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“That tracks,” she said, and drank her water, and I put my hand over my mouth and coughed into it until it passed.

Cole was delighted. He was always delighted to get beaten by a faster mind, which was the best of him and most of the reason every other man in the locker room would have taken a puck for him.

I wasn’t delighted. I was sitting in a meeting about my daughter’s care with my pulse up because a woman had been rude to Cole, and I wanted to hear her be rude to me.

“I like her,” Cole announced.

“Nobody asked.”

“Saying it anyway.”

“Her mother calls,” I said. “Not often. Every few weeks, and it isn’t a schedule.”

“Does Iris know when it’s coming?”

“No.”

“Okay.” She set the glass down out of her own reach. “What does she need in the hour after?”

I had the other answer loaded, the one everybody wanted, what to tell a little girl about a mother who called from another country. I had a paragraph for it, worn smooth, delivered to a pediatrician and two babysitters and my own mother, who had asked me eleven hundred questions about my daughter and never that one.

“Say it again,” I said.

“She hangs up,” Delaney said. “She’s little. She’s got nowhere to put it. What does she need?”

I put my eyes on the table. Cole opened his mouth and she set two fingers on the wood without turning her head, and he shut it.

“A job,” I said. “Not a hug. She won’t take a hug for about twenty minutes. She wants to know what’s happening next, in order, all of it, and she wants to hear it twice. Then she wants her hands busy. Give her a job and she’ll take it. Ask her how she’s feeling and she’ll leave the room.”

“What kind of job?”

“Anything with steps. She sorted the recycling for forty minutes once and told me the schedule for the rest of the day four times while she did it.”

“And the hug?”

“After. She comes and stands against my leg and doesn’t say anything, and that’s when you pick her up.”

Delaney nodded.

“Nightmares,” she said. “Same thing?”

“No.”

“Tell me the difference.”

“Opposite.” I had both hands on the edge of the table, and I took them off it and put them in my lap, and there was a white line pressed across the pad of each thumb from the steel lip under the laminate. “No steps, no schedule, no talking. Talking wakes her further up. Pick her up, hold her, say nothing at all. Fifteen minutes and she goes back down.”

She didn’t write it down.

Later she gave every one of my answers back to me in the order I’d said them, and that was when I understood she’d never needed a pen at any point in her life.

“Can I ask you two things?” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“What happens in April?”

“April.”