*The headlights caught the deer too late.*
Jack Hutton used to be a defenseman. Now he is standing alone on the ice of an old arena at 6:47 in the morning, in a town of twelve hundred people, his right knee complaining in the specific way it has since the surgery, coaching a Single-A minor league team and trying to remember why he said yes.
Gloria Vance built the Wolves out of scrap, and she is not going to be gentle about why he is here.
*You came here because nobody else would hire you.*
She has read the reports from his last three assistant jobs. The fight, the suspension, the screaming match with a general manager. She has also handed the head job to him over the assistant who has been here four years and applied for it herself, and on his first morning Rosa Flores contradicts his system in front of the whole room. She is not wrong about the roster, either.
That part Jack can survive.
The part he cannot is nine years old, wears her mother's old Wolves hat pulled low, and has been in another fight at school. Chloe's aunt wants her back in Duluth for good, and the custody hearing is set for February, and the file says her father was absent for approximately eighteen months following her mother's death.
Lena Kovac is the sports psychologist attached to the Wolves, and she takes school referrals as well. She reads that line in the intake folder before Chloe ever walks through the door.
*I'm Lena. You can call me that if you want.*
She is not supposed to feel anything for the father of the child she is assessing. What happens next she starts, and then she ends, and neither decision makes it stop.
And Dieter Lange, the bookie who used to cover Jack's bets, has started making contact again. He has the records. He knows what Jack was doing with his money and his nights, he knows about the drinking, and there is a man who has spent six months trying to buy this hockey team and would be very glad of the leverage.
A small-town hockey romance out of the Iron Range, with a coach six months sober, an assistant coach with every reason to resent him, a nine-year-old who fights because nobody has told her the truth, and a psychologist who can see exactly which professional line she is standing on. The romance is closed-door.
