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Then it was the three of us in a corridor that smelled of popcorn and cold air, and I drove my family home one more time, in a season that was over, with what she’d said to me on the eleventh still standing in the middle of the floor where she’d left it, the word neither of us had put out loud, and the answer she’d agreed to wait on for the length of a series.

I didn’t say it that night. I’d asked her to give me till the end of the series, and the series had ended two hours ago, and a man who waited out a series and then made the biggest move of his life in a dark garage at midnight because he couldn’t keep it in one more minute wasn’t doing it for her. He’d be doing it for himself. So I put Iris down in her clothes, and I went to bed, and I didn’t sleep, and I got up at five and did it right.

I had the coffee on by five-thirty, one cup left in the pot for her, and I couldn’t have said a word about the cup I drank myself.

Then I got the folder out of the drawer in the office and put it on the kitchen table where she’d see it, and I put the index card on top of it, and I got breakfast going, because it was a Tuesday, and on a Tuesday my daughter ate, season or no season, heartbreak or no heartbreak. I cut the banana into seven pieces, which was the correct number, a fact I’d fought wars over. I got the blue plate down for Gerald and put a corner of toast on it, because Gerald didn’t eat but Gerald was served, and I wasn’t willing to run a house where the dragon went hungry.

Iris came up the hall at ten past six with Gerald by the neck and the crown back on, re-taped.

“Did we lose?” she said. She wasn’t sad. She was gathering facts.

“We lost.”

She took that in. “Is Daddy sad?”

“A little.”

“Is Gerald sad?”

“Gerald’s taking it hard.” I set the plate in front of the empty chair. “He’s eating though. That’s a good sign.”

She climbed into her booster, satisfied with the state of the dragon, and ate four of the seven banana pieces and gave two to Gerald, who was having a strong recovery.

Delaney came through her door at six-twenty in the gray sweater with her sleeves pushed up, and she said good morning to my daughter first and to me second, and she crossed to the pot and poured out the cup I’d left in it, milk first, her hip against the counter.

Then she saw the folder.

She stilled, the same as at the pillar, reading it from across the room, her eyes on the index card on top where I’d written one word in block capitals because I wrote everything in block capitals and because one word was all I could get down at five without my hand showing me up.

STAY.

“Eli.”

“Sit down,” I said. “Please. Before you read the top one, so you don’t read it standing up and decide something about me halfway through.”

She sat. Iris was briefing Gerald on the loss two feet away, at volume, with a banana piece as a visual aid. I pulled a chair around so I was between the two of them, my daughter on one side and Delaney on the other, which was where I lived.

“Top one’s your contract,” I said. “The one you signed in August. Page two’s the one about eating with us, in numbered clauses, which Maren tells me you quoted back to her as a felony.”

“I did say that,” she said faintly.

“It’s paid out. All of it, through the summer. There’s a service starting Monday for the pickups and the hours I’m not home. I interviewed them Thursday, between games two and three, in the players’ lounge, which is the only free hour I had.” I kept my voice level, because if it went anywhere I’d lose the thread. “You don’t work for me anymore. That’s done as of this morning. I’m not going to be a man who keeps a woman in his house by signing her paychecks. If you stay, you don’t stay as staff. You couldn’t, now. There’s no job to stay for. I ended it.”

Her hands lay flat on the table.

“Second one,” I said.

She opened the folder under the index card.

They were the school forms. Iris was starting kindergarten in the fall, which was its own grief and not one I was getting into at six in the morning, and the district had sent a stack of them, enrollment and medical and emergency contacts and the release for who was allowed to take her off the property. I’d done them in March, at this table, in my own capitals, every page, and I’d filled in the family line and the emergency contacts and the names a school was allowed to hand my daughter to at the end of a day, and there were two names on every one of them.

Eli Kovac.

Delaney Rhodes.

Every one of them was older than the eleventh, older than anything she’d said to me in this kitchen.

She looked at them for a long time.