On the Fourth Line

Callum MacBride buys himself another shift the only way he still can: hip drop, shoulder through the logo, a rookie's skates leaving the ice. *Preseason game three. Roster cuts coming in forty-eight hours.* The crowd loves it. His coach dips his chin a fraction of an inch. Nobody in the building is under any illusion about what that hit was for. He is thirty-four, on a one-year deal worth nine hundred thousand, and the arithmetic does not work the way people assume. His mother, Margaret, who drove him to five in the morning practices and never once complained about the cold, now sits in a recliner at Lakeshore Care watching shadows move on a wall. The bill arrives on the first of every month. Then his agent texts. *They hired someone new. Sports psych. Name's Juliette Brennan. She's got a history.* Juliette does have a history. She was the clinical director at the Highmark Center in Buffalo until a client had a public breakdown and blamed her methods. The suit settled, the reputation did not recover, and a small Ontario club was the only place that would hire her. She walks into the Titans' room knowing exactly how thin the ice is. *The one that gets me fired. The one that proves everyone right about me.* Which makes Callum the one player she cannot afford. He needs her, because the fear has started arriving before the puck does. She needs the job, and he is on her list. And Felix Kowalski is twenty-two and faster, and Callum recognises the grip on his stick because he wore it himself at that age: *I want what you have and I'll take it and there's nothing you can do to stop me.* Maddie Hart of the Port Rainier Chronicle keeps turning up with a notebook and a question nobody wants. And somewhere underneath all of it sits a debt that belongs to a man who is supposed to be protecting both of them. By the time it surfaces, somebody has been paid to lie about Juliette, and the price of proving it is the career Callum has been clinging to by his fingernails. A closed-door hockey romance about ageing out of the only thing you were ever good at, about a therapist who cannot afford to care, and about what it means when a man comes off the ice, skates to the glass, and points.