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So he called my therapist before he called me, and she gave him numbers, and neither of them thought I needed to be in the room for it.

There were a dozen useful things I could have said. I picked the easiest one.

“I’m playing.”

“I know.”

“My minutes are fine.”

“I know.”

“You planning to replace me before I finish the year?”

“No.”

That should have helped. It did not.

Silas closed the folder. “It’s not a no.”

On the way out I did the math. A month on the shoulder, then the medical, then the conversation. It lands in the same stretch of weeks as my wife’s paperwork.

I have not asked him again, and I have not told her.

Sunday in Nashville, Sully starts me in our own end eleven times and in theirs twice.

I count. I count everything now.

Eleven and two isn’t an insult. It’s what you do with a thirty-eight-year-old who wins draws and doesn’t score, in a month where two points separate four teams and nobody is going to apologize for using a man the way he’s useful.

So I take the eleven.

In the first period I read their center’s shoulder before the linesman’s hand opens and have it back to Evan before their winger has finished turning. In the second I lose one I should have won, and I spend the next four minutes finding the man who beat me and making the rest of his night expensive.

Nothing I do goes on the scoresheet. Ryan’s does, and Mack’s does, and we’re up one going into the third with the building getting restless about it.

With forty seconds left, Sully sends me out for the draw in our end. They have six skaters on, and their center keeps looking over my shoulder at the point like I might have forgotten there’s a man standing there.

I get low and make him wait for me. The puck drops, I tie up his stick, put my hip into him, and Cross comes through behind us to take it. By the time their winger gets around me the puck is halfway down the ice and eighteen thousand people are calling me an asshole.

I’ve had worse reviews.

We burn the clock. Roman hits the side of my helmet hard enough to knock it crooked when I get to the bench, and I shove him back before the horn is finished, and then I sit down and the glove on my left hand is doing a thing, so I open it and close it twice under the bench rail where the camera on the far side can’t see it and where Maren absolutely can.

She doesn’t look up.

Nineteen minutes a day since November, on the end of a hotel bed with the television on mute, and nobody in this organization has ever watched me do one of them, because I’m thirty-eight and because they trust me, and because a man my age who says he did his work gets believed.

On the flight home I eat everything they put in front of me and open Astrid’s message again.

Tova likes the desk.

Four words. No picture. Mack glances over while he settles his headphones.

“Bad news?”

“No. Kid likes her room.”

“Good.”