Page 23 of Power Play

Iris didn’t react at all. She’d been expecting it. “That’s for Gerald, actually,” she said, without taking her eyes off the ice, and made a small adjustment to the dragon’s seating position.

He’d known to the foot where his daughter was sitting. I sat there on a cold bench being soft and stupid about a man knocking on a pane of glass, and nobody had given me permission for it, including me.

Out in the corridor afterward, Cole Westbrook found us with his helmet swinging from one hand, and a younger man came up behind him, blond, pale eyebrows, a mouth open on the next question before he’d stopped moving.

“Is this her?” he said.

“Kasperi,” Cole said.

“I am asking because he hasn’t said one word about it and it’s been two weeks.” Kasperi swung his attention onto me and left it there. “He hires a nanny and says nothing. In Finland we would ask, so I am asking. How is it going?”

“It is going great. Iris is a delight, and the house has a snack drawer that I have improved without asking anybody.”

“This is already more than he told us,” Kasperi said. “He told us nothing.” He came back to me with the same unarmed face. “How old are you?”

“Kasperi,” Cole said.

“It is a normal question.”

“It is a famously normal question,” I said. “Thirty-six.”

Kasperi raised his eyebrows and plainly believed he was being subtle about it. It could have been seen from the parking lot.

“He’s twenty-six,” Cole said, to the wall, to no one.

“I’m aware. I did that math on a rented couch on a night I had nothing else going on.”

Cole laughed. Kasperi didn’t. He was still working on it.

I said it lightly and it came out lightly. It took me the rest of the morning to stop hearing it.

Eli came off the ice a while later with his hair still wet at the neck, and Iris hit him at running speed. He absorbed the hit without moving his feet.

“You’re cold,” he said to me, over her head.

“I am at room temperature.”

“You’ve got your hands inside your sleeves.”

“That is a styling choice.”

His mouth moved at one side and got no further than that. “It’s twelve degrees on the sheet.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“Celsius. Sorry.” He did the conversion without appearing to do it. “Fifty-four.”

“Fifty-four is a temperature people are permitted to complain about.”

“Not where I’m from.” He shifted the bag on his shoulder. “I skated in Transcona until I was eleven. Old barn with a leaking roof, no heat in it. My dad used to make me wear a toque under my helmet.”

“Your what?”

He stopped, and his eyebrows came down.

“Toque,” he said, slower, as if the trouble were my hearing and not my nationality.

“I have no idea what that word is.”