Major Penalty

Tiggy has been taping Beck's sticks since Beck was a nineteen-year-old rookie who didn't know how to tie his own skates, so he knows what he is looking at tonight. *"That's called anxiety with a hockey jersey on."* Beck Mallory takes the ice anyway. First shift, he wins the faceoff, sends the puck deep, follows it into the corner, sees the lane and steps into it. Then there is a stick between his skates and a knee that buckles instead of holding. He comes back eleven months later, after four surgeries, and walks into a therapist's office with a coffee cup held like a shield. Quinn Mercer has already read the file. Three previous sessions with the psychologist who retired in June, every report landing on the same phrase: *Subject demonstrates resistance to vulnerability-based interventions.* Beck's opening move is to point out that she never played the game. Her answer is that she doesn't need to have broken a kneecap to set one. That is the job. The thing neither of them mentions in that office is what else they have in common. Quinn's brother Josh owes thirty thousand dollars to a loan shark called Decker, who charges twenty percent interest a week. It started as one bad bet and a decision to double down. Quinn has emptied her savings. She keeps wiring him two hundred at a time and telling herself it is the last time. Coach Kowalski, meanwhile, wants Beck off the first line and his own kid on it, and he has a colleague of Quinn's quietly logging everything she does and reporting it back. When Kowalski works out what Josh is worth as leverage, he uses it. The rule is not ambiguous. *"Therapists don't date players. If they find out—when they find out—I lose my license."* Quinn's licence is also the only thing keeping her brother out of Decker's reach. What she finally does in a Vipers medical room at 6:47 in the morning is where the book turns, and it is not the kind of turn where she gets away with it. Everything after that is Beck deciding what a comeback is actually for, and Quinn deciding what she is willing to put in writing. This is a contemporary hockey romance about a body that has stopped cooperating, a debt that belongs to somebody else, and two people whose careers are the collateral. The romance is closed-door.