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I tell him. Not everything — I don’t have the words for everything yet — but the shape of it: the scout, the agent, the meeting, the question of whether the Bruins will wait a year. Beau listens the way he does, with his whole attention and no interruptions, and when I’m done he’s quiet for a long moment.

“You want the degree,” he says. Not a question.

“Yeah.”

“Good.” He says it like it’s settled. “Don’t let anybody tell you that’s the wrong call. You’ve been building that thing for three years. It’s yours.” He shifts the ice pack on his shoulder, winces slightly, ignores it. “Reiss is solid, by the way. Two guys I know from juniors signed with him. He’s not a shark.”

“You know every agent.”

“I know people. It’s a different thing.” A pause, the kind that means he’s shifting gears. “There’s something else I wanted to say.”

And here it comes. I’ve been waiting for it since Burlington.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Margo.”

“Beau —”

“I know.” He cuts it off easy, not unkind. “I’ve known for a while. Sloane told me after New Year’s — she saw her come down the stairs that morning and she didn’t say anything to Margo about it, but she told me.” He looks at me straight. “She wasn’t gossiping. She was making sure I wasn’t going to make it weird, because she knows I’m your teammate and she knows Margo’s her best friend and she’s been managing the overlap since January.”

Of course Sloane knew. Sloane always knows. It’s one of the things that makes her terrifying.

“It’s not serious,” I say.

Beau looks at me for a long moment. “No?”

“It’s —” I stop. The word that comes up first is arrangement, which is accurate and completely wrong at the same time. “It’s complicated.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t push. He lets the word sit in the room and lets me hear how it sounds. Complicated. For a man who built his whole system on simplicity — box it, contain it, call it what it is — complicated is not a category. Complicated is what you say when the category broke and you haven’t fixed it yet. “Here’s the thing,” Beau says. “And I’m only saying this once, because it’s not my business and after this you can tell me to shut up and I will. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I know what you look like when you’re not thinking about something.” He lets that land. “I’ve played with you for two-and-a-half years. I know when you’re in your head and I know when you’ve actually let go of it. And this year, since roughly September, there are moments — a few of them, not many — where you look like you’ve let go. Like the weight took a minute off.” He pauses. “Those moments track with Margo. That’s all I’m saying.”

I don’t say anything.

“She’s good for you, man,” Beau says, quiet. Certain. “She’s the only person I’ve ever seen make you look like you forgot to be the wall for a minute. And I don’t know what the two of you have worked out, and I don’t need to. But whatever it is — it’s not nothing. And you know it’s not nothing.”

He says it and then he gets up to make a sandwich, because that’s Beau: drops the true thing and walks away and lets you have it in private, because he’s known since freshman year that I can’t receive things with an audience.

I stand in the kitchen with a glass of water and the card in my pocket and three unresolved things on my chest, and I let myself admit, in a room with nobody watching, that he’s right.

It’s not nothing. It stopped being nothing a long time ago, and the arrangement was supposed to be the container, and the container is gone, and what I’ve been doing for three weeks is walking around with a handful of something I don’t have a vessel for, pretending the handful is a plan.

She’s good for you.

The thing about Beau saying that is he means it the way he means everything — measured, considered, certain. He didn’t say it to be kind. He said it because it’s true, and because he’s my best friend in the way Cash is Wyatt’s, the way that means he’ll say the true thing even when it costs him something, and I can count on my one hand the people in my life who do that.

I wash my glass. Put it away. And I stand there for a second longer than I need to, thinking about a girl on a hotel corridor in Vermont, and the way she looked when she opened the door, and what she said after, and the calm certainty of we’re okay in the dark.

The no-condom thing hasn’t left me. I said it first — set it down between us the way I set down everything true, plain and without decoration — and she was steady, and she told me we were okay, and I believed her because she said it the way she says the things she means. Not the bright version. The real one. So I don’t lie awake about the risk.

I lie awake about what the not-thinking means.

I’m the one who always thinks. It’s the one constant in my life, the one thing I can count on about myself: I don’t leave gaps. Not on the ice, not off it. I assess, I plan, I close the thing that could hurt me before it has the chance. And I didn’t reach for my wallet, didn’t think about it at all until after — and she didn’t either, and neither of us said anything until I said it, and the only explanation that makes any sense is that the arrangement’s container broke a long time ago and we’ve both been pretending it didn’t, and you don’t forget the drawer with someone who still lives in a box. You forget it when the box is already gone.

I add the month’s transfer to the tally. It’s the same number it always is, reliable as a clock, which is what his presence in my life has always been: regular, impersonal, there without being there. I look at the running total and I think about the agent card in my pocket and the Bruins and what it would mean to zero this number out and how bad I want it and how it’s sitting differently this week than it did three weeks ago, before Burlington, before the hotel room, before she’s good for you from the mouth of my best friend in a kitchen that still smells like whatever Cash burned last Thursday.