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The place is exactly as I left it on Thursday, except worse. Two plates. The suit from Thursday night on the back of the couch. The blinds down on the harbor side, which he never does.

He has an optional skate, a treatment session, and a meeting with the club’s media people that will take nine minutes.

I open the blinds.

Then I stand in his kitchen with my coat off and my sleeves up. I cook for four hours in a room where I’ve stood two hundred times, telling a man about his own money.

The oven works. The knives are terrible. There’s one pan, a good cast-iron one. I find out later it belonged to Fin and came out of their mother’s house.

By half past five the whole apartment smells like garlic, thyme, and chicken. The cranes on the far side of the water have started up their green lights in the murk. I have my glasses on and a dishtowel over my shoulder. I haven’t thought about Vera Lindqvist for four consecutive hours.

That’s the longest since November.

He comes in at six and stops in the doorway.

“What’s that?”

“Dinner.”

He stands in his own hall with his bag on his shoulder, coat still on. His eyes move over the kitchen, the pan, the counter, the garlic, the newspaper around the thyme. He says nothing for about eight seconds.

“You cooked.”

“Come and eat it.”

He eats an enormous amount the way athletes do, without ceremony or stopping. Then he goes back for three helpings of potatoes. He finishes the bread. He doesn’t say one word about the second game, the footage request, or the fact that his club has him on the ice at optional skates and off it at everything else.

He talks about a roof instead. Fin’s landlord’s roof is failing. Fin has offered to strip and re-sheet it in exchange for two months off the rent. Kieran gives me a full account of what a square of architectural shingles costs at the yard up there. I let him talk for a quarter of an hour and ask two questions about the flashing to keep him going.

Halfway through the second helping, he stops with the fork in the air.

“This is my mother’s pan,” he says.

“It was in the cupboard under the stove.”

“I know where it was.” He turns the pan on the stove with two fingers, looking at the handle. “Fin gave it to me when I got this place. He drove it over. He wouldn’t come up. He handed it to me in the lobby in a shopping bag, said it was the only thing worth taking out of that house, and then got back in the truck.”

He goes back to eating.

“Nobody’s cooked in it,” he says.

“For how long?”

“For four years.”

Then he washes the dishes, which he doesn’t let me touch. Afterward he lies on the couch to watch four minutes of a game in another city.

At half past eight I come out with two coffees, and he’s asleep.

There’s a bag of frozen peas strapped to the front of his left hip with a tensor bandage over his track pants.

I put the coffees down.

“Kieran.”

Nothing.

“Kieran.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You can’t sleep here.”