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He’s very still in that corner. This isn’t his usual quiet, not the slow withdrawal I know. He’s holding himself completely still.

“Then why?” he asks.

I don’t have an answer that’s the right size for the question, so I give him the one I have.

“Because you’re the only person in the world who knows what’s actually happening to me,” I say, “and I’m not going to waste the one truthful relationship I’ve got lying about my hip.”

He doesn’t answer that.

I get my pads on. He’s still in the corner when I go out, in the same position, with the laptop shut on his knees.

I go out and take the ice for warmup. The Nashville building is loud early, as always. The first shot of the night is a two-on-oh in the eighth minute that I have no business stopping, and I stop it anyway.

We win four to three.

Practice on the Thursday after we get home is optional, and eleven guys come.

Emil is going in circles at the end of practice, his mask up. He skates over and stops so hard the snow comes off his blades onto my pads.

“Stay?”

“How long?”

“Twenty minutes.” Which means an hour. “It’s the glove. It’s a shoulder problem. You said it in November. I’ve watched about a hundred clips and I still can’t see it on myself.”

We stay two hours.

I put him in the net and stand at the top of the circle to shoot at him, which I’m bad at. After eleven, I move behind him and place my hand flat between his shoulder blades. I tell him to take the shot without letting my hand move. Again. Again, with the trainer feeding pucks. By the eighth, his glove is coming across level. His shoulder is back where it started. He makes a noise like somebody let him out of a locked room.

“That’s it. That’s it. Oh my God.”

“Do it eight hundred more times and it’s yours.”

“You could’ve told me this in November.”

“I did tell you in November.”

“You told me my shoulder drops. That’s not the same as this.” He’s red-faced, grinning. He pulls the mask off completely; his hair is plastered flat to his head. “Stand there again. Put your hand there again.”

We go until the lights on the far half go out on the timer.

In the locker room, he sits on the floor in front of his stall, phone up, arm out. He takes a photograph of the two of us—him grinning with his hair wrecked, me behind him half out of frame with a water bottle—and posts it before I’ve finished taking my chest protector off.

“What did you write on it?”

“Nothing. ‘Two goalies.’” He looks up. “Is that all right?”

“It’s fine.”

He’s twenty-three, and he wants my job. He’ll have it, probably in three years, maybe two. He studies my games on a laptop in his kitchen, copies my warmup, and asks how I do things. None of that is complicated for him.

I could leave. It would take one sentence: not today, kid. He would say sure, no problem, leave the room, and be fine about it. In three years, when he has this job, he won’t remember I said it.

I’ve never said it.

Beau puts his head in at the end of the second hour on his way out, his kids’ skates over one shoulder. He looks at the two of us, shakes his head, and then says something to the trainer that makes him laugh.

I tell Emil to ice his shoulder, and then I go home.