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Halvorsen's quiet for a while. Then he nods, slowly.

"I'll tell him," he says.

From my window that night, I see them on the porch.

Nico and Theo. Sitting on the top step in the dark, under the porch light, a foot of space between them. Nico's talking. Theo's got his knees pulled up and his arms around them. He's listening. At one point he puts his face down on his knees, and Nico puts his hand on the back of his neck and leaves it there.

They sit there for an hour.

I don't go down. It's not mine to go down.

Wednesday night, I go to the stick room to get a spare blade for the morning.

The light's off. I flip it on.

My sticks are on the rack. All six. I take one down and look at it.

Black on the blade, heel to toe, overlap by half. Seven wraps on the knob. Waxed. I take down the next one. Same. All six, perfect, hung left to right the way I like them.

I haven't asked him to tape my sticks since February. He hasn't stopped.

I stand there in the stick room under the buzzing light, holding one of them, for a long time.

Then I put it back on the rack, exactly where he left it.

He doesn't come Wednesday. Or Thursday.

Every morning, I'm there at five-fifteen. I put the pucks out. I fill the water bottles. I scrape my ice and tap my posts and drop into my stance in the half dark, and I wait. I stand in the crease and watch the tunnel the way I watch a shooter coming down the wing.

Nobody comes.

Lou's stopped asking. He just nods at me now when he comes in at seven, and I nod back, and I pick up the pucks.

On Thursday, at the Lantern, there are two card tables pushed together in the corner. Wes. Petey. Okoye. Kasper. Theo. And now Jace, too, who's never once sat anywhere but the head of the long table in three years. He gets up after the walleye comes, picks up his plate, and walks over and sits down at the end of the card table, and doesn't say anything about it.

Gunnar watches him go. He looks at me.

I'm at the long table. Me and Gunnar and a handful of juniors.

Theo doesn't look at me. Not once. Marcy brings him two bread baskets.

Thursday night, I sit on my bed with the Book of Grudges open on my knees.

I've written in it every day since I was fourteen. Shots. Saves. Goals against. Where it came from, where it went. Every one of Theo's shots since September, every morning, all of them. Pages and pages of him.

I turn to a blank page at the back.

Not because you found out, he said, with his hand over my mouth, in this bed. Because you mean it. Say it when you've figured out what you're sorry for.

I pick up the pen.

I write for a long time. Longer than I've ever written in this book. No shots this time. Just the things I decided for him.

The card table. The bag. The water bottles. Eat when I say. Nobody talks to him. The scrum, three strides, the knee. Every Thursday at the long table. Making him stand in an empty room in his underwear with his hands behind his back so I could feel like he was small. The pucks on his knees in front of the whole team, the morning after the cage. The way I walked out of the cage and left him there with the door closing on its slow arm.

His phone.

Halvorsen's kitchen.