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Thursday is a home game against Ottawa.

I don’t need to be there. As Kieran Doyle’s financial representative, I can have a legitimate seat in the building any night I want one. The credential exists. Priya Raman’s office issued it. It costs nothing, appears nowhere.

At 4:15, I go onto the club’s website like a member of the public and buy a single ticket in section 214 for eighty-eight dollars.

I don’t have a reason.

I haven’t been inside a rink as a paying customer in nineteen years.

I haven’t thought about that in years. On the escalator, the smell of the rink brings it back—fryer oil, wet rubber matting, the particular cold that comes off a sheet of ice, settling on the back of your neck. My mother couldn’t come to my games because of her hours. My father came to almost all of them. He stood in the corner by the gate at the outdoor sheet on Corliss Street because standing was free, hands buried in his coat.

Nineteen. A car outside the rink. A man with an envelope, very friendly, saying it was for gas money. More than my father made in a month. I took it without asking what I already knew. After that: no spring camp. No invitations to anything. No one spoke to me about it. Not one adult in that building picked up a telephone.

I go up the stairs into section 214 with my coat still buttoned. I watch the third period from the tunnel mouth, two hundred people between me and the ice. Nobody here knows who I am. Beside me, a man in a jersey eats nachos while shouting at a linesman.

Down there—a hundred and forty feet away, the size of a thumbnail—is a man in white pads. He pushes off, slides, stops. Stands up. Taps the left post twice, the right post twice. Settles.

He does that after every whistle. I’ve watched two periods now. Every single time, he taps the posts without looking at his stick, skates, or the clock. Nobody in this building seems to notice. Eleven thousand people are watching him, yet almost none are watching that. I stand in the tunnel mouth counting his stick taps.

With four minutes left, Ottawa gets a two-on-one. The pass comes across. Kieran is there before the puck arrives. He takes it in the glove, raises it. The crowd comes up all at once. My hands grip the rail.

Ashgate wins three to one. He faces twenty-six.

At the horn, the building rises. The man with nachos hits my arm, cheerful, raving about the third goal. I nod.

I ride down the escalator with the crowd, blue jerseys all around. Past merchandise, past pretzels, into a night that’s turned cold. The eighty-eight dollars stays off the books.

There’s a line for it. I could claim the ticket as client entertainment or travel attendance. I’ve claimed a hundred such expenses in nine years; Vera has never queried one. I could also have had the seat free on a credential her own arrangement paid for.

I bought the ticket with my own money. I stood at the back. I didn’t tell him I was there.

The stub goes in my coat pocket and stays there.

He’s standing beside my car in the public structure on level four when I come out.

He must have been in the building for the entire game, a gray coat somewhere in the crowd. I didn’t see him.

“Roth.”

He doesn’t say anything back. He takes his hands out of his coat pockets, which is what he does when he’s going to be here for more than eleven seconds, and he waits with his weight on both feet.

“How’s the account progressing?”

“On schedule.”

He nods. He looks at the concrete pillar past my shoulder. A family passes behind him, arguing about where they parked. A car alarm chirps two rows over. He waits until both are silent.

“How’s the account progressing?”

Exactly the same words, at exactly the same speed. He does this. He’s done it to me perhaps thirty times over nine years. It’s never been personal. I’ve watched two men come apart in front of him inside four minutes.

There’s nothing to gain by making him ask a third time. Nobody gets anything out of Roth by waiting him out. He gives you nothing to outlast.

“The balance is unmoved. It will still be unmoved next month,” I say. “He accepted the manager structure without amendment. I have his schedule, his mail. He hasn’t spoken to a lawyer, accountant, or his agent about any of it. Reporting is on time. If you want a number, there’s not one yet. That’s the progress.”

Roth takes a small notebook from his inside pocket, then a pen. He writes without hurry, never showing me the page. It takes him a while. Whatever he’s writing is longer than what I said.

I’ve known this man for nine years. I don’t know where he lives, whether he’s married, what he does on Sundays, or if he’s ever been angry at anyone. Three weeks ago, he broke Fintan Doyle’s hand.