“My phone rang. It was my agent. I ducked into a quiet room, half-drunk, thinking I was headed to Los Angeles, Florida, maybe Boston. Those were the teams we had heard whispers about,” the book says. 

“Edmonton,” he said.

Edmonton? Nobody mentioned f—ing Edmonton.

On our way home, Lauren and I stopped at a bookstore. She asked the clerk, “Do you have any books about Edmonton?”

The woman looked at her like she’d asked for books about the North Pole. “Why would anyone want to go there?”

“Five years,” I told her the next morning.

The silence that followed was louder than any arena crowd.

“You made a five-year commitment about our lives without talking to me? While you were drunk?”

No excuses. That was my standard. So I owned it.

He says that’s where the narrative and the rumours were wrong, that Lauren didn’t hate Canada, but that Pronger had made the decision without talking with his wife.

Do you understand what that’s like? Suiting up every night for fans who love you, teammates who trust you, knowing you’re going to break their hearts? But I’d already broken a more important trust. I’d chosen my career over my family once. I wasn’t doing it again.

After we lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final in Carolina on June 19, 2006, the news broke almost immediately. I flew home the next morning and had our rental furniture picked up. Then I left the following day. Rumors spread — can’t be that he screwed up. Can’t be that he made a bad decision. Must be his American wife.

None of the rumors were accurate. The truth was: I’d made a promise to my wife, broken it and spent a year trying to make it right.