I leave it. I take the pen back and write nothing, because writing the answers myself isn't the point and never was. I set it down parallel to the long edge because that's how it lives on his table. I go stir a sauce that doesn't need stirring, and the fear I've been outrunning all night catches up to me at the stove with my back to him. He's two rooms deep in himself. I can't find the door. I read everyone. I read shooters before they shoot and teammates before they know their own faces. And I'm standing in his kitchen unable to read the one person I'd give anything to be right about.
I come around behind him with the plate and put my hand on the back of his neck the way I do, as I've done since a hotel in Tampa when I learned his neck was a place my hand could go and the rest of him would ease. My hand lands. For a quarter second nothing eases. For a quarter second he's a man with a stranger's hand on him, every line of him deciding, and then he leans back into it on purpose and gives me the ease, hands it over like a thing he had to go to another room to get.
"That's nice," he says.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Keep your hand there."
I keep my hand there. It used to be the one place on him that never had to think about it. Tonight he thought about it. I felt the half-second where my hand was a question instead of an answer. I felt him choose to say yes. A yes you have to choose is a different animal than the one I've had all season, and I hold his neck and I don't say any of that. Tonight's rule, the one neither of us wrote down, is that we don't say any of it.
"Did you see them?" I ask. "Your mom."
"Tomorrow. The one night."
"You should go. Take the whole night. I'll handle the morning skate, tell Bodie you're with family." The fixing reflex says it before I can stop it, the whole plan assembled and offered. Make their life easier. Remove an obstacle. Be useful until the wall comes down.
"I don't need you to handle it. I'll be at skate." There's an edge on it, thin and tired, gone almost before it lands.
"I just meant if you wanted the time."
"I know what you meant." And he pulls it back, gives me that much. "Sorry. I know what you meant."
I plate the food. "Leave the dishes after. I'll do them."
"I can do my own dishes."
"I know you can. Leave them." I set the plate down. "Tell me if I'm doing too much."
"You're not doing too much."
"You're fine. It's not you. I'm tired, and my family is exhausting, and the series is long. That's all it's." He says it like a thing he's reciting, true in every clause. I count the clauses and notice none of them is the one I'm afraid of. I don't make him say that one.
"You'd tell me," I say. "If it was me."
"I'd tell you."
"Would you, though."
"Soren." He sets the pen down. "Drop it. Please."
So I drop it, because he asked, because the please had a crack in it I've never heard from him, and dropping it's the worst thing I do all night, because dropping it means leaving him alone in whatever room he's in, and I've built my whole life on never leaving anyone alone in a room, and he just asked me to, and I'm doing it. He picks up the fork. He doesn't eat.
I'm wiping down a counter that's already clean when he speaks again, quiet, to the crossword.
"Twelve across is lagoon."
"What?"
"Sheltered water. Six letters. It's lagoon. I had it." He doesn't look up. "I had it the whole time you were asking. I don't know why I said I didn't."
He says it like a confession. It's one. The smallest possible version of the thing neither of us is naming, because the man doesn't leave wrong data standing, it isn't in him, and "I don't know" was wrong data, and his brain made him come back and fix the record even when nothing else will get fixed tonight. Lagoon and steady. I had them both, too, sitting right there in the grid, and I couldn't say them to him in any way that counted. There's no clue for that.
"Lagoon," I say. "Yeah. That's it. Eat before you sleep. I'll leave it on the stove."
"I'll."
"Promise me you'll eat."
