"I didn't check," I said. "I know. I didn't check. I should have checked. I just—I had a lot going on today and I didn't—" I stopped. "I'm sorry. I can find somewhere else. I'll look right now, I'll find—"
"Do you like pizza?" Nathan said.
I stared at him.
"Pizza," he said again. "Do you like it?"
"Yes," I said. "Obviously I like pizza, Nathan, everyone likes pizza—"
"There's a place," he said. "Two blocks."
He said it like this was just information he was providing rather than a rescue he was conducting. Then he turned and started walking, and I stood on the sidewalk for one more second facing the closed restaurant and the sign and the Tuesday that was absolutely happening, and then I followed him.
Because that was what you did when Nathan Cross walked somewhere.
The pizza placewas called Sal's. It was small and cash only and had six tables and a chalkboard menu. The guy behind the counter looked up when Nathan walked in and said "The usual?" before Nathan had his jacket off.
"Not tonight," Nathan said. "We'll order."
I studied the menu on the chalkboard.
"Margherita," I said, to Sal, with the confidence of a man who had been rescued. "Large. And whatever he's having."
Nathan ordered without consulting the menu. Of course he did.
We sat.
The table was small and the chairs were slightly mismatched and someone had carved something into the edge of the table that I wasn't going to examine too closely.
Sal brought bread. I took a piece. Nathan took a piece. The bread was good. The candle on the table was one of those stubby ones in a glass holder that had clearly been refilled approximately a hundred times. Outside the window Boston was doing its Boston thing, cold and self-contained, and inside it was warm and nobody knew who I was, and it felt, as we started to talk, like exactly the right place to be.
"—and the thing is," I was saying, "Dylan had already told Coach he was fine. He'd told the trainer he was fine. He'd told me he was fine. He skated three full shifts on it."
Nathan was eating bread with the unhurried consideration of someone for whom bread was a thing worth doing properly. I had already eaten most of mine without noticing.
"And then?" Nathan said.
"And then he went to tie his skate after practice and couldn't bend his knee enough to reach it." I pulled off another piece. "Just sat there on the bench. Wouldn't ask for help. I had to tie it for him."
"How old were you?"
"Sixteen. He was twenty." I pointed the bread at Nathan. "Twenty years old. Alternate captain of his junior team. Needed his sixteen-year-old brother to tie his skate because he would not under any circumstances admit that his knee hurt."
Nathan looked at me. "And you?"
"I would have told someone immediately," I said. "First sign of anything wrong, I'm flagging it. That's just smart."
Nathan's expression did something.
"That's—okay, that's different," I said. "That was different and you know it."
"Was it?"
"I always tell you when something's wrong."
"You told me you were fine approximately eleven times while symptomatic."
"That's—" I stopped. "That's a medical context. That's different."
