Off the Record

Chapter One

Tessa Brantley sometimes blamed her love of romantic comedies for the career she'd chosen.

Growing up, journalism had looked glamorous.

Women in impossibly chic coats sprinted through Manhattan with coffee in one hand and a notebook in the other, chasing stories that somehow always led to love.

Their apartments were beautiful despite salaries that couldn't possibly have paid for them, their hair remained perfect through every deadline and their editors always seemed willing to give them weeks to complete assignments of questionable news value.

Tessa had believed every minute of it.

Real journalism hadn't worked out that way.

At twenty-six, Tessa spent more nights eating microwave dinners over her laptop than she did sleeping.

Her apartment looked less like a home than a satellite newsroom, littered with notepads, media guides, charging cords and half-empty coffee mugs she'd stopped noticing days ago.

She hadn't been on a date in almost a year.

Her closest relationships were with the overnight copy editor and the woman at Tim Hortons who started making her coffee as soon as she saw Tessa pull into the drive-through.

None of that bothered her.

Mostly.

She could deal with the empty apartment, the terrible diet and the fact that she had no idea what people her age did on weekends when they weren't sitting in cold arenas.

This was what she'd wanted. Maybe not the microwave dinners or the midnight arguments over comma placement, but the work itself.

The chance to tell stories that mattered to someone.

And today wasn't about the distance between the journalism she'd imagined and the journalism she'd found.

Today was the first day of NHL training camp.

Her first day covering the Halifax Convoy.

Tessa tightened her ponytail in the rearview mirror, then glanced toward the credential lying on the passenger seat.

She had been issued plenty of credentials over the years, most of them cheaply laminated cards attached to lanyards bearing the logos of local banks or car dealerships.

This one looked no different, but she'd already picked it up and studied it at least six times since leaving her apartment.

Tessa BrantleyHalifax Tribune

It still didn't feel real.

Three months earlier, she'd been balancing two jobs at the newspaper, covering local junior hockey during the season while working as a copy editor the rest of the year.

She'd spent her evenings interviewing teenagers who still had homework waiting for them when they got home, then returned to the newsroom and corrected mistakes in stories that carried someone else's name.

It wasn't glamorous, but it was steady. She understood it. She knew where she belonged.

Then Frank Donnelly retired.

Frank had covered the Convoy for thirty-nine years, long enough that his byline had become nearly as synonymous with professional hockey in Halifax as the team itself.

He had covered their first playoff appearance, their only championship and every disastrous season in between.

Players who had retired before Tessa finished elementary school still returned his calls.

Fans referred to him by his first name as though he were a relative who joined them for dinner several nights a week.

The assumption around the newsroom had been that the Tribune would replace him with someone established. Someone who had already spent years covering a major professional team. Someone who could slide into Frank's chair without making the paper's readers wonder whether management had lost its mind.

Instead, somehow, the editors had chosen Tessa.

She'd spent the entire summer trying to convince herself it wasn't a mistake.

Every game story she'd written had led to this.

Every feature on a sixteen-year-old prospect who suddenly couldn't stop scoring.

Every night spent fixing commas in someone else's copy after filing her own story from a junior rink two hours away.

She had taken every assignment they'd given her, worked every weekend nobody else wanted and stayed late often enough that the cleaning staff knew which desk lamp to leave on.

She had earned this.

Tessa repeated those words to herself as she guided her car into the Atlantic Centre parking garage. They didn't sound any more convincing than they had the day her editor called her into her office and offered her the job.

The garage was already filling with television vans and cars sporting media parking passes.

A local station's reporter stood beside a live truck, fixing her hair in the dark reflection of its windows while a camera operator unloaded equipment behind her.

Two men Tessa recognized from radio crossed toward the entrance carrying coffees and arguing about whether the Convoy had done enough to address their power play.

She killed the engine but didn't immediately move. Her fingers remained curled around the steering wheel while she watched people disappear through the doors ahead of her with the casual confidence of those who had done it hundreds of times before.

This was different.

Junior hockey had been familiar. Comfortable, even.

She knew the coaches, the public relations staff and most of the parents.

She knew which players would give thoughtful answers and which ones would disappear before reporters could even zip up their equipment bags.

When she walked into those rinks, people knew her name. Nobody wondered why she was there.

The NHL was another world.

These were players she'd watched on television growing up.

Players with million-dollar contracts and endorsement deals.

Players who'd spent years learning exactly how to answer a question without saying anything remotely interesting.

Their names generated thousands of comments online every night, and one poorly worded sentence could become a headline across the country before they made it home from the rink.

Now it was her job to ask them those questions.

Tessa drew in a slow breath, grabbed her recorder and slung her backpack over one shoulder. She looped the credential around her neck, checked for her notebook even though she knew she'd packed it and stepped out of the car before she could give herself another reason to stay there.

The lobby buzzed with the unmistakable energy of the first day of camp.

Equipment staff wheeled carts overflowing with sticks.

Television crews had already begun staking out positions, discussing camera angles while producers checked schedules on their phones.

Nobody appeared lost. Nobody stood in the middle of the lobby wondering where to go next.

Tessa smiled despite herself.

This was where she wanted to be.

“Brantley.”

She turned toward the familiar voice and found Rick Calloway from the local sports talk radio station balancing two coffees in one hand and a microphone in the other.

