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Calloway walked through at quarter past six and stopped at the end of my stall with the tablet under his arm, and didn’t lower his voice, because a lowered voice in that room would have made it news.

“First shift,” he said.

“I know.”

“First ten minutes.”

“I know.”

He turned the tablet around and ran three clips. The first was the Chicago kill, the one where I sold out. The second was a zone exit in Nashville where I lifted the puck off their forward’s stick without touching him. The third was a two-on-one I broke up by staying dead center until the passer decided wrong.

“He’s going to come at our right side on the first shift, and try to get you to take a penalty in the first ten minutes so he can run their top line at your partner all night.”

“I know.”

“October, he gets that out of you.” He tapped the screen, and the last clip froze on me in the middle of the ice with no puck near me. “This guy, he doesn’t. I asked you for this guy in October.”

“I know you did.”

“And here he is.” He flipped the tablet back around. “I’m not going to ask you what changed. Here’s what is my business. Whatever it is you’ve got going at home, at some point it’s going to have a bad day. Everything does. When it does, it doesn’t come on my ice.”

“It’s not going to have a bad day.”

Calloway didn’t look away from me. “Everybody’s sure in December,” he said, and tapped the top of my stall with two fingers, and went out.

Ryan looked over from three stalls down, gave me a second and a half of the face he used on rookies, and rolled his shoulder back into the pad.

I went out third, the ice new under me with the cut-ice smell still on it. Harker was already out at the far end, skating his circuit. I turned up ice, and a couple of loops in I found my kid.

She was in the family seats, both hands on the rail and her chin up over it, in her orange sweater, with Maren holding the back of it in one fist to keep her from going over. I put my glove up. Iris waved with her arm out straight, and Maren caught her by the sweater again.

Then I looked one seat over.

Delaney had her coat on her lap and her hair down. She wasn’t holding anybody, not handling a jacket or a snack or a small person’s hat. She had her chin up and her eyes on me, and she didn’t look away. She didn’t wave and she didn’t smile, and I stood at the top of the circle with a puck three feet away and stopped skating.

She raised two fingers off the arm of the seat. That was all she did.

I turned and skated. Cole crossed me at the blue line going the other way and didn’t slow down. “Two hours, forty-four,” he said, in the voice he’d use to read a weather report, and kept going, and I put the next puck into the net so hard the mesh snapped back and Griffin yelled at me about warming a goalie up, and that helped.

Harker came at me on the first shift, the way Calloway said he would. It wasn’t a hit. He came in on the forecheck with his stick up under my arm and rode me into the wall well after I’d moved the puck, and said a few words into the side of my helmet, and I caught every one of them.

October, I’d have turned around, and he’d have had his top line out against Ryan’s group all night with me watching from a box. I got up and went to the bench. “Nothing,” I said to Calloway on my way past. He didn’t answer. He wrote on his card.

Harker did it twice more in the first period and got nothing both times. The last was a cross-check between the shoulder blades that snapped my chin down onto my collarbone. I turned around slowly, close in, with the gap in his bottom teeth right there, and gave him a flat mouth.

“Nothing here,” I said.

He went to the box seconds later for putting his stick into Theo’s ribs, because a guy who’d been fed nothing for twenty minutes had to eat, and we scored on the power play.

Second period they turned it up, heavy and slow and mean, grinding our right side. My foot didn’t love it. I didn’t mention that on the bench.

Harker got his run at the end of the period. Kasperi had the puck behind our net with his head down, and Harker came off the wall on a line he’d decided three strides back. I got there first. I didn’t hit him. I put my hip and my shoulder into the lane he wanted and let him come, and he got all of me at a dead stop with his own speed in it. It made a flat, heavy crack that carried up the glass. He went down onto one knee and slid into the base of the post, and Griffin skated out of his crease and said, “Hi,” pleasantly, to the man on the ice. Calloway had his arms folded and his weight back on his heels, watching me, and not the pile.

I scored in the third, which didn’t happen often. Theo won a puck in the neutral zone he had no business winning and chipped it ahead, and when their D turned his hips the wrong way I had the middle of the ice to myself. The goalie cheated on his post, and I put it far side low, and the building got up off its feet.

I looked up at the family seats before I got to the bench. Iris was on her seat with both fists in the air. Delaney was standing beside her with her coat on the floor and her hands pressed flat over her mouth, crying and laughing at the same time and not doing one thing to hide it.

None of my good nights in that building had anything on a woman down by the glass with her hands over her mouth.