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He looks at me.

I have an answer ready. It comes out of me the way the tape goes on. Slow winter, Fin’s business..

“No,” I say again. “Nothing’s wrong.”

He nods once.

That’s it. He doesn’t ask a second time. He doesn’t lean on it or offer me some movie-coach version of you can talk to me. He takes me at my word because that’s what he does. It’s the worst moment of my week.

“Sleep,” he says. “Two days. Emil takes Ottawa Saturday.”

“Okay.”

“You’re my goaltender.” He’s already turning back to the whiteboard. “Go home.”

I don’t go home.

I drive. It’s a quarter to one in the morning. Nothing is on the road but salt trucks. I take the harbor road because it’s the long way.

I go past my own building at one o’clock. Eleven stories, three lights on, the awning, Arturo behind the desk with a paperback. I don’t slow down.

At one in the morning, the port district is loading docks, chain link, and one dark bar with the sign still on. His street is four blocks from the water. The buildings are low brick. Everything smells like diesel and cold river.

I park. I sit in the truck with the heater ticking as it cools and I don’t have one sentence prepared.

I have nothing to give him. I didn’t bring anything, there’s nothing to sign, no number to discuss, no reason on earth for me to be standing outside a man’s building at one in the morning after a six-two loss except that I don’t want to be in my own apartment.

I get out, go up the steps. The street door buzzes before my hand reaches it.

He’s on the landing when I come up. Shirt sleeves, no shoes, and the hall light is behind him so I can’t see his face at all.

“Twenty-two minutes from the arena,” he says. “You took the harbor road.”

“Yeah.”

“Come inside, it’s four degrees.”

He doesn’t ask about the game. He doesn’t give me the usual line about one bad night, an unstoppable tip, the defense hanging me out on nineteen shots. He takes my coat off the back of my shoulders and hangs it up.

“Bed or couch?”

“Couch.”

“Bed,” he says. “I’m working.”

I lie on top of the covers in my clothes, shoes off, one arm over my eyes. Light from the hall comes through the gap in the door. The laptop makes small sounds in the kitchen.

At some point, he comes in. When I wake at seven, a blanket is over me. I lie there looking at the ceiling of a room in the port district for a long time before I get up.

Suze calls me on Thursday at ten past nine.

“Kieran. Two seconds. What’s Harbor and Main?”

I’m standing in my own kitchen. There’s one clean cup on the rack and everything else is where I left it on Saturday.

“It’s a coffee place.”

“I know what it is. I’ve been in it. Why is forty thousand dollars of their money in your account under a Q1 licensing line that I didn’t put there?”