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"It doesn't, legally. They'll ask anyway. They want to see if you get angry, and if you get angry, they'll use it in the settlement talks. So you don't get angry. You tell the truth, calm, short, and you let me object to anything that's none of their business."

"What if I don't know."

"Know what?"

"Why it ended."

The light turns green. I don't move. Somebody behind me honks, and I go.

Saul is quiet for a long moment on the other end of the line.

"Owen," he says. "You were married twelve years. Something ended it."

"We stopped talking. Then one day she said she was done, and she was right."

"Okay," he says slowly. "That's a fine answer. That's actually a very good answer. That's what you say."

"That's not the reason, though."

"Then what's the reason?"

I don't know. That's the problem. I've been trying to figure it out since June, lying awake in the rental with the air conditioning ticking, and every time I get close to it, it's like reaching into cold water for something at the bottom, and my hand goes numb before I can grab it.

"I'll see you Monday," I say.

"Owen—"

"Monday, Saul."

The rental is a two-bedroom on the twenty-second floor of a building in the West Loop, with gray everything and a view of other buildings. Everything in it came with the lease except my clothes and a box of stuff Laurel packed for me in July, which I still haven't opened. It's in the second bedroom, next to a treadmill I've used twice.

I make chicken and rice. I eat it standing up at the counter.

I tell myself I'm going to watch video from last night's game. I've done it after every game for seventeen years, one pass through the whole thing, looking for where our structure broke down. I get my laptop out. I pull up the game file.

Instead I'm watching the crossbar.

Somebody's cut it into a clip, and the clip is everywhere. The kid picks the puck off his skate, walks straight at Varga, and just goes around him, like Varga's a pylon somebody forgot to move. The shot. The ping. The kid throwing both arms up, spinning, pointing at the bar.

I watch it again.

In the third replay you can see our bench in the corner of the frame. You can see me. I'm on my feet. I don't remember standing up.

I close the laptop. Film's supposed to show you where the structure broke down. This one does. Just not on the ice.

I wash the plate. I dry it. I put it away in the gray cabinet next to the other plate.

Then I take the index card out of my pocket and look at it under the kitchen light. FOR THE PARADE. The letters are pressed hard into the card, like whoever wrote them was angry, or excited, or both.

I should give it to Moretti. I should have let Gus pull the door log. I should have stood up in the room this morning and said something, anything, to Brandt and Kowal and whoever else was waiting to see what the kid would do when he found it.

I didn't. I threw it out, and I told him nothing happened.

I tear the card in half, and then in half again, and drop the pieces in the trash under the sink. Then I stand there with my hand on the cabinet door for a long time, until the ice maker in the freezer drops a load of cubes and makes me jump.

Chapter Four

RÉMY