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Me: It’s a knee.

Theo: Il dit toujours que ça va. Surveillez-le, il devient bizarre à la maison.

Theo had told them I always said I was fine, and to keep an eye on me, because I got weird at home.

Cole: I don’t know what Theo said but I’m choosing to believe it was a compliment

Kasperi: It was not

Cole: new business. while I carry this franchise up the standings without him I move that someone check on forty-four. he gets weird when he’s home, and now he’s home and they won’t let him play

Kasperi: He does get weird

Me: I’m not hurt.

Kasperi: That is the weird thing he says

From a man who read philosophy for pleasure, Theo’s line was as close to warmth as the chat ever ran, and he’d had the decency to say it in French. I left the chat and put the phone face down. Before I’d taken my hand off it, Cole had added me back in. He did it every time. I’d never once had the satisfaction of staying gone.

I cut Iris a banana at the counter, which I’d done a thousand mornings and could have done asleep.

It was seven pieces. It was always seven, by Iris’s ruling, and she lined them up by size on her plate as if she were running a lab, and one always came out fat and crooked on the end where the knife got ahead of me. She ate six and left the ugly one, and Gerald got none, because dragons ate knights, and I’d learned not to argue dragon policy with a woman who had his documented medical history memorized.

Delaney came in for the coffee while I was doing it. I had the knife going and Iris narrating the sizes, and Delaney reached past me for the milk, close, at home in that kitchen, and I turned my head and she was right there, her hair down, that spot under her jaw where I’d put a mark in December long healed and the memory of it not.

I put the knife down. I got a hand on her hip, light, the move I’d always used to shift her the two inches out of the way of a drawer, and I turned it into more, drew her back against my chest and put my mouth at the top of her shoulder. For one second it was how it used to be. Her weight gave. Her head tipped.

Then she set her palm flat on the counter and stepped out of my hands, gentle, nothing in it a person could fight, and the look she turned on me before she caught it wasn’t want. It was closer to grief. She picked up her mug and said, bright, to Iris, “Six for you and none for the dragon,” and carried her coffee out of my kitchen.

I stood there with a banana in seven pieces and my daughter at my elbow and both hands empty and still warm from a woman who’d already gone.

“Daddy.” Iris held up the plate. “You have to eat the ugly one. You made it ugly so it’s yours.”

“That’s fair,” I said, and ate the ugly one, and it was fair, and I thought about it the rest of the day.

Kasperi came over while I was still out of the lineup, because Cole had told him to, and Kasperi did what Cole told him, and neither of them had ever worked out that this was true.

“Cole said check on you.” He was already past me and into the kitchen. “You look fine. I’m going to eat something.”

“There’s chili in the⁠—”

“I found it.” He had the container open before I’d finished the sentence, got a fork from the drawer he somehow knew, loaded a bowl, and carried it to the couch. He put on the replay of the Tuesday game so he could watch the kid from Tampa turn Cole inside out at the blue line, which only Kasperi would drive across a city to do on an off day. “This is better than what I make,” he told the chili. “Jenna cooks and it’s good. You cook and you don’t tell anybody, and Jenna says that means something. I don’t know what she means. She said to say it to you.”

“Sit down.”

He was already sitting. He put his feet on my table and ate and watched the kid from Tampa undress Cole again with his face lit up.

“You look bad,” he told me, not turning his head. “Not now. In the face. All week.”

“Thanks.”

“My mother looks like that when my father is away too long. In the face.” He pointed the fork at me. “But you’re home all week and you look like your father is away.” He chewed. “It doesn’t make sense. You are the father.”

I kept my eyes on the replay and didn’t answer, because there wasn’t a three-word version and I wasn’t handing Kasperi the long one.

Iris came out from her room in the paper crown and climbed onto Kasperi as if he were furniture, which to her he was, and asked him the Finnish word for cat, and he told her kissa, and she said it back wrong over and over with total confidence, and he corrected her with more patience than he’d ever shown a linesman. Delaney came through for a glass of water and lit up for him, teased him about driving clear across town to watch a replay, got the story out of him in under a minute with her hand on the counter and her head tipped, laughing that laugh, and I sat across the room and got the back of it.

Kasperi watched her go back to the casita. He was twenty-two and had no filter and no idea that either of those things was true.