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Fin comes to the Saturday game.

He has the splint on still, six weeks in. The pins are in two of the fingers and the surgeon says he’ll be in the splint for another four weeks. He sits in the seat I leave for him in the family section and stands up for both goals.

We eat after, at the place across from the arena that stays open late for the players and charges accordingly.

He talks through the entire appetizer: the two spring bids, the school district job, Marcus’s baby. A girl, due in April. He orders steak, changes it to chicken, then switches back when I look at him.

Then the plates go and he puts his good hand flat on the table.

“I want to sell the house.”

I put my fork down.

“Hear me out. It’s paid down to about a hundred and ten. It’ll go for three eighty, maybe three ninety with the roof I put on it. That’s two seventy toward it, Kieran. Two hundred and seventy thousand dollars. That’s real. That’s not a bid. That’s a check.”

“No.”

“I’ll rent. There are places out past the crossing for four hundred a month, guys I know⁠—”

“No.”

“You don’t get to just say no.” His voice rises, and the couple at the next table look over at him. He lowers it again. “It’s my debt. My mess. You said it yourself in the truck. Why do I not get to pay one dollar of my own mess?”

He’s not going to sit down for the rest of this. He’s half standing already, one hand on the chair back. He stays like that, hovering over a table with a splint on his hand and a dessert menu he’s never going to look at.

“Because it’s two hundred and seventy against one point four,” I say. “It doesn’t clear it. It doesn’t come close. All it does is take your house away and leave you owing the same people the same money with nowhere to sleep. That isn’t a payment. It’s giving them something for free because it makes you feel better.”

He sits back. “And what are you doing?”

“I’m handling it.”

“How?”

“I’m handling it.”

He looks at me for a while. My brother has never been able to keep anything off his face. What I see there now is what I’ve been outrunning since November.

“You’ve got somebody,” he says. “That guy. Brandt. He paid my men out of a bag, Kieran. He put a lock on my gate. You told me he was yours, and I’ve been telling myself for six weeks that that means you hired him.”

“Leave it, Fin.”

“Kieran.”

“I’m handling it,” I say. “You’re going to keep your house. If you bring this up again, I’m going to stop coming to dinner.”

He doesn’t bring it up again.

I take the check. He reaches for it with the splint, holding that hand up the way he does now to prove he can. I slide the check out from under him and pay it. In the parking lot, he hugs me one-armed before getting into his truck.

The apartment is dark when I come in at eleven forty, except for the light off a laptop screen.

He’s in the chair by the door. It isn’t a chair anybody sits in; it’s the one I put my bag on. He has the laptop open on his knees with one hand still on it. His head is back against the wall, mouth slightly open. He’s completely under.

His reading glasses are on the arm of the chair, folded.

There are papers on the floor by his foot in three small stacks, weighted with his phone, his keys, and a coffee cup with nothing in it.

The heat is on. The dishwasher has been run and emptied. There’s a bag of oranges on the counter that I didn’t buy. The mail is opened and stacked. The empty water glass by the sink has been rinsed and left to drain.