A sample from
Paper Vows
The email had come in at 7:14 that morning, and by the time Isla Cameron reached the club's admin offices she had already read it four times, hunting for the sentence that would turn out to be a mistake. There wasn't one. The Home Office did not, as a rule, make the kind of mistake you could argue your way out of before nine on a Monday.
Governing Body Endorsement — status: LAPSED. Two words that unspooled an entire signing. Cole Tremblay's name sat above them like a headstone.
She stood in the little kitchenette off the main corridor and made herself a coffee she didn't want, because the ritual of it steadied her hands, and steady hands were the whole of her professional reputation. Isla Cameron did not get rattled. It was practically printed on her lanyard. Three years of dressing-room fires, contract collapses, a winger caught on a hotel CCTV he'd sworn blind he'd never been near — she'd walked through all of it with the same flat, dry calm, and the men upstairs had learned to hand her the things they didn't want their fingerprints on.
The coffee machine wheezed. Out the window, the practice rink was silver with frost, and somewhere out on the ice in the arena beyond, a Zamboni was laying down a fresh sheet for men who had valid paperwork to skate on it.
She'd vouched for Cole. That was the part she kept coming back to, the splinter under the nail. When the transfer had wobbled in the winter window — too expensive, too foreign, too much of a gamble on a body that had been broken and rebuilt — it had been Isla who'd sat in the meeting and said, in that voice that closed arguments, I've done the diligence. The endorsement's clean. Sign him. She'd staked her judgement on it. Her judgement was the only thing she owned outright.
And now the endorsement was not clean. The endorsement was a corpse, and the clock on his lawful presence was already ticking down — ten days, near enough, before he was a man the state would put on a plane.
"He's not deported yet," she told the coffee machine, and drank.
Gordon Sinclair's office had a view of the ice and a desk you could land a light aircraft on, and Gordon behind it like a man who'd been carved to match the furniture. He was reading something on his monitor when she came in, and he let her stand for a beat before he looked up, which was a thing he did, a small tax he levied on everyone.
"You've seen it," he said.
"I've seen it."
"How."
Not how did this happen — Gordon didn't waste words on the past tense. How, meaning: how does it get fixed, and how much of it lands on me.
Isla sat without being asked, because asking would have conceded something. "The endorsement was issued off the back of his international appearances. The federation reclassified two of the fixtures — friendlies, not competitive caps — retroactively, back in the spring. It kicked his points total under the threshold. Nobody flagged it because nobody was looking. The permit was already granted." She kept her voice level, a woman reading out a train timetable. "It lapsed on renewal. Automatically. There was no letter, no interview. A number in a database changed and the system did the rest."
"So it's their error."
"It's their interpretation. Which is worse. There's nothing to appeal, because on their reading of the rules, they're right." She let that sit. "He has, at the outside, ten days of lawful presence. After that he's an overstayer and we're a club that employed one. That's the exposure."
Gordon's jaw worked. He was not a stupid man, whatever the fanzines said, and she watched him do the same arithmetic she'd done in the kitchenette — the transfer fee, the wage bill, the sponsors who'd been sold a Canadian saviour, the licence that sat under all of it like foundations under a house.
"Re-file," he said. "Re-apply for the endorsement. Get the federation to reclassify the fixtures back."
"I've started both. The re-file takes weeks even if it's waved through, and the federation reclassification is a committee that meets once a month and last met a fortnight ago." She spread her hands, a small controlled gesture. "The paperwork route is right. It's also too slow. He'll be gone before either lands. I need to keep him lawfully in the country long enough for the correct fix to arrive."
"Then you get him a bridging visa, or whatever it is—"
"There isn't one. Not for this. His lawful basis was the work permit, and the work permit is the thing that's died. Once he tips into overstaying, every route gets harder, not easier, and the club's name is attached to all of it."
Gordon leaned back. The chair complained. "Then he goes home," he said, "and he comes back when the paperwork's sorted, and we take the hit on the season."
"He goes home as a refused case and the next application gets scrutinised to death. You know how it reads. Club signs foreign player, permit fails, player removed. That's not a delay, Gordon, that's a scar. On the file and on us."
"So what are you telling me you need."
And here was the edge of it — the thing she'd turned over on the drive in and hadn't yet let herself say out loud, because saying it made it real. There was exactly one lever that stopped the clock cleanly and legally: a change of immigration status that didn't depend on the dead permit at all. There was exactly one way to get it inside ten days.
She didn't say it. She'd learned, painfully, over three years, that you never handed Gordon Sinclair a problem and its solution in the same breath, because he'd sign off on neither and blame you for both.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.