thousand seats above him, a team that hasn't sniffed the playoffs in six years, and a knee eight months out of surgery that finally feels warm and loose. Then a call-up breaks clean through the neutral zone. Finn reads the forehand, reads the drag to the backhand, drops, seals the five-hole, and the puck dies in his trapper. His knee catches his weight at the wrong angle. Something pops. He gets up. He tests it. It holds. The Blades' new hire sees it before the medical staff does. *"Brynn O'Connell. New data analyst."* She is the entire analytics department — *"The department is me. You found me."* — brought in over the front office's head, writing reports nobody upstairs reads, and she finds Finn's hesitation in three viewings. Three. Finn has reasons to keep the knee quiet. His father is gone. His sister Emma's tuition is seventeen thousand dollars for the semester and her school doesn't take payment plans. One more season, he keeps telling her. He also has Dante Rossi three lockers down, a backup who wants the crease and isn't particular about how. A rumour in the locker room. A photograph. A reporter named Leslie Vance who is glad to be handed something. By the time an envelope lands on the owner's desk, Brynn is no longer the rising analyst; she is the woman sleeping with the starting goaltender. *"You're compromised,"* Mac tells her, and he isn't wrong, and it doesn't help. What breaks them is not the rumour. It's Finn ending it in the worst available words — choosing hockey, calling her a distraction — and then having to find somewhere public enough to take it back. He finds a microphone, a half-full press room and the owner standing at the back wall. Brynn's brother Connor, sober eighteen months and not spoken to in three years, turns out to be the only person who can say out loud where the campaign against them started, and why. This is a contemporary hockey romance about a body that is failing quietly, a job that requires telling powerful men things they don't want to hear, and two careers set on the same table to see whether either one survives being honest.