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I got my keys and buckled Gerald into the passenger seat, because I refused to leave him alone in an empty house. I knew what I was doing while I did it and I did it anyway.

Then I texted a man who had no idea where I was going.

Me: gerald has been briefed on the situation

Me: holding up better than expected

He didn’t answer. It was well into pregame by then.

I collected a ticket at will call under my own name and didn’t have to explain myself to anybody.

The shop sat off the main concourse behind a wall of glass, with display sweaters hung high on the back wall and folded stacks on the shelves under them. A kid in a black polo pulled mine off a stack. He was nineteen or twenty, with a lanyard, deep into a long shift and moving at the speed of it.

“Forty-four,” I said.

“Number’s on the sleeve and the back. You want a name on it?”

“Yes.”

“What name?”

There it was. A family of five waited behind me with a stroller, and I, a woman with peanut butter on her cuff, was about to give a man’s last name out loud to a stranger at a register in the middle of the desert.

“Kovac.”

“Spell it.”

I spelled it. K, O, V, A, C. A toddler behind me kicked the back of my calf and nobody said sorry about it. The kid didn’t look up once. I’d braced on the walk in for a flicker of recognition off a stranger who knew the name, and what I got was a kid checking a spelling.

“Twenty minutes on the press. Three oh one, twelve.”

I put the card down and didn’t watch him run it.

Twenty minutes later he brought it out over his forearm with the heat of the press still in it. It smelled of scorched plastic. He cut the tag off and handed it over, and I put the tag in my back pocket instead of the bin.

I put it on right there in the shop with my bag hanging off one wrist and my arms up over my head, because there was nowhere else to do it. The collar sat up off my neck and wouldn’t lie down. The mesh had two creases across the front where it had been folded on the shelf, and the white letters were stiff under my fingers when I reached back and touched them. It fit. It was my size, and nobody on this earth had lent it to me.

I rode an escalator up in a river of people in burnt orange and black. There were names and numbers everywhere. I passed a seventeen with Lindqvist across the shoulders, and three Callahans in a row, because people loved a goalie. I went the length of the concourse and didn’t pass one other Kovac.

A girl of about eleven read my back and then read my face, worked a piece of arithmetic faster than I could have, and arrived at an answer. She wasn’t wrong.

I found the family section and went down the steps into the bowl.

The ice was a shock from that close. It was enormous and white, lit so hard from above that there wasn’t a shadow anywhere on it. The cold poured off the glass and got up under the jersey.

Row two had a woman in it, in a Callahan sweater, with her boots up on the rail and a beer in each hand.

“Delaney Rhodes,” she said. “One of these is yours. Sit down, and I am not saying one word about what you have on for at least a period and a half.”

It was Paige Lawson. I’d met her once, over coffee with Maren on Camelback, and she’d taken over the table inside of a few minutes.

“I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“I’m at all of them.” She handed the beer over without looking away from the ice. “Drink that. It’s a long period and a half.”

Maren came up the tunnel stairs before warmups, took one look at me, pressed her lips together, and said only that she was working and would find me after.

The horn sounded and Paige was on her feet before it finished. “Warmups. This is the good part and almost nobody knows it.”