Romance

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Sports RomanceBy Quinn Mercer

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Length7h 51m

About this audiobook

Lena Martel watches the Brookhaven Bears run their first practice of the season with her breath fogging the cold glass. She counts nineteen players on the ice. *Nineteen bodies in padded armor, gliding and cutting and colliding like they were made of something indestructible. Like hearts didn't just stop.* She is the team's new sports psychologist, on a short contract, in an office with a dented filing cabinet and a door marked for visiting staff. The trainer offers her the truth instead of the pep talk. Derek Slade wants the captaincy and will push until she flinches. Jasper Kane will be polite and cooperative and give her exactly nothing. Gordie Harlow will pretend he does not need her while watching every move she makes. The captain wears forty-seven. He is broad-shouldered with a scar above his left eyebrow, and he stands at the edge of the circle at center ice with his body angled toward the bench, toward the exit, like he is always ready to leave. He carries his sister, the trainer says, *like she's made of glass and he's the only one who can keep her from shattering.* He never talks about it. Lena knows that posture. She once had a player smile and tell her he was fine and then drop dead on the blue line eighteen minutes later. The autopsy found an undiagnosed heart condition. The investigation found nothing she could have prevented. The guilt arrived anyway, and everyone in the building is waiting to see whether it breaks her. Then a torn scrap of notebook paper turns up on the locker room floor, creased from being folded and unfolded, a phone number in blue ink and a name. Cedar Hills Treatment Center. *Compassionate Care for Chronic Conditions.* Lena drives past it, looks it up, and types out her suspicions in a document she saves as evidence of a sort, and then has to decide what a clinician is permitted to do with a private guess about a patient's family. And then, in front of the whole room, Derek Slade holds up a folded cream-colored slip and says the captain has been throwing games. Two hundred against the Bears on the Portland game, found in Jasper's bag. Gordie reads the paper like a death certificate and tells Jasper privately that the paper is wrong, the ink is wrong, and the handwriting is sloppy, like someone used their off hand. It does not matter what it is. It matters what it looks like, and the league's policy is that any gambling accusation gets an automatic review. One young player on that roster saw exactly what happened after the Portland game, and has said nothing. This is a contemporary hockey romance about a professional duty of care that stops being professional, a forged piece of paper, and a promise made to a dying girl. The heat is closed-door.

Psychological Grief Family Healing Identity Protective Hero Memory