CHAPTER 1: TAPE JOB

The scoreboard flickers when I hit the ice.

Not the whole thing — just the away team's side, the bottom two digits sputtering like they're trying to remember what numbers are. It's been doing this since August. Donnie put in a work order. The work order is still sitting on Donnie's desk under a coffee mug and what I'm pretty sure is a petrified bagel.

I don't care about the scoreboard. I care about the ice.

It's 5:47 AM and the Allegheny Ice Center is mine. The overhead lights are off — just the emergency strips along the boards casting everything in this gray half-dark that makes the rink feel like the inside of a snow globe somebody forgot to shake. My skates cut the fresh sheet and the sound is the only good thing that's happened to me in four months.

Left crossover. Right crossover. Figure eight around the circles.

I push harder on the left side and wait for it — the pull in my collarbone, the hot wire that ran from my shoulder to my sternum all summer. It was a clean break. Six weeks in a sling, eight weeks of rehab, four weeks of skating alone before training camp. The bone healed. The fear didn't.

No pull today. Just the memory of one.

Good enough.

I run the drill again. Crossovers, transitions, pivot at center ice, backward skating to the blue line. My edges are fine. My edges have always been fine. Defensemen live on their edges — it's the first thing my father ever taught me about hockey, and it's one of the three things he taught me that turned out to be true.

The other two: always tape your stick the same way before every game, and nobody is going to hand you anything.

He was right about those, at least.

I finish the drill set and coast to the bench. My water bottle is where I left it, next to my phone and a roll of white tape. I pick up the tape and start working it over the blade of my backup stick — heel to toe, overlapping, the same pattern I've used since I was fourteen. Some guys tape toe to heel. Some guys use black tape. Some guys don't tape at all, which is anarchy, and I don't trust them.

The tape job takes four minutes. I could do it in two, but I don't rush it. The rhythm is the point — the slow, deliberate layering of something functional over something that needs protection. It's the closest thing I have to meditation.

From the locker room, I can hear the click of nails on concrete.

Biscuit appears at the end of the tunnel, all sixty-five pounds of golden retriever, tail going like a metronome set to way too fast. He stops at the rubber mat where the ice meets the hallway and sits down, because he's smart enough to know ice is not his surface. He is not, however, smart enough to stop trying to eat my tape.

"Morning, bud."

He wags harder. His whole back end moves with it.

I skate over and scratch behind his ears. He leans into it, eyes closed, like this is the single greatest moment of his life. It was also the single greatest moment of his life yesterday, and the day before that, and every day since I found him in a Walmart parking lot two years ago with no collar and a limp he's since outgrown.

Biscuit is a simple guy. He wants three things: food, ear scratches, and to be wherever I am.

I respect the clarity.

* * *

My apartment is four blocks from the arena, in a building the guys call the Penalty Box because three of us live there and the rent is cheap enough to confirm that someone, at some point, made a terrible real estate decision. It's a one-bedroom. Clean. Sparse. Biscuit's bed takes up most of the living room because I got the large and didn't measure. There's a couch I bought at a thrift store, a TV I never turn on, and a kitchen where I make eggs and coffee and exactly nothing else.

One framed photo on the nightstand. My mom, Linda, at a lake in Minnesota. She's laughing at something outside the frame. My dad probably took the photo, but I've edited him out of the memory. I'm good at that.

I shower, dress — jeans, gray henley, boots — and make eggs the way I always make them. Scrambled. Salt. Nothing else. I eat standing at the counter because sitting down to eat alone at a table feels like a statement I'm not prepared to make.

Biscuit sits at my feet, staring upward with the focused intensity of a being who has wagered his entire emotional portfolio on the possibility that I might drop something. I don't drop anything. He sighs. It's very dramatic.

I drive back to the rink with him riding shotgun, his head out the window even though it's October in Pennsylvania and the air is cold enough to make my eyes water. The town slides past — Bridge Street with its two-story brick buildings and the diner on the corner, the gas station where the attendant knows my name but calls me "Captain" anyway, the hardware store with the permanent SALE sign that's been in the window since before I moved here. Millhaven, Pennsylvania. Population eighteen thousand and change. Home of the Northside Rebels. Home of Beckett Cole.

Home is a strong word. I live here. That's different.

* * *

Coach Hank is behind his desk, which is also the equipment manager's desk, which is also the video coordinator's desk, because the Allegheny Ice Center does not believe in the luxury of separate rooms. He's got his reading glasses on and he's looking at a lineup card like it owes him money.

"Cole."

"Coach."

"How's the shoulder?"

"Fine."

"You're a terrible liar."

"It's fine enough."

He looks at me over his glasses. Hank has this way of looking at people that makes you feel like he's reading your medical chart and your diary at the same time.

"Front office hired a PT," he says. "Part-time. Some woman from Philly. She's starting today."

I take a sip of my water. "We have a PT."

"We have Dr. Morrison, who is seventy-one and told me last week that he doesn't believe in foam rollers."

"What's wrong with Dr. Morrison?"

"Aside from the fact that he called a hamstring a 'leg tendon' in front of three rookies? Nothing. He's a treasure." Hank puts down the lineup card. "Look. The front office is trying. Pauline is trying. The team needs help, and Morrison is — Morrison is great for team physicals and telling guys to walk it off, but we need someone who can actually design rehab programs and keep players healthy for more than six consecutive games."

I don't say anything. I don't need a new PT. My shoulder is fine. I've been managing my own recovery since July — ice, stretches, the resistance band protocol I pulled from a YouTube video that had fourteen views. It's fine. I'm fine.

"She'll want to assess you first," Hank says. "You're the captain. Set the tone."

"I always set the tone."

"Set a cooperative tone, Beckett. Not the tone where you answer every question with one word and everyone's afraid to make eye contact."

"That's just my face."

"I know. That's the problem."

I leave his office. In the hallway, I pass the team photo from last season — twenty-two guys in Rebels jerseys, most of them smiling, a few of them already traded or released. I'm in the back row, center, because I'm the captain and that's where the captain stands. My face in the photo looks exactly like my face right now: serious, watchful, carrying something I don't know how to put down.

We finished last in the division. Twenty-two wins, forty-two losses, eight overtime losses. The worst record in franchise history.

This season is supposed to be different.

Through the lobby windows, I see a car pulling into the lot. It's early. Way too early for any of the guys.

The car is a blue Honda with the windows down despite the October air, and even from the hallway I can hear music. Something upbeat and terrible. Pop, maybe. The kind of music that sounds like it was manufactured in a lab by people who have never experienced sadness.

The engine cuts off. The music stops. The door opens.

A woman gets out.

She's talking to herself. I can see her mouth moving — animated, emphatic, like she's in the middle of a conversation with someone who isn't there. She's got a bag over one shoulder roughly the size of a suitcase, a clipboard in her hand, and she's looking up at the building like she's evaluating it for structural soundness, which, given the state of things, is a reasonable concern.

She walks toward the entrance. She moves with the easy physicality of someone who lives in her body — not performing it, just comfortable. Her hair is dark and curly and pulled up, and even from forty feet away through a window I can tell that she is the kind of person who enters a room and changes the temperature.

I realize I'm standing in the hallway watching a stranger approach the building like some kind of security camera with a pulse.

I turn around and head back to the ice.

Behind me, I hear the front door open. I hear the click of shoes on concrete. I hear a voice — warm, bright, entirely too much energy for six-thirty in the morning — say to no one in particular:

"Okay, Harper. Let's save some shoulders."

I don't look back.

I absolutely do not look back.

I look back.