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“Being looked at by somebody whose opinion I want.”

I sit back.

She holds my eyes for the rest of it and doesn’t change her expression by one degree.

“I am managing tonight.”

“My turn,” she says.

“That’s not how this works.”

“It is now.”

I put both hands flat on the cloth. “Go.”

“What happens in April.”

The question is so plain that it takes me a second to find the bottom of it. Nobody asks me that.

“Contract’s up. Silas talks to Maren, Maren gives him a number, and somebody upstairs decides what a thirty-eight-year-old center who wins draws is worth against a flat cap.”

“What are you worth?”

“Depends who’s counting. I take about forty percent of this team’s defensive-zone draws and I’ve won more of them than anybody in that organization.” I turn the water glass a quarter turn on the cloth, which is a thing I have apparently learned tonight from the woman across the table.

“And they will not count that.”

“They’ll count minutes. Minutes are on the broadcast.”

Astrid does not tell me that is unfair. She does not tell me I am good either, which I would have hated and then thought about for a week.

“Then say it to somebody,” she says.

“You can’t make a man hear that.”

“No. But you have not said it to anybody, and I have been in rooms with you for three months, and I had to ask.”

The man at the next table sends his steak back for the third time and his wife looks at the ceiling.

My phone lights up beside the water. For one second I think it’s Silas before I even see the screen.

Team schedule. Tomorrow’s start time moved thirty minutes.

I turn the phone face down.

“Do you need to answer that?”

“No.”

“You always answer.”

“Tonight I’m busy.”

Her eyes stay on me a second longer and then she lets it go, and I’m grateful enough not to examine why.

We hear the piano before we reach the bottom of the stairs.

Astrid slows just enough that anybody else would miss it. I don’t.