Sin Bin Nights

Margot stops halfway down the tunnel at Harbour City Arena, her massage table bag digging into her shoulder, and watches her brother push himself up off the practice ice. Brody's glove is off. His middle finger will not bend all the way. From the bench, Coach Dom is delighted. *"Nice hit, rookie! That's how we play in Harbour City. Hard."* Margot is the Wolves' massage therapist. She is also Brody Delacroix's sister, which means she is the only person in the building who can see him favouring that hand on his shots and the only one who is going to say so. The team doctor, Nadia Petrov, already knows how this argument ends: the boys' father played through a broken wrist in the playoffs and did not tell anybody until game seven. Their father is dead. CTE, painkillers, the whole package. Standing at the face-off circle through all of this is Cal MacTavish, six-three, thirty-four, with a nose that healed crooked after somebody's visor opened it, and a stillness that makes him seem older than he is. He has been on this roster for three years and Margot has never once held his eye longer than a beat. Then Brody repeats something their father used to say about a retired player who changed his name as a kid, and the pieces go together in Margot's hands like a lock she has been picking for three years. Cal MacTavish used to be Mike Kowalski. There is an article with the headline *Kowalski Suspended After Fatal Fight*, and her father kept a clipping of it in a manila envelope marked *Confidential*, and he never said a word about it to anyone for seventeen years. Somebody, around the same time, puts three unlabelled amber vials and a sealed syringe into Margot's kit bag, tucked among her lotions and a spare set of scrubs, and the compound inside is clear and oily and does not dissolve in water. *"It looks like I'm running the same program I tried to shut down."* Tessa in public relations has her own arithmetic. A player who killed somebody, changed his name and lied to the organisation for two decades is not a second-chance story, he is a liability, and she says so out loud. What Margot has to decide is whether to take what she knows to a league investigator, and what it costs a man with a six-year-old son to sit in a room and finally say all of it. A hockey romance about a therapist who will not sign off on an injury, a coach running something he should not be running, and a man who has spent seventeen years being someone else. The romance is closed-door.