The Centerman's Weakness

An expansion team's rink is a building with no history in it. No banners, no ghosts, no tradition to hide behind. Everything that happens there is on the record from the first whistle, which is exactly the wrong environment for a man carrying what he is carrying. Four months since he last stood on that other ice, and the Zamboni fumes still smell like home. Cormac drags a glove across the fresh sheet and feels the cold bite through the leather. His rink now, supposedly. Twenty-four years old, first-line centre for a team that has never seen a playoff game, and he feels like a kid sneaking onto a pond after curfew. The stands are empty except for the usual scouts, a few reporters, and one person he refuses to look at. Maren Halvorsen sits in the press box with her laptop open and her blonde hair pulled back tight enough to stretch her scalp. She has been in the building since half past five. He knows because Leo texted him a photograph of her car in the lot, captioned *she's already watching tape of us stretching*. He pushes off the boards and circles toward centre ice, edges biting. The new practice jerseys are still stiff. He has worn the same number since juniors. Twenty-one. His father's number. What follows: a door he swore he would never open, a rule set in blood, a debt he cannot repay, a name he has now buried twice, the hardest thing he has ever done, the lie he keeps telling himself, ice that burns, and a promise he should not have made in the first place. Four months. One rule. Twenty-one on the back of the jersey. *We've got one night before the madness.* *One night. Make it count.* She lets herself feel the whole weight of it: the day, the choice she made, the cost of trusting a man who lied to her. Then she picks up the phone and dials.