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I put the game on late in the second period with a glass of water beside me. I was on the clock and I didn’t drink on the clock. I wanted to be able to say, if anybody ever asked me, that every hour I’d spent in his house I’d been what I said I was.

I sat on the end of his couch. The blanket I’d slept under for eight nights was folded over the arm of it, back in its place. The cushion at the far end had a dent in it the size of a large man. I sat nowhere near the dent.

With the sound at four I could barely make out the commentary, but the skates and the boards came through under it, hard little cracks louder than the voices.

What I couldn’t work out was why he was never anywhere near the puck. The camera followed the puck, and the puck arrived over and over at men in the middle of the ice who carried it and shot it, and none of it was ever him. He was behind it, or off to one side of it, standing in a place the puck hadn’t gotten to yet, and then the puck didn’t get there.

Partway into it I gave up and texted Maren, who knew the game better than anyone else I could ask.

Me: Explain to me what he is actually doing. I have been watching for forty minutes and he has touched the puck four times.

Maren: he’s a defenseman

Me: I am aware he is a defenseman.

Maren: ok so. forwards score, defensemen make it so the other team doesn’t. watch the guy with the puck. don’t watch eli. watch the guy carrying it and watch what happens to his face

So I stopped watching Eli, which took more effort than I was prepared to admit to Maren.

San Jose pushed up the right side with speed. The man with the puck lifted his head, and for half a second his eyes cut to Eli, who was standing in the middle of the ice doing nothing at all. His shoulders turned. He gave the puck backward to a teammate instead of driving through a large man who hadn’t moved once.

It happened again a good while later, with a different player, the same half second, and the same reversal.

Me: He didn’t even do anything.

Maren: that’s the point

Maren: nobody in that building will ever clap for it and it’s the reason ryan sleeps at night

The hit landed late in the third period.

I didn’t see it start. The puck squirted into the corner and two bodies chased in after it, and then Eli dropped off the boards onto his back with his stick eight feet away from him, and I was standing up.

I didn’t decide to stand. I was just on my feet in a living room that wasn’t mine with the water glass in my fist, and the announcers had dropped into the slow, careful voice they used for a man who hadn’t moved yet, and the camera stayed on him for four seconds.

I counted. At one, his glove was across his face. At two, one skate dragged a few inches on the ice and stopped. Three went by, and then four.

Then he got up.

He got a knee under himself, then a skate, and he was upright before the trainer had the door open. He picked up his stick and said a few words to the linesman that got a laugh out of him, and skated to the bench. A shift later he was back over the boards.

My knees quit under me and I sat down harder than I meant to. My hands weren’t steady. It was ridiculous, and I made myself hold them out in front of me anyway and admit it.

I couldn’t call anybody. No one in the organization had the job of telling me where he was.

I got my laptop out after he was back out there and wrote through the rest of the period with the sound at four. I didn’t write about the hit. I wrote a woman standing in a kitchen listening for a vehicle, and it ran out of me in one pass, and it was the best page in the document by a mile. There were twenty pages now, every one written in this house, about a man with large hands who didn’t say much.

They won 2-1. He wasn’t on the ice for any of the goals and Ryan scored one of them.

The truck turned in sooner than I’d planned for. The headlights hit the far wall first, two bars swinging across it and up over the ceiling.

I had very little warning and I used it badly. I shut the laptop, and there was no dish in the sink and no crumb on the counter to justify me, so I opened the book club book to a page. It was the most transparent thing I’d ever done, and I did at least hold it right side up.

He pushed through the door and stopped when he saw me. His hair was wet from the rink showers and one side of his jacket collar was turned up.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”