Off the Rink and Into My Heart

*Forty minutes late, Forrester. I don't care if your alarm clock melted.* Paige Delaney's first day as PR director of the Thunderbirds is going exactly as badly as she feared. Her coffee went cold an hour ago, the owner is due in twelve minutes, and the man who holds the franchise's future in his scuffed-up skates has not turned up for media day. When Reid Forrester finally bangs through the door he is six-four, maybe six-five, scowling, and smelling like a perfume counter threw up on him. Up close his eyes are tired and rimmed with red. He does not offer his hand. He tells her he does not do lifestyle shots, that his contract says he does not hold sticks for photos. Paige points out that the shot list was approved by Henrik Johansson and Gerald Whitmore, and that his captain should not have to explain to the media why the franchise player can't hold a stick for thirty seconds. Then she gets the only usable headshot of the morning by telling the photographer, loudly, that they'll use it for the Wanted posters. That's the job. What is not the job is her aunt Gwen, silver braid, tomato in each hand in the photo taped to Paige's monitor, now stage four pancreatic cancer in the city Paige has been avoiding. Or the silver scar on Paige's cheek from falling on the ice when she was ten, and the promise Gwen made her make about never stepping on a frozen lake again. And it is definitely not the job to work out why Reid plays angry. A girl in a hospital playroom asks him straight out. He doesn't answer her. He answers Paige months later, in the dark, about a brother called Tate who scored one goal on a slapshot from the blue line, took a clean hit in the third period, skated to the bench, sat down, and died of a cardiac event nobody had ever caught. Reid wears seventeen. One more than Tate's. Then there is a photograph Paige never authorized, a colleague who got into her phone, and a reporter who already has the uncropped version. A hockey romance about grief, a PR director with rules she keeps breaking, and a winger learning that hitting people is not the only way to prove he is still here. It ends at a kitchen table with poutine, and it is closed-door.