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“Want more soup?”

She shakes her head.

I go downstairs and heat up a two bowls of soup and take the best part of the bread. I bring it all up on a tray like a room service waiter.

“I’m not hungry,” she says when I put it on the coffee table.

“Okay.”

I eat my soup. She watches the game.

About four minutes later, her hand comes across the space between us and takes the end piece of my bread. The crust. She doesn’t look at me. She just takes it and eats it and watches the TV like it was hers the whole time.

I look at her. “Thought you weren’t hungry, little Tessa.”

Her eyes dart to mine. She knows what I'm doing. She hides behind the bread, but I can see her blushing. I slide the other bowl over in front of her. I put the rest of the bread next to it. I don’t say anything.

She eats all of it.

The game goes to overtime. Then to a shootout, which I hate and explain why I hate it. She tells me that I hate everything, and I say I don’t hate everything, and she asks me to name one thing I don’t hate. I say the crust on my mother’s bread, and she looks at the empty plate and doesn’t say anything else.

Somewhere in there, she stretches her legs out. Her feet end up on the cushion between us, in those thick socks, a couple of inches from my knee. She doesn’t move them. I don’t either.

The team in blue wins in the shootout. The winger who went top shelf scores again. Same side. That goalie’s going to get an earful on the plane home.

I look over to tell her.

And she’s watching me again.

Not the TV. Me.

And it isn’t the way she used to watch me. I know that look. I spent four years being on the other side of that look. The one where she was checking my eyes, my jaw, my hands, to see what kind of day it was going to be. Reading me.

This isn’t that. There’s nothing careful in it. Nothing braced. She’s just looking at me with her knees pulled up and her chin on them and her hair drying in pieces around her face, like I’m something she’s trying to figure out and isn’t in any hurry about it.

“What?” I say.

She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

I don’t push it.

She holds it. One second. Two. Long enough that it stops being a look and starts being something else, something with weight to it.

Five seconds.

Then somebody on the TV yells, the crowd goes up, and she blinks and looks at the screen.

The game’s over. The players are lining up for handshakes. The announcers are talking.

She stretches. She puts her feet on the floor.

“I should go to bed,” she says.

She stands up. I don’t know why I stand up, too. I just do. Maybe to take the tray. But I don’t grab it.

We’re standing in front of the couch, and the TV’s throwing blue light across the room, and she’s closer than she’s been all night. Closer than at the hockey replays. A foot, maybe. Less.

She looks up at me.