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“You’re going for one night,” I said. “It isn’t Antarctica.”

“Sophia has a dog.” Iris said this like it settled the matter.

“A dog doesn’t change the underwear math. Two pairs is plenty for one night.”

She considered me with her father’s exact expression. Then she marched down the hall, returned with four more pairs, and stuffed them in the backpack without comment. It was a counteroffer, and it wasn’t open to discussion.

Eli carried the sleeping bag out. He’d been quiet since he got back from the rink, and by now I could read that quiet. It meant he was fine and had no intention of discussing it.

Gerald was on the porch step where Iris had set him down. Gerald didn’t do sleepovers, a policy he’d arrived at without consulting anybody.

I picked him up. He was warm right through from sitting out in the sun. His orange felt had worn soft at the corners from being carried by the middle everywhere she went.

Eli came back up the walk for his daughter and stopped when he saw the dragon in my hands.

“She left him.”

“He doesn’t do sleepovers, apparently.”

His eyes went to Gerald and didn’t come off him. “She’s never left him anywhere.”

“I know.”

He let the subject go.

They pulled out a few minutes later. Iris didn’t look back. The entire world was in front of her, and there was a dog at the end of it. He’d drive straight from Sophia’s doorstep to the arena. He’d told me so at breakfast and again from the doorway, making sure I knew without admitting he cared whether I did.

Then I shut the door and carried a dragon into the kitchen. The house had never been empty like this. Since August I’d had it to myself on preschool mornings, and everybody had been asleep in it at night, but Eli or Iris had always come home before dark.

I put Gerald on the counter facing the window so he’d have a view, in an empty house, with no one home to see me do it, and this was probably how it started.

Maren texted me at ten past four.

Maren: there is a seat next to Iris and it is going to sit there empty all night. I’m leaving it at will call under your name because it is easier than arguing with you

Me: Maren.

Maren: I have eleven athletes and a rookie with a hamstring. Put shoes on.

She was wrong about that. My shoes had been on since two o’clock, and I’d spent the afternoon walking around an empty house in them, waiting for somebody to send for me.

I made eggs and toast and ate them standing at the counter across from a dragon.

It wasn’t about a hockey game. He’d driven Iris to Peoria, texted me not to wait up, and left me the house.

No one was going to give me permission. There was no version of this where a woman sat in somebody else’s casita and waited to be handed a reason to walk into a building.

I had spent six years with a man who didn’t have a number. Being David’s had required a paragraph of explanation, and it usually got one, from me, at parties, while he watched from beside me and let me deliver it. Hockey had solved that problem a hundred years ago. A name went across a pair of shoulders, and a building full of strangers read it from the top row without needing a paragraph from anybody.

Then I opened the team shop on my phone, because I owned nothing orange and I wasn’t walking into that building in linen.

The home sweater came up first. It was burnt orange and black with white trim and the coiled snake, and it cost two hundred and nineteen dollars. Underneath it, in small print, was a line about lettering. Player name and number cost sixty dollars, with twenty minutes allowed for pressing in store.

That came to two hundred and seventy-nine, and three hundred and one with the tax.

I ran the numbers twice and got the same answer both times, which was the trouble with numbers. There were four thousand two hundred and six dollars in a checking account that had only started climbing in August, and every dollar of it was his. Three hundred and one of them was half a week of his daughter’s mornings. I was going to hand them over a counter for a shirt, for a game I hadn’t been invited to, so that a man who paid me could turn a corner in his own building and find his name on my back.

“Fuck it,” I said, out loud, to the room, which contained a dragon.