Sin Bin Sweetheart

The press box smells like stale coffee and the ghost of a thousand hot dogs, and the plexiglass is still streaked from last night's rain. Megan Korver is up here for atmosphere. What she is actually doing is finishing three hundred words on Harold Blevins, retired mail carrier and volunteer fire chief, survived by his wife of forty-two years, two daughters, and a golden retriever named Duke. Then the arena explodes, and she does not have to look at the ice to know what that particular sound means. Her editor comes through the door to tell her the hockey beat she has wanted since June is going to Jenna, who has six months more seniority and turned up with a three-page pitch document and graphics. What he hands her instead is a profile. DeShawn Rourke, number seventeen, six-foot-three, the Thunderhawks' designated tough guy, the man who leads the league in fights and has turned this paper down three times. He will say yes now, because his ex-wife wants to take their daughter to Portland and his agent has explained what a newspaper profile looks like to a family court judge. *The story is: can a guy whose job is violence be a good dad?* Megan takes it. On her way out she checks her phone: three texts from her mother, one from Carter, and one from hospital billing. *Your account balance of $12,843.00 is now 60 days past due.* Her brother is seventeen. He was born with tetralogy of Fallot, his heart is failing, and the surgery he needs is in six weeks and costs money nobody in her family has. What she does not know yet is why DeShawn will not talk to reporters. A writer once turned an interview into a front page reading *Rourke admits he's unfit to be a father*, and his ex's lawyer entered it into evidence, and he lost every other weekend for six months and had to fight his way back to supervised visitation. His daughter Zoe is five. Curly dark hair, a stuffed otter named Ollie with a matching Thunderhawks scarf, and firm views on the fact that her father puts pickles in his grilled cheese. The two of them strike a bargain neither will say out loud. Then a recorder goes missing from Megan's apartment, and a voicemail turns up on her brother's phone, and DeShawn gets an offer that would pay for a heart valve and cost him his daughter. A contemporary hockey romance about an enforcer in a custody fight and the obituary writer assigned to make him look human. The romance is closed-door.