The Winger's Vow

Cole MacTavish has been in Port Calder for nine years. Nine years of bus rides, Tuesday night home games, the same hallway, the same carpet stains, and a trophy case holding one division banner from 2017 and nothing else. Losses used to burn off fast. Now they settle in his joints like gravel and remind him he is not twenty-five any more. He does not need a tablet to tell him he played badly. He gets one anyway. Coach Stan Kowalski calls him into an office that smells of stale coffee, and standing beside the desk is the consultant who has spent two weeks in the press box telling the coaching staff exactly where every player on the ice went wrong, and who has been right often enough that Kowalski started listening. Brynn O'Shea holds her tablet in both hands like a newborn, or like a weapon she has not decided whether to use. What Cole is actually carrying has nothing to do with zone exits. His sister Fiona is on the fourth floor of the oncology wing. She beat this once. She is tired in a way she was not tired last time, and her doctor wants to run the kind of tests you do not want to hear about. So he invents a charity hockey clinic. Every Tuesday until the end of the season. It is not on the team schedule, and Brynn notices that immediately. What neither of them plans is what happens once she knows, or what a teammate does with a rumour at a team dinner, or what a front office is willing to put in writing. The ultimatum, when it lands, is aimed at her: sign the separation agreement and walk away after the conference finals, or he gets cut tonight with a statement saying he violated team policy. And there is a donor registry, and a stranger in Calgary, and a brother who wants to give his own marrow and a sister who tells him he does not get to decide that. A contemporary hockey romance about an ageing winger, an analytics consultant nobody in the room wanted, and a family illness that does not resolve on a convenient schedule. Closed-door, honest about hospitals, and warmer than it has any right to be.