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“Okay.”

“Do not tell your mother I cried.”

“You’re not crying.”

“I am not, “ said my father, with dignity, and wiped his eye with the back of his wrist.

The office door opened. A tall, gray-haired man in a cardigan stood in the doorway, smiling.

“Mr. Pendleton?” said Dr. Ono. “Come in whenever you’re ready.”

I stood. My legs were shaky. My father stood too, and straightened his coat.

“I will wait here,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I have nothing else to do.”

“You have, like, forty companies.”

“They can spare me.”

I looked at him.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, Dad.”

I walked in and closed the door. On the other side of it, I heard the creak of the couch as a man sat down to wait.

Chapter 36

MAKSIM

Clean-Up

There is a particular kind of work that follows a catastrophe, and it is not glamorous.

Nobody writes songs about it. No one paints the moment when the last sword is put back on the wall, and the ledgers are opened, and the dead are counted, and the survivors sit down together at a table and try to work out who is to pay for the window. But I have lived through eleven hundred years of the aftermath, and I have come to believe it is the truest thing we do.

We cleaned up.

The first order of business was Derek Mathis.

I had expected to deal with him myself. I had a plan, even, of a sort: a quiet word in a quiet place, a hint of what he had seen, a firm request to consider the evidence unreliable. I would not compel him. I had sworn that. But there is a kind of persuasion that costs nothing and requires no teeth, and I had spent a long life becoming good at it.

I did not get the chance.

I discovered, on the morning after the squash court, that Richard Pendleton had already handled it.

“Derek Mathis?” said my host, at the breakfast table, folding his newspaper. “A defenseman from Minnesota. Six foot three. He installed nine hidden cameras in the Halden Arena, in violation of two state statutes and three league bylaws, and he has a habit of posting on a certain online forum under the name NorthmenNinja. “ He turned a page. “I spoke to my lawyers on Tuesday.”

I put down my spoon.

“You did what?”

“They wrote him a letter.”

Jenny made a noise into her orange juice, and Mrs. Pendleton examined the ceiling with rapt interest.