Rick had covered the Convoy longer than Tessa had been alive, and he carried himself through Atlantic Centre with the ease of someone who probably knew which locked doors opened if you pulled hard enough.

“Morning,” she said.

“So you're really doing this?”

“I think so.”

Rick grinned as he fell into step beside her. “They finally gave you Frank's seat upstairs?”

“They did.”

“Poor kid.”

Tessa laughed, though her stomach tightened at the mention of Frank. “That's encouraging.”

“I'm serious.” Rick nodded toward the media elevator and pressed the call button with his elbow. “Frank was here almost forty years. Half the people in this building still think he's coming back after vacation.”

“I've noticed.”

During the summer, nearly every conversation about her promotion had somehow become a conversation about Frank.

People told her which stories he'd covered, which players trusted him and which routines he'd followed.

Several season-ticket holders had emailed to explain what they expected from the Tribune's new beat reporter, as though Tessa had inherited not only his job but a contract with every reader in Halifax.

Rick took a sip of coffee. “You'll be fine.”

She looked at him, waiting for the joke.

He paused before adding, “Just don't try to be Frank.”

It was the first genuinely reassuring thing anyone had said to her in weeks.

“Thanks.”

The elevator doors opened, and they rode to the press level with two television camera operators and a team employee wearing a headset. When the doors opened again, Tessa followed Rick into the media workroom overlooking the ice.

Several reporters were already unpacking laptops at the same seats they'd probably occupied for years.

The morning sports shows played silently on televisions mounted along the walls, captions scrolling beneath highlights from the night before.

Conversations drifted around the room about summer travel, roster battles and an assistant coach's decision to change the makeup of the penalty-killing units.

Tessa recognized nearly every face from watching scrums online or passing them in junior rinks around Nova Scotia.

A few looked up long enough to offer polite nods.

Others continued working, not because they were being unfriendly but because her first day wasn't particularly significant to anyone besides her.

She found the desk marked by a small paper placard that read HALIFAX TRIBUNE and lowered her backpack to the floor.

Frank Donnelly's old seat.

For a moment, she simply stared at it. There was nothing remarkable about the desk itself, and the chair looked exactly like every other chair in the room. Still, taking the seat felt strangely ceremonial, like someone had handed her the keys to a house she wasn't sure she deserved to live in.

“Coffee?”

Tessa looked up to find Linda O'Rourke from the Halifax Chronicle holding out a cardboard tray. She had covered the team for nearly a decade and was one of the few people in the room Tessa had spoken to more than once before that morning.

“I grabbed extras,” Linda said.

“Oh. Thank you.”

She accepted the cup, grateful to have something to do with her hands. Linda slid into the seat across the aisle and began removing a laptop from her bag.

“Don't worry,” she said.

Tessa took a cautious sip. “Worry about what?”

“Everybody's terrified on their first day.”

“I wasn't aware it was that obvious.”

Linda laughed as she opened her computer. “It isn't.”

She glanced at Tessa over the top of the screen.

“It was.”

Tessa smiled and settled into her chair, then pulled out the notebook she'd spent much of the previous night preparing. At the top of a fresh page, she had already written the working headline she'd come up with sometime around midnight.

Can Matvei Belov bounce back?

The numbers said he should.

After four straight seasons as one of the league's most reliable goaltenders, Belov had stumbled the year before.

His save percentage had dipped below .900 for the first time in his NHL career.

He'd lost the starting job for a stretch in January, and when he'd returned to the crease, he hadn't looked much more secure than he had before being benched.

Fans questioned whether he'd ever fully recovered from the knee injury he'd suffered the previous spring or whether the problem had become something more permanent.

Belov had spent the offseason back in Russia, reportedly working with the same goalie coach who'd helped him develop into the sixth overall pick nearly a decade earlier.

Beyond that, there wasn't much to work with.

He hadn't given any substantial interviews over the summer, and the handful of quotes she found from team-produced videos were so brief they barely qualified as answers.

Tessa had read every one anyway.

If there was one player everyone in Halifax would be watching when camp opened, it was Matvei Belov.

He had been the backbone of the Convoy for years, the type of goaltender who could carry them through stretches when the rest of the roster wasn't playing particularly well.

Last season had changed the way people talked about him.

The questions were no longer about whether he could steal a playoff series.

They were about whether the team could still trust him to start one.

If Belov looked like himself again, Tessa wanted to be the first person to tell that story.

It was a straightforward training camp feature. A star player coming off a difficult season, returning healthy and determined to prove the previous year had been an exception. She had covered enough versions of it in junior hockey to know the basic shape.

A Convoy media relations staffer stepped into the workroom and raised his voice above the scattered conversations.

“Morning, everybody. Players will be available in about fifteen.”

Chairs shifted as reporters checked recorders and began collecting notebooks.

Tessa glanced through her notes one final time.

She had prepared half a dozen possible questions for Belov, each one carefully worded to avoid sounding accusatory or repetitive.

Nothing controversial, nothing designed solely to produce a headline.

She wanted to ask what he'd worked on during the summer, what had felt different since returning to Halifax and whether he believed the knee had affected his mechanics more than he'd admitted during the previous season.

Enough to get him talking about where his game had been and where he hoped it was going.

It should have been the easiest interview of the morning.