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"You told me in the kitchen you'd tell me the minute you were ready," he says. "You said I'd be the first. Now you've stood in a room and told four people it was nothing."

"It's not nothing. You know it's not nothing."

"I know." He takes a step back, up one stair. "They don't. You made sure."

"Rémy—"

"Say it's not a mistake," he says. "Right now. Here. Nobody's listening. It's a stairwell."

I open my mouth.

Above us, a door bangs open on one of the upper floors. Footsteps start coming down. Somebody's whistling. It's a housekeeper, maybe, or a guest, or anybody. It doesn't matter who.

I close my mouth.

He watches me do it. I watch him watch me.

"Okay," he says. Very softly. "Okay."

He turns around. He goes up the stairs, not down. Past the person coming the other way, a man in a hotel uniform with a cart of towels, who nods at him and keeps whistling.

I stand there on the landing until the whistling fades. Then I sit down on the step, the way I sat on the step in Santa Monica, with my elbows on my knees and my hands hanging between them.

Nobody crouches down in front of me this time. Nobody puts a hand on my chest and tells me to breathe.

I sit there until it's time for morning skate. Then I get up, and I go do my job.

Chapter Twenty-Six

RÉMY

At morning skate, Priya hands both of us the same index card.

We don't comment on rumors. Our focus is on game four.

"Word for word," she says, not quite looking at either of us. "Please."

The reporters are waiting outside the dressing room, a lot more of them than usual, and they don't ask about game four. They ask about room 814. They ask about the ice machine. One of them asks me, straight out, if I'm in a relationship with my captain.

"We don't comment on rumors," I say. "Our focus is on game four."

Word for word. I'm very good at it now.

Owen's ten feet away, at his own stall, with his hair still wet, saying the exact same sentence to his own wall of cameras. I don't look at him. I can hear him, though. His reporter voice. Steady. Calm. Nothing in it at all.

It was a mistake. He said it in that voice too.

Beth is in the lobby after skate, at her little table by the elevators with her clipboard and her box of key cards.

"I need a different room," I tell her.

She looks up. She looks at me for a long moment over her reading glasses, and I can tell she's seen the picture. Everybody's seen the picture.

"Rémy," she says gently. "I don't have a single. I didn't have one in Toronto, either."

"I don't need a single. Sorel's rooming with Adeyemi. Adeyemi can switch with me."

"Does Adeyemi know that?"