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"You remember Danny Lisowski?" he asks.

Everything in me goes still.

"I was an assistant that year," Moretti says. "My first year on the bench here. Behind Doucette. I was the guy who ran the penalty kill and did the video and fetched Doucette's coffee." He's watching my face carefully. "I remember Danny. Nice kid. Funny. Did a Doucette impression that made Doucette laugh, which I never saw anybody else do in eight years. I remember what happened to him."

My mouth's dry. "Coach⁠—"

"I remember you, too. How you two were joined at the hip in October, and by February you wouldn't sit next to him on the bus." His voice doesn't change. It's flat and even, like he's reading me a line change. "I didn't do anything about it either. I was forty-six years old and I told myself it wasn't my business. I've thought about that kid a lot over the years. I've thought about how he looked the day of the trade."

I can't say anything. I stand there with my hands at my sides.

"I'll put your name on the statement," he says. "Nadia will be thrilled. She'll print it on a banner." He picks the sandwich back up. "But Owen. Listen to me. It's the only thing I'm going to say about this, and then we're going to talk about the power play."

"Okay."

"Don't do it twice, son."

He takes a bite of the sandwich. He chews. He puts the sandwich down and pulls a sheet of paper out from under a stack of video printouts, and it's the power-play breakdown from Nashville, and he slides it across the desk to me.

"We gave up the tying goal on a four-on-five," he says. "Look at where Kowal is."

I look at the paper. I can't see any of it.

Laurel calls that night.

I'm in the gray apartment, which isn't gray anymore. The rug. The fern. The Christmas lights he never let me take down. I'm lying on the couch under the green blanket, and I haven't turned on any lights except those, and it feels like sitting inside a string of colored stars.

He hasn't come over. He hasn't texted. I've texted him twice. Can we talk. Please. Both Delivered. Nothing.

I almost don't answer Laurel. Then I do.

"I saw it," she says. No hello.

"Everybody saw it."

"I know. I watched the whole thing. Both clips. The side-by-side." She's quiet for a moment. "Owen, I know that face."

"What face?"

"The face you made in the second clip. When they asked if you heard it." She takes a breath. "It's the face you used to make at parties. When somebody asked when we were going to have kids. When your mother asked if we'd thought about it. You'd go completely blank, and you'd say something polite, and you'd look right past everybody like you were somewhere else."

I don't say anything. My heart's going.

"I used to think it meant you didn't want kids," she says. "Then I thought it meant you didn't want me. It took me a really long time to figure out it was something else."

"Laurel."

"Is it him?" she asks. "The rookie?"

The Christmas lights blink. The refrigerator hums. Outside the window, twenty-two floors down, somebody's car alarm is going off.

I've never said it to anybody. Not to Webb. Not to Moretti, even when he said Danny's name. Not to my mother, who asked if I was seeing someone and assumed she. Not even to myself, really, except in a hotel bathroom in Toronto with the shower running.

"Yes," I say.

The line's quiet.

"Okay," Laurel says. Just that. Her voice is soft.