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Me: Fuck you.

Barnes: Love you too bro.

I’m sitting here in a navy suit eating a piece of fish, and an hour north, my team is on the ice without me. Layous is on my wing. Layous, who’s really a center and skates like he’s pushing a shopping cart. I can see the whole thing in my head. The boards. The noise. Kennebeck over the dot.

The phone buzzes again during the main course. 1-1. Then again over dessert. 2-1 them. Pennock fell over. Then, 2-2 Weber off a rebound.

Morley catches me looking.

“Woodbury playing tonight?” he says across the table.

“Yeah.”

“You’d rather be there.”

It isn’t a question. My father’s watching me from the head of the table. I can feel it.

“Yeah,” I say.

Morley looks at me for a second. Then he nods, once, and something in his face almost moves, and goes back to his coffee. And I get the feeling, for the first time all night, that I said something he’ll remember.

At nine forty-one, the phone buzzes one more time.

Kennebeck: 3-2. Final.

Barnes: Kennebeck with a minute twelve left.

Barnes: Absolute filth!

Barnes: We didn’t even need you.

I look at it for a long time.

I’m glad. I am. It’s a win, and we needed it, and Kennebeck’s been playing like a man possessed since he came back from his suspension, and he deserves the winner more than anybody on the roster.

But Barnes isn’t wrong. They didn’t need me. They went out and played sixty minutes without me and won a hockey game, and nobody will remember in a week that I wasn’t there. The world will go on. Layous passed the puck. Kennebeck scored. It all just kept happening.

And I think about that little blue dot on Greer Street, and I think, she didn’t need me either. She came to Woodbury anyway. She made friends anyway. She put on whatever she put on tonight and went to a party anyway, and I wasn’t anywhere in it.

When the plates are cleared and the room starts breaking up, Morley finds me by the fire. He shakes my hand the same way he did the first time, short and dry.

“Have a good year, Waleska,” he says. Then, already turning away, already reaching for his coat. “We’ll be around.”

I nod.

My father walks me down to the car.

He doesn’t do that. He’s never done that. He comes down the red staircase beside me with his coat over his arm and stands on the sidewalk in the cold while Martin brings the car around, and I understand that he’s waiting for something.

The car pulls up. Martin gets out and opens the back door.

“You’re welcome,” my father says.

I look at him.

“I didn’t say thank you.”

“You will.”