The Goalie's Weakness

Two for the hip. One for luck. He dry-swallows all three before anybody else is in the room, and then he twists the cap back on and puts the bottle in the side pocket of the duffel where it lives. Quarter to eight, and the locker room smells like three things: wintergreen rub, old sweat, and the particular hope that comes with a new season. Declan Tanner sits on the bench in front of his stall with the number thirty-one staring back at him from the jersey on the hook. Rookie year he believed in luck. Year six, he believes in ibuprofen and ice baths and the quiet arithmetic of how many games a body has left in it. He did that arithmetic last night, lying awake while the ceiling fan clicked. Forty-two games at full capacity if he manages the inflammation. Thirty if he does not. The season is eighty-two games long. The maths does not work, which is why the rest of this book happens. Roz arrives in a role nobody in the organisation has explained properly, with access to files he assumed nobody read and a habit of asking the second question rather than the first. What follows: the lie he has built his life on, a wall he built around himself and forgot the door to, a door he swore he would never open, the cost of knowing, the weight of a mask, a crack in a mirror, an enemy of an enemy, and the exact shape of a lie once you take it out and look at it. *I've been playing hurt for longer than I should have. I lied on injury reports. I lied to my coach. I lied to my teammates.* *I'm not trying to fix you any more.* *I know.* He will sign the honest report himself. He will sit out the games and take the demotion and say it out loud to a room that will hate him for it. And the first person who comes after her for having the file is going to find out how little of the composure was ever real.