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Kieran stops thirty-one in Buffalo, and Ashgate wins two to nothing.

Three days later, he stops twenty-eight in Pittsburgh, and they win in overtime. Nils Haugen tells four reporters in a corridor that the team isn’t being carried, which is a sentence that means the opposite, and every person in the corridor knows it.

I file on Monday at 12:11.

CONDITION. Nothing logged with the club, nothing requested from the trainers. Sleeping six to seven. Travel tolerated. Will start both ends of the back-to-back in the coming week.

I don’t write down that he stands up out of chairs in two movements instead of one.

Vera calls me at nine on Tuesday.

“Eleven thousand four hundred,” she says, without a greeting. “That’s what the last two lines of your report were worth. Nobody outside that building knew he was starting both ends of a back-to-back, and by the time anybody did, the price had moved. I was already in. I’ve credited it against the balance.”

“Credited how?”

“Off the principal. It’s his account. His information.” A page turning. “Don’t sound like that.”

“I don’t sound like anything.”

“You sound like a man who’s just discovered his work affects people,” she says pleasantly. “It’s a rather late discovery, Marek. Keep them coming. I want the condition line every Monday. If it changes, I want it that day, not the Monday after.”

“He’ll see the credit.”

“He’ll see eleven thousand four hundred come off a balance of one point four million and he’ll think somebody made an adjustment, because that’s what men think when a number goes down.” A pause. “And if he asks you, you’ll tell him it was an adjustment. You’ll be telling him the truth, because that’s what it is.”

She hangs up first. She always hangs up first.

Eleven thousand four hundred dollars for two sentences about a man’s travel week. The club had already decided the lineup. Nobody was harmed by Vera knowing it a day early.

I’ve said versions of that to myself for nine years, in an office, alone, and it’s always held. It holds now.

It just no longer does anything for me.

On Thursday, I’m supposed to be there at seven.

I’m on Weyburn at ten past six.

There’s a parking space on the harbor side with a view of the lobby door, and I take it. I turn the engine off and sit.

The lobby is lit. A heavy older man sits behind the desk with a radio going. Beyond him are the elevators. An eighth-floor window is lit; it may or may not be Kieran’s. I’ve never confirmed which one is his. Doing that would require me to look up from the street and count.

I have the key in my coat pocket. I could go up at ten past six as easily as at seven.

I don’t.

I sit in a cold car for fifty minutes on a Thursday evening because the schedule I printed says seven. At seven o’clock exactly, I get out, cross the road, and use a key I have no right to use.

On Saturday, I do it again.

Ten past six, the same space, the same fifty minutes, the radio off. Rain this time, coming across the harbor in sheets. The wipers off and the windshield so watery that the lobby is a smear of yellow.

Fifty minutes. I know how long it is because I look at the clock on the dash eleven times.

At two minutes to seven, the rain eases enough to see the doorway. A man comes out of the lobby with a dog on a lead and stands under the canopy waiting for it to stop. Goes back in.

I’ve done a great many things in twenty years without looking at them, and I’ve never had to sit still for fifty minutes.

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