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He pushed up off the bench and crossed back to his own stall. We flew to Detroit.

Theo came alongside me at the water break at the Detroit morning skate.

“Cole’s been on his phone all trip,” Theo said.

“He has.”

“Podcast,” Theo said, and kept his eyes on the water bottle.

“Apparently.”

“He’s texting her. A lot.” He said it in French. He put no unkindness in it.

“Theo.” I said his name the French way.

“I’m just saying what I see.” He skated off.

The Detroit hotel room was eleven floors up, and Canada sat across the dark river. I lay on the bed and tried to watch film, and my head left Detroit entirely.

I knew what I wanted. Knowing had never been hard. I’d known since I was nineteen, and it had never gotten easier to carry.

What I wanted was to be handed control. I didn’t want to take it. I wanted a woman who knew what she was doing to decide out loud, in words, that she’d stop setting her own pace for a while and let me set it. I wanted her to be right to do it, because I’d be good enough at it that she’d never spend one second wondering whether she was safe.

It took a few sentences in my own head in a Detroit hotel room. It had never made it out of my mouth in under an hour.

I told a girl in Winnipeg when I was nineteen. I did it badly, in the dark, with no idea how to put any of it. Her mouth pulled at one side and she got it back under control, and then she was kind about it. It was a door-closing kindness. She never let me get the sentence out a second time. It had been seven years, and I hadn’t misplaced one second of it. I’d said it out loud a couple more times since, each time to a woman already most of the way to the door, which wasn’t an accident. Along the way I got very good at deciding in advance that nobody in the room wanted to hear it, so I never had to find out whether they did.

What I hadn’t accounted for was Delaney.

In a meeting room in August, before she even had the job, she’d asked me what happened in April and hadn’t softened one word of it. When I couldn’t answer, she didn’t rattle for a single second. She said okay and moved on to allergies.

Nobody would ever handle Delaney Rhodes. Anything she gave, she’d hand over with her eyes open and her own reasons for it.

I pictured it anyway, on a hotel bed in Detroit with the film running to an empty room. Delaney was in my room, telling me plainly what she wanted. She had her hands up over her head on my pillow because she’d put them there herself, and her voice, the dry Boston one, asked me to keep them there for her. My hand closed around both her wrists, and her pulse went hard under my thumb. She looked up at me, not scared, not even a little. She was deciding.

I sat up and put both feet on the floor.

She was ten years older than me, and the trouble with it wasn’t the one people would assume. She had a decade on me of being nobody’s project, and it showed in every room she walked into, and I wanted to be the one man she decided to set it down in front of. There was no casual way to want it.

She lived in my casita. She was responsible for my daughter. I’d spent years building the life Iris and I had. I had three good reasons, and I was in a Detroit hotel room losing an argument I’d been having with myself since not long after she moved in.

Road nights she stayed in the house. I’d written the clause myself, at a kitchen table, thinking about my daughter and a smoke alarm and not one thing past that. I didn’t know where she slept. I hadn’t thought to write that part down. Maybe she took the couch, with her legs over the arm of it and her hair all over the cushion. It didn’t occur to me to ask her, because asking would have meant saying out loud that I’d been thinking about it.

We won Detroit 3-1. I had a goal and an assist, and my legs were finished by the last whistle. Calloway said three words to me after.

“That’s the guy.”

On the bus Delaney sent a photo of Iris at the kitchen table, chin propped in both hands, completely serious, with a drawing in front of her of me surrounded by skyscrapers, done carefully in blue and black. Below it she’d written DADY WINS.

Delaney must have kept the best attempt back all day, waiting on the final score to send it.

The bus was loud with men laughing about the game, and I sat in the middle of it with my thumb on a crayon skyline and didn’t hear any of them.

Me: How’s the house?

Delaney: Good. Quiet tonight. She’s in pajamas waiting on your call.

Me: She sleeping okay?