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“You don’t decide who approaches him,” she says. “You don’t decide when. You aren’t the perimeter; you’re the desk. I would have thought that was a distinction you’d be comfortable with after nine years.”

The container yard is behind her out the window. A straddle carrier is walking a forty-foot box down a lane at four miles an hour.

“Understood,” I say.

“Say the rest.”

“The promise I gave him is worth nothing.”

“Correct.” She picks the glasses back up and puts them on. “Weekly report on Monday. I want the Buffalo and Pittsburgh travel in it. I want to know why a twenty-seven-year-old goaltender is on the ice ninety minutes before anyone else in that building every single morning.”

“Because it’s how he settles himself.”

“That’s a sentence about his character. I asked about his body.” She turns back to the window. “Everybody who’s ever bet on hockey knows what a goaltender’s numbers say. Almost nobody knows what his mornings say. Find out what’s going on and put it in the report.”

Here’s what I don’t do.

I don’t go back and tell him. It would take eleven minutes. I could stand in his kitchen on Sunday and say, what I told you on Friday wasn’t mine to promise. The man in the lobby was sent by the woman I work for. If she wants him back in that chair, he’ll be there. Eleven minutes, and Kieran would know exactly what he’s standing in.

He gave me a spare key on Friday. He worked it off a stiff ring with his thumbnail in the doorway. It took him half a minute. Neither of us spoke.

I don’t tell him.

I’ve written down the reasons why, and they’re all sound. Telling him buys him nothing operationally. Telling him will frighten him, and a frightened man calls a lawyer. A man who calls a lawyer ends up in a room with the league and then in a room with federal attorneys. Every one of those is true.

None of them is why I don’t tell him. What I do instead is print the schedule again.

It’s been on his refrigerator since the last week of November, held up by a magnet from a plumbing supply company. It has my hours on it in the right-hand column: Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, one to four, which is when a financial manager would reasonably be in a client’s home going through paperwork.

I reprint it with the column changed.

Sunday evening. Tuesday evening. Thursday evening. Saturdays when he’s home. I cross-reference against the club schedule, practice times, treatment log. I slot my hours into every window where the apartment holds only him. It’s not a lie—I will be there.

I let myself in on Sunday at ten past four with a key I haven’t put on a ring.

He’s not home. The apartment is very clean and very empty. There’s one plate in the rack and one glass, both washed. The couch has a blanket folded over the arm. There’s nothing on the walls but a framed photograph in the hall of two boys on an outdoor rink, the taller one about nine, the smaller one holding a stick that’s too long for him by a foot.

I take the old schedule off the refrigerator, replace it under the same magnet, and put the old copy in my coat pocket.

Then I stand in the middle of his kitchen with my hands at my sides.

I’ve been inside a great many homes belonging to men who owed money, and I could identify every one of them by its objects. The one in Sudbury had eleven guitars. There was a man out by the airport with a wall of watches in a case with a light in it, and he cried about losing the watches, not his wife.

This apartment has a couch, a table, four chairs, a television nobody has plugged the second cable into, and a photograph of two boys on an outdoor rink. Eight hundred square feet on a harbor view that costs what it costs, and a man lives here who could buy the building. There’s one plate in the rack.

He isn’t saving. I have his accounts. He isn’t spending, either. He moves money out the door on the first business day of the month, then leaves the rest sitting there as if no one has ever asked what he wants.

I go and look at the photograph in the hall.

The taller boy has an arm around the smaller one, grinning at whoever holds the camera. The smaller boy isn’t looking at the camera. He’s staring down the ice at something out of frame with an expression that hasn’t changed in eighteen years.

I let myself out.

Suze Okafor takes forty seconds on the manifest.

“Buffalo and Pittsburgh. You want to be on the travel party.”

“There are three signature-level items in the next month, and I’d rather do them in a hotel lobby than by email. He doesn’t read email.”