Page 45 of Single Pucking Orc

“Reasonable. Go on.”

“Two. My office door closed means the door is closed. Not the door is closed unless you have coffee. Not the door is closed but here’s a baby. Closed.”

“That one’s going to be a problem for you, not me.”

“Three.” She looked at him over the top of the glasses, which he’d told her a dozen times was the most devastating thing she did and which she had therefore weaponized. “We do not tell your team.”

“That’s three.”

“Four is provisional.”

“Provisional.” He set his chin on Charlie’s head. “You’ve written a rule and left it blank. That’s not a rule. That’s a threat with a placeholder.”

“Four,” she said, folding the paper again, “is provisional.”

Rule one survived ten days.

It survived because Nora meant it, and because Rognar, to his genuine surprise, agreed with it. A bad third period was a real cost. He had a daughter now, and a reason to be good at his job that had nothing to do with the joy of it. That was new. He turned it over privately and didn’t mention it. So on game nights he kissed her at the fence and went home to his bed and slept, and it worked, and he was insufferably proud of both of them.

It survived until an overtime loss in Cascade Bay, a five-hour bus ride, and a text at eleven at night that said only up? and a reply that said only yes. And then the discovery, at four in the morning, that eight feet of wet grass is not a meaningful distance to a male with a monitor in his fist who has decided it isn’t.

“This isn’t staying over,” he said into the dark. “I left. I came back. Those are two separate visits.”

“You came back at four in the morning.”

“I came back at four in the morning from my own house, Nora, which is eight feet away. I’ve been over the paperwork. It’s airtight. There’s no clause about the middle.”

“There is now.”

“You can’t amend it retroactively. That’s not how documents work. Ask your clients.”

Rule two he never broke, because he found he didn’t want to. A closed door in that house meant she was working. He’d come to like the look of her working through the office glass—the frown, the glasses, the pencil she chewed and denied chewing. He had no wish to be the kind of interruption that turned it off. He left coffee outside the door instead. She never mentioned finding it. He knew she found it because the mug came back rinsed.

Rule three did not survive Fen.

Rule three did not, in fairness, stand a chance against Fen. He noticed things the way a metal detector notices things, indiscriminately and out loud. He had already watched the pair of them across a bar room, and he drew the only possible conclusion. It was the correct one. He put it in the newsletter.

There was, by then, a newsletter.

Mildred Prescott came on a Thursday. She had given him two weeks' notice this time, an hour-long window, and a short list of what she would want to see, and he had treated all three like a playoff opponent. He cleaned the nursery. Then he cleaned the guest bathroom, which nobody had used since August. He put the recycling out on a Tuesday, which had never once happened in the history of the house. On Thursday morning he stood in his living room and looked at it the way he looked at video of a team that had beaten him.

Deb had offered to stay for it. He'd told her not to. If Mildred was going to look at his house, he wanted it to be his house she looked at.

"You've moved the couch," Nora said.

"It was crooked. It's been crooked for a year and I never once noticed." He turned around. She was at the kitchen table with her laptop open and her glasses pushed up into her hair, and she had made no move at all to go. "You don't have to be here."

"I'm aware."

"She'll ask who you are."

"Then she'll ask." she typed something. "I'd rather be here than sitting in my kitchen at ten in the morning wondering how it went, which is what I'd be doing, and we both know it. So let's not."

Mildred arrived at ten exactly, in sensible shoes and a faded blue cardigan, and declined the tour.

"I don't need the tour, Mr. Stonebreaker. I've seen a great many tours." She stepped past him into the hall. "Where does she sleep?"

He showed her. She stood in the nursery doorway for a moment, looked at the crib, then put two fingers on the top rail and pushed. It didn't move. She made a note.