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“Nobody’s ever put it like that,” he said.

“Somebody should have.”

Half his face was in the lamplight and the rest of him was in shadow. There were four feet of ordinary upholstery between us, and his hand was open on his knee, and I knew to the inch how far I’d have to lean to put mine in it. Nothing was going to happen tonight, and neither of us closed the four feet.

Then he stood up.

“You should go to bed,” he said. “She’s up at six-ten.”

“She’s always up at six-ten.”

“I know.”

I picked my book up off his coffee table, and my laptop and my bag, and I made it as far as the side hall. Then I stopped. There was a container on the counter by the sink, washed and dried and set upside down on a dish towel, the lid beside it, both of them squared to the same fold.

He’d eaten out of it in the locker room and washed it there, and carried it home clean, and set it out on the towel while I’d been pretending to read. He’d done it ahead of the glass of water and the conversation and sitting down.

“Goodnight, Eli,” I said.

“Goodnight.”

CHAPTER 9

Eli

I’d known about the involvement day for weeks. Practice ran straight through the middle of it, non-negotiable in October. I’d asked Delaney the evening the flyer turned up in Iris’s cubby folder, and she’d said yes before I finished the sentence.

I hadn’t thanked her. I’d nodded and turned back to the peppers in the pan.

She knew about the coffee and the backup crackers and which side of Iris’s bed Gerald slept on. I’d asked her because I wanted somebody there who would actually see Iris, not just be present for her. I wanted somebody who’d notice when her face changed and know which chair was Gerald’s.

I’d wanted it to be her. There was nothing else in the sentence.

Practice was good. The arena lights were up full over an empty bowl, no shadow under anybody’s skates, and my first three strides bit clean into fresh sheet.

Cole dropped onto the bench beside me at the end of a line change.

“Missing the school thing this morning.”

“Practice.”

“Sure.” Cole drank his water and put it down. “Nanny go?”

“Yeah.”

Cole nodded slowly and didn’t say the sentence he had loaded up behind it. He wore the expression he got when he was adding a number to a column. “Hard to find someone Iris actually likes.”

I took the ice again for the first rush of the drill and put a man into the boards a shade harder than I needed to. The glass boomed down the length of it. The hit traveled back through my shoulder into my ribs, and it was the first thing all morning that quieted my head down. Calloway saw it and didn’t blow the whistle.

My phone was going off on the bench near the end of practice. I carried it to the boards and stripped a glove to work the screen, and my bare hand stiffened in the cold inside a few seconds.

Delaney had sent one photo with no text.

It showed Iris at a low table, paper crown on her head, one elbow anchoring the corner of the paper and the other hand dragging the brush across the project in front of her. Gerald was in the chair beside her, pulled up to the table as if I’d registered him for the event too. The crown was sideways. Iris hadn’t fixed it.

I saved it. I didn’t text back.

She hadn’t fixed the crown because she didn’t care how it sat, only whether the painting worked. I’d been like that at her age. My mother used to say so. It was the same stubbornness, the same tunnel focus, the same total indifference to presentation when the work mattered. I’d never told anybody about it. Delaney had picked that one frame out of the morning and sent it with no message. She’d guessed I wouldn’t need the words. I needed the photo.