The Coach's Bargain

Fourteen hundred people in an old building, one playoff game, and about two seconds between a bad pass and the rest of somebody's life. A puck. Scuffed black rubber on white ice, tracing a lazy arc toward the corner boards. Declan O'Rourke tracks it the way he tracks everything, with a predator's patience, waiting for the gap. The arena roars around him. Boots stomping aluminium bleachers, breath fogging above the glass. Playoff hockey in a northern town means spring still clinging to winter's coat and ice that has gone soft and rutted and treacherous, which suits a team that plays mean. *O'Rourke! Cycle it!* He hears it, but his eyes are already past the puck and onto Finn on the far wing. His brother taps his stick once, twice, eager, almost frantic, and Declan feeds him the pass. Finn takes it in stride, because that is his gift: a hummingbird on blades, all lean acceleration and sudden shifts. Declan sees the hit coming before Finn does. Everything in this book proceeds from that half-second, and from the decision Declan makes about what to write down afterwards. Alex arrives as the person responsible for making sure that decision was recorded correctly, in a shared office with two desks and no door, which is the worst possible place to conduct a disagreement and the only place either of them is honest. What follows: a seat neither man feels he earned, a headache that will not be ignored, a stand taken in a boardroom, a phone call somebody refuses to make, the truth sitting between two lines of a report, and a leak nobody can plug. *I messed up. I lied. I blocked your baseline updates and kept you on the ice when I should've sat you.* *It's not fair.* *But nothing worth doing ever is.* Declan has to decide whether the brother he has protected since they were children is worth the career, the room and the man he has only just admitted he wants.