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“Why not?”

“Because then,” Vera says, “I would have to think about why you offered it. I would prefer not to do that for a little longer.”

She squares the page, holds it out. I take it back.

I’ve had the words ready since the quay Saturday night. She’s known me since I was twenty-nine. In nine years I’ve never asked her for a raise, a week off, a favor at Christmas. This is me asking.

I don’t say it. She knows all of it.

“You’ve done well by me,” she says mildly, as though she heard the whole speech anyway. “I’d like that to continue. For the next six weeks you can file your reports, take your fee, and finish the year as the second-best-paid person in my organization. I would be perfectly happy with that. It requires nothing you haven’t already been doing since November.”

“And the other version?”

“There isn’t another version. There’s this one, and then there’s a man I used to work with.” She turns her chair a few degrees toward the window. “Your father was a container man, wasn’t he?”

“Twenty-two years on the yard.”

“Then you know what happens to anything that isn’t tied down.”

Then she says, without any change in her voice at all:

“How long have you been sleeping at his apartment?”

The heating ticks in the wall.

“I work late there. He’s on the road half the month.”

“That isn’t the question I asked.” She puts the glasses back on, turns to her screen. “Next Tuesday, Marek. Go and do your job.”

Wednesday, I take the bus, which I haven’t done in nineteen years.

Thursday, the money lands in the Brandt Financial operating account: a hundred ninety thousand, five hundred dollars, the entire liquid remainder of a life. It sits there doing nothing.

Friday, he’s in Vancouver. Saturday, too. He wins one, loses one. Monday, I go to the arena.

I have a manifest pass, a photograph on a lanyard, a legitimate reason to be in the building, and I use all of it to stand in a corridor outside the coaches’ offices at half past four in the afternoon with my hands in my pockets like a man waiting on a delayed train.

They post the lineup on a corkboard beside the door. A woman from operations comes out with four pins in her mouth, puts it up, goes back in, and shuts the door.

I wait until she’s gone before I walk over to read it. I don’t need to. I do it anyway.

G — DOYLE (S)

G — SANDOVAL

That’s all it is. Characters on a printout pinned to a corkboard in a corridor that smells like floor wax. I read it four times through my reading glasses. The assistant equipment manager passes with a laundry cart.

Then I take off the glasses and put them in my pocket. I don’t put them back on for the rest of the day.

Four months ago, I would have photographed that corkboard. At eleven minutes past midnight, I would have attached it to a Sunday report with starter confirmed underneath. A confirmed starter twenty-eight hours ahead of a market is worth four thousand dollars to Vera Lindqvist. I’ve made her that money nine times since November.

I go out through the loading bay past the beer trucks, and I don’t photograph anything.

The lot is half empty. Thin March rain has started, not quite finished being snow. I stand at the end of the row for a minute before I remember I sold the car Tuesday. The bus leaves from the far side of the beltway.

I walk it. Twenty-five minutes later, I’m wet through at the shelter. A woman with two children gets on ahead of me, carrying a hockey bag bigger than either child. One kid has a goalie stick with the paddle taped in the way I recognize from Weyburn.

He comes to my apartment at half past ten that night.