Chapter 23: 2 A.M.

I woke up at two in the morning to my phone lighting the dark.

Not a call. A notification from the security camera at my building entrance, motion detected. Standard. It went off for deliveries, for neighbors, for raccoons that had learned where the trash was. I rolled over.

The light came again.

I picked up the phone. Opened the camera app. Looked at the feed.

A car was parked across the street from my building. Dark. I recognized it because I had been in it dozens of times, because I had learned the particular sound of its engine and the way it sat low and certain on its suspension.

Jax's car.

I lay in my bed and looked at the feed for a full minute. The car didn't move. There was no indication he was getting out. He was just, there. At two in the morning, parked outside my building, in the dark.

I got up. I pulled on a sweatshirt and went to my window and looked down. From this angle I could see the car more clearly. The engine was off. I could see the faint silhouette of him in the driver's seat, just the outline, just the shape of a man sitting still.

I thought about calling. I thought about going down. I thought about text messages and all the conversations we'd had and hadn't had, and all the ways he was not good at the things he was feeling, and all the ways I was not good at letting people feel things near me without armor.

I stood at the window for a long time.

Then I did something I hadn't planned to do. I sent him one text.

*I can see your car.*

A pause. Then the car's interior light came on briefly, phone screen illuminating, and went off. No response.

Then the engine started, and the car pulled away, slowly, and turned at the end of the block, and was gone.

I stood at the window in my dark apartment and watched the empty street.

He had come. He hadn't knocked. He had just, sat there, in the cold, outside my building, like that was a thing a person did when they didn't have language for something. Like the physical proximity was a substitute for the words he didn't have yet.

I went back to bed. I lay in the dark and thought about a man who showed up to things he couldn't explain and left before he had to account for them, and I felt something that I had not let myself feel clearly before, not the complicated dual tension of our arrangement, not the strategic calculation, not even the want that I'd been managing for weeks.

Something softer than all of that. Something I was significantly more afraid of.

I went to sleep eventually. In the morning I went to practice and he was already on the ice, and he looked at me when I stepped out, and neither of us mentioned it.

But he looked at me, and I let him.

[THE KINDNESS THAT HAD NO STRATEGY ]

It was a Tuesday in November, and nothing about it was marked in advance.

We had a home game that night. Mid-afternoon, I was in the video room doing my own film prep, something I'd developed the habit of, separate from the team sessions, just me and a screen and forty minutes of an upcoming opponent's footage. I had notes. I was eating a protein bar with the specific joylessness of a person who is fueling a machine and not tasting anything.

The door opened.

Jax came in with two cups of coffee from the good place two blocks from the facility, not the vending machine sludge that the building provided, actual coffee, and set one in front of me without ceremony and sat down in the chair beside mine with the other.

I looked at the coffee. Then at him.

He reached over and hit play on the footage I'd paused.

We watched together for twenty minutes. He said nothing for the first five, and then he pointed at something on screen, a defenseman's tendency to cheat left when pressured on the backhand, and said, quietly, "He does this every game. Third period especially. He gets tired and the habit comes out."

"I noticed that too," I said. "On the goal in the second-to-last game—"

"Same defect. Different angle." He made a note on his own pad. "If you're on his side in the third, he's going to give you an opening and he's not going to know he's doing it."

We talked through the footage. It was the most functional forty minutes we'd had in weeks, not the careful performance of professional interaction, but the real version, two people who were genuinely good at the same thing working through it together.

The session ended. I reached to close the laptop.

"Your contract," he said, without preface.

I went still. "What about it?"

"It comes up for review in the spring. There's going to be interest from other teams." He looked at the screen, not at me. "Significant interest. Two teams in particular are going to offer more than we can counter at the current cap structure."

I looked at him. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you should know." He picked up his coffee. "Because someone should have told you before now and the fact that no one has is a failure of your representation." He paused. "And because I intend to make the case to management to restructure in order to keep you. But I want you to know it's a choice. That you have one."

The room was very quiet.

"You want me to stay," I said. I wasn't being coy. I was being precise.

"I want you to stay," he confirmed, the same precision.

"For the team," I said.

He looked at me, finally. Something in his face that was tired and clear at once.

"Among other reasons," he said.

I picked up my coffee. I took a drink. It was exactly how I'd have ordered it, which meant he had either guessed correctly or had been paying attention for longer than I knew.

"Okay," I said.

He nodded once. He stood, gathered his things, and left. The door clicked quietly behind him.

I sat in the video room in the afternoon light with the coffee and the paused footage and the knowledge that nothing between us had been said clearly, and everything had just been said.