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“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“The shoulder?”

“It’s fine. It’s fine.”

“The invoice for the doctor in Toronto arrived,” he said. “It has been paid.”

“Dad, I told you I’d cover—”

“It has been paid,” he repeated, and there was no room in it at all. “Win, Alexander. Or don’t. But be well. That is all your mother and I ask. I will let you go.”

He hung up. He always hangs up first. He’s never said goodbye in his life.

I stood there for a long time with the phone against my ear, hearing nothing.

Here is a thing I have never told anyone. My whole life I’ve thought my father didn’t care. He doesn’t hug. He doesn’t come to games. He speaks to me in the tone he uses on his lawyers. I’d built a whole personality out of it, honestly. I don’t need him. I don’t need any of them. It was armor. It kept out the cold.

And then he asks if I’m eating. And I go soft as bread.

I don’t understand it. I don’t want to.

“You look terrible,” Jason said, when I got back.

“I’m great.”

“You’re crying.”

“I’m sweating from the eyes.”

“Lex.” He took my empty shot glass out of my hand, gently, the way you’d take scissors from a toddler. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”

“I’m not going back to 214.”

“You can’t sleep in my room, Chip’s still in it until tomorrow and I’ve only got the one spare cot, and—”

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“You’ll sleep in your own bed, in your own room, which has a lock and a hot shower and a perfectly nice, slightly murderous roommate who is probably not even in it.” Jason hoisted me up by one arm. “I’m not letting you sleep on my floor and get hypothermia. You’re the best player on this team, and I’m not explaining it to Duke.”

“I’m the worst player on this team.”

“You’re whatever I say you are, buddy. Come on.”

He walked me the whole way. Two blocks in the snow, his arm around my back, my boots doing their own thing. I remember stars. I remember the guest house door and Gary at the front desk saying something anxious. I remember Jason’s face very close to mine, and his voice saying “Do you have your key?” in a tone like a nurse. I had it. I don’t know how.

I remember the bed. I remember the blanket. I remember Jason’s hand on my hair for a second, like a brother, and then the click of the door.

I remember the smell.

It was faint. Everything in the room was faint: snow, wine, clean cold linen. But underneath it, warm and sweet and dark, was the thing I’d been breathing in for days without knowing. It came off the pillow on the daybed across the room. It came off the air. It was honey and bread and something that felt like a hand on the back of my head.

I turned my face into my own pillow and thought, I hate you, ice prince, and fell asleep.

I dreamed.

I’m not going to describe the whole dream. It was a lot. There was a rink, but the rink was somehow also a room, and the ice was somehow also a bed, and there was snow falling inside it, slow and silent. Someone was standing in the middle of all that white in black clothes, with his back to me. Tall, broad through the shoulders, hair dark against the light.