Page 139 of Power Play

Cole: I would like it noted that I never doubted us

Kasperi: You cried in February

Cole: That was allergies

Kasperi: We were in Nashville. You have no allergies in Nashville. You told me this is why you like Nashville

Theo: On a gagné. Maintenant le vrai travail.

Theo was telling them they’d won, and now the real work started.

Cole added Eli to the group.

Cole: Eli you left the chat again. During a historic franchise moment

Eli: I was driving

Cole: You leave every single day. I re-add you every single day. At this point it is the most stable relationship I have

Kasperi: Who is picking the restaurant?

Griffin: Not a steakhouse

Kasperi: It is always a steakhouse

I read them on Eli’s phone from the passenger seat with Iris narrating the win to Gerald in the back and Eli’s hands easy on the wheel. The one reply was his, dictated at a red light, and I typed it for him and nothing else, because the chat was the team’s, and I wasn’t on the team.

It was the arrangement. I was in the house and the car and the section with the good sightline, and I wasn’t in the chat, and both of those were true at once. For fourteen years I’d read which kids in a room were in and which ones stood at the edge of the rug waiting to be asked onto it, and I knew the edge of the rug from the inside now, down to the square foot, and what I’d kept off my face since August was that I wanted onto the rug.

Maren called while I was running Iris’s bath.

“Tell me everything,” she said. “I was in the tunnel with the training staff and I missed the third. Did Eli really run the guy in front of the benches?”

“He really did. The man went over. Gerald saw.” I got the water to the right side of warm and Iris into it with the cup she liked and the two boats that were, I had been instructed, married. “It was extremely romantic, if you’re a defenseman. There was a lot of shoulder.”

“God, I love it here.” Maren had espresso machines going behind her. “Okay. Playoffs. Ryan’s going to be unbearable. He gets a smell to him in the playoffs, like a dog before a storm. I’m telling you now so you can plan around it.”

“I’ll alert the department.”

“Coffee Friday? Off day between games. Jenna wants to come. She’s got the media thing to run for the series and she says if she doesn’t sit down with two women who don’t want anything from her she’s going to drive into the canal.”

“Friday,” I said. “I’ll bring the good kind. I’ll over-order pastries and then make us feel bad about it, as a group.”

“That’s the dream.” She paused, and the machines hissed, and then she got to the question she’d called to ask, as Maren always did eventually, warmly, through the side door. “You good, D? The season going long. I know you had a—” She stopped, because she didn’t know how far it had gone. Nobody did. “A thing in August. The teaching thing.”

“It starts in August regardless,” I said, light, which was true, and complete, and a lie by omission the size of a house. “Go be with your storm dog.”

“I love you. The man went over. Bye.”

I hung up and sat on the cold edge of the tub with a married boat in each fist. Maren was the one friend I had in Phoenix who’d have caught me if I said the real version out loud, and I’d handed her the small one and kept the rest, because saying it to her would have made it true in a second room, and I only had the one mouth and a lifetime of practice keeping it shut.

He found me in the kitchen after she went down.

Back in the fall, when I’d been so proud of the professional face and the handshake and the clean exit, I hadn’t planned for the house going quiet at nine, and the refrigerator coming on, and him coming up the hall in his socks with his shirt untucked to stand in the doorway of a room I had made run on time, and me wanting, with everything I had, to stay in it forever.

He was setting out the single cup for the morning, the one he never mentioned, the green mug on the counter with the spoon laid across it. He’d started doing it in September. He had never once said a word about it, and I had never once said a word about the fact that it was my mug.

“You’re quiet,” he said.