The Centerman's Redemption, livre ebook

Riley Novak wants him to know whose man scored the winner. Declan already knows. What he does not need is the kid in the next stall saying it out loud, and then adding that he is only here on parole.
He puts Novak into the lockers before he has decided to. Henri Bouchard opens the office door and does not say anything for a long moment, which is worse than shouting.
Declan Kostiuk was a captain once. He lost the C. There is a file on him in his coach's office with medical reports, penalty summaries and witness statements, and everyone in the building has a name for the thing that put it there. The hit. The suspension. The choke job.
He was eighteen when it happened. He has been trying to live with it for ten years, and what he dreams about is not the hit. It is the silence afterwards, fifteen thousand people making no sound at all.
Margot Bouchard is the head athletic therapist and she is the coach's daughter, and Declan has managed to avoid her for three months. That ends in a treatment room with a bottle of saline and a pair of blue nitrile gloves. She has read the file. She tells him so. She also tells him: *"I don't care what they call it. I care about what's true."*
She does not let him off anything. She corrects her own father about a benching. She tells Declan she knows something and then refuses to tell him what.
What comes out of that file eventually is not only about Declan. There is a note in it from Riley to Henri, there are statistics that were never innocent, and there is a betting ring, and a league hearing that will require both a coach and his daughter to sit in a room and answer questions.
And there is the moment Margot's hands start shaking when she says the word father, and Declan swallows everything he was about to say about what Henri did to him.
A sports romance about a hockey player carrying a decade-old injury that was never his own, the therapist who refuses to treat him as a case file, and a father-and-daughter fracture nobody escapes cleanly. Closed-door, ending with a crooked C sewn on by hand and left uncorrected.