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CHAPTER 1

Eli

The hockey shirt was non-negotiable.

I’d established this before the sun was all the way up, standing in Iris’s doorway holding a perfectly reasonable yellow sundress while she stared me down from the center of her bed. Arms crossed. Chin up. Already wearing the jersey.

Number forty-four. My number. The hem hit her mid-thigh and the sleeves swallowed her hands completely. It was intended for her to wear when she got a little bit bigger, but she’d gotten into it before I woke up, which told me she’d been planning this, and the stern set of her brows said the conversation was already over.

I hung the yellow sundress back on its hook and went to start breakfast.

This was how mornings worked. I made scrambled eggs the shaky way, which was just me scrambling them in the pan and not in a bowl first, per Iris’s standing order, and watched the clock while answering a team group chat that had dissolved into a debate about whether Phoenix had a single good diner. Iris appeared in the kitchen a short while later with her light-up runners on the wrong feet and a barrette clipped into her hair at an angle she’d done entirely by feel. I fixed the shoes. Left the barrette. She was proud of doing her own hair and who was I to judge her fashion sense.

I had just enough time and not one minute past it.

My phone buzzed on the counter.

Katya: Can we do a call with Iris this week? Thursday maybe.

I read it twice. Katya’s messages came in clusters. Nothing for weeks, then a burst, always casual and always leaving the door open without walking through it. I’d spent a long time being angry about the inconsistency and had eventually reached a point where I could tolerate it. It wasn’t necessarily forgiveness or even indifference, just me resigned to the flat steady management of a fact that wasn’t going to change. Iris deserved a father who could handle the moods of her mother and shield her from them. I typed back.

Me: Thursday works

Then I put the phone face down.

The calls went fine. Iris talked about whatever was important to her that week, lately whether dragons counted as dinosaurs, and Katya listened and said the right things and Iris waved goodbye when it ended and went on about her day. It was fine. Because I had made it fine.

My approach to most things since coming to Phoenix was to decide something was manageable, build around it, and maintain the structure for the two of us. Two years ago I’d had a relationship—not the best or healthiest one—and a career and Iris. Now I had a career and Iris and a house in Glendale with a casita attached, where the neighbor’s kids left chalk drawings on the sidewalk and the grocery store was a quick drive from the front door, and there was a park in our neighborhood we could walk to. I didn’t talk about what had changed. There was nothing useful in talking about it. I had Iris. She was fine; healthy, happy, and loud at breakfast. That was the only measurement that mattered.

The text from the sitter came in while I was rinsing the pan from breakfast.

Kim: So sorry, family thing came up, can’t make it today. Will make it up to you next week!!

I took off my hat and ran my hand through my hair and sighed. Iris stopped eating and was watching me, still and alert.

“Are you mad?” she asked.

“No.” I rubbed a palm down my face, then pasted on a smile. It was for her. Everything was for her.

She held my gaze a moment, unconvinced, then pointed at her toast. “I need more butter.”

I got the butter. I’d learned early that Iris was perceptive, concrete, and direct, a kid who paid attention. She didn’t analyze. She just asked are you mad and moved on, which was more efficient than most adults I knew.

I ran through my options while she finished eating. My neighbor was in Tucson until Friday. My mother was back in Winnipeg. The backup sitter from the fall had moved to Denver. I’d seen it coming and hadn’t replaced her because the system was holding, and now the morning had gotten away from me and I had even less time to figure out a plan.

Iris was watching me again.

“Can I come to work with you?” she asked.

I refilled her water bottle and started packing her bag and threw a lunch together for her.

The Sidewinders facility sat on the west side of Glendale and smelled exactly like every hockey facility I’d ever been in. Cold rubber and ice, the sharp clean scent of it hit a person the moment the outer doors swung open. I’d been walking into rinks since I was three years old. That smell was the most consistent thing in my life. In Winnipeg it meant early Saturday mornings with my father, the city still dark, the arena half-lit and half-empty. In Phoenix it meant a cold building in a desert where the parking lot was already warm and the mountains sat low on the horizon and nothing about the setting made any sense for the sport.

Iris and I made our way to the boards. She stopped and tried to see over them, too small to get her chin to the top.

I picked her up and held her so she could see the Zamboni finish its last pass on the ice. She went quiet, fully focused, and not fidgeting. She’d been like this at her first game at two years old, leaning forward in my arms while the crowd made noise all around her.

She tapped the glass twice. “Done,” she said.