The Center's Obsession

*"I said no doctors!"* Declan Roth's voice bounces off the concrete walls of the Vipers' practice rink, loud enough to stop the Zamboni driver mid-lap. Caroline Vance has already diagnosed him from thirty feet away. *"You came down wrong on that back-check in the final drill. Left knee, inside rotation, non-contact. I saw it from the tunnel."* She gives him her name and her title — assistant athletic trainer — and watches the surname land. *"Great. Another Vance who doesn't know when to stop."* Her father was the Vipers' team physician for twelve years before the investigation came down. The charges were prescription fraud and self-referrals to a clinic he owned. In Cascade City nobody has forgotten, and Caroline has spent every shift since being read as his daughter first and a clinician second. Declan has his own inheritance, worn on a chain: a small silver key with an engraved F, given to him by his father on his eighteenth birthday, the day before the aneurysm took him. *Take care of your brother.* His brother Finn is still collecting on that instruction. A thousand one day. Two grand the next. Gambling debt, and a man who will do almost anything to clear it. Renata Garcia wants the head trainer's office and has done the arithmetic. She has the inside track, she tells Caroline, and offers a piece of advice about not romancing the patients. Then she starts building the case: a whisper about fraternization, a blogger who has run hit pieces on the Vipers' training staff before, equipment that never showed up in inventory, and Finn's debt as the lever. What Caroline has is a swollen medial line, a player who will not sit, and evidence she can only use by putting her own name in the middle of it. What Declan has is a habit of standing between people he loves and anything coming for them, which in a locker room is called leadership and in Caroline's case reads as exactly the thing Renata says it is. This is a contemporary hockey romance about an athlete hiding a knee, a trainer hiding a surname, and the question of whether either of them can be believed once the story has already been written for them.