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She doesn’t say anything about it.

Tova’s bedroom door is open at the top of the stairs. The desk I bought is green. She painted it herself, and nobody asked me what I thought.

We text Tova normal amounts. Astrid doesn’t ask whether I saw the blue check beside her last message. I don’t mention that she checks the clock every evening around the time Sweden wakes up.

I thought I understood what one kid could do to a house.

I did not.

Colorado comes in on the fifth night, three points back with a game in hand, which is the kind of math that ends up printed over a photograph of somebody’s face.

I take nineteen draws and win fourteen.

Nothing I do goes in the net. Ryan’s does, off the far post with four minutes left in the second, from a puck I put on his tape without looking at him, and the building makes the noise it makes when a game stops being a worry.

With ninety seconds left Sully sends me out for the defensive-zone draw with their goalie on the bench. I get low, make their center wait for me, and put it back to Evan clean.

Brick finds me on the bench afterward.

“You’re welcome,” he says.

“For what?”

“Existing behind you.”

Ryan knocks his glove against my shin on the way past the stall and says nothing, which from him is a speech.

I take my gloves off and sit there a while.

It didn’t do it. Not on the draw, not along the wall, not once in sixteen minutes of hockey.

I drive home flexing the left hand on the wheel at every light, and it answers at every one of them.

Tonight Astrid is at the piano.

I hear her from the kitchen while I’m opening a beer, one note and then another, and I stop with the cap still in my hand.

She has played since the piano came into the house, but mostly when she thinks nobody is listening. I have caught pieces through a wall or from the stairs. Once I came in from the garage and she stopped before I got my shoes off.

This is different.

She plays nothing like she talks.

Astrid speaks as if every word should have a job before she lets it out. She can make an entire argument in six sentences and still look at me like I’m wasting oxygen when I need twelve.

The piano gets paragraphs.

Maybe pages.

The music fills the living room. Her left hand drives underneath while the right climbs, answers, comes back harder. There’s control in it, because there’s control in everything she does well, but nothing restrained.

I forget about the beer.

My left fingers begin to tingle, two of them first and then the edge of my palm, and I press them hard against my thigh until the pressure comes back.

The music keeps going.

Good.