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"Good." He puts the printout in his pocket and walks away down the hall.

He believed me. Of course he did. He's known me since I was nineteen, and in all that time, I've never given him a reason not to.

Rémy's on my couch when I get home, with his feet up on the coffee table and a bag of pretzels on his stomach, watching a replay of the clinch game on my TV.

"Hey!" He sits up. Pretzels go everywhere. "How was it? What did they say?"

I put my keys in the bowl by the door. My hands are steady. My hands are always steady.

"Wear and tear," I say.

"That's it?"

"That's what happens at thirty-five. The cartilage gets thin. There's a little tear in the meniscus. They'll drain it before games. Some injections. It's nothing I haven't done before."

He's watching my face. He's always watching my face.

"You're sure," he says.

"I'm sure."

"Rule two, Owen." He says it lightly. Half a joke. "You don't lie to me."

I look at him. On the orange couch cushion he brought over last week. With pretzel crumbs down his shirt and his hair sticking up on one side where he's been lying on it. Looking at me like I'm the one thing in the world he can count on.

"I'm not lying," I say. "It's wear and tear."

He holds my eyes for a second longer. Then he smiles and flops back down on the couch.

"Okay," he says. "Good. Because I need you for the playoffs. I need you to throw passes into empty ice and yell at me about my stick."

"I don't yell."

"You yell with your eyebrows."

He holds out his hand without looking, and I take it, and he pulls me down onto the couch next to him, and I sit there with his head on my shoulder while the TV replays the goal that sent us to the playoffs. The puck that didn't know where it was going. He's warm and he smells like pretzels and his hair tickles my jaw.

He believed me.

I've lied to a lot of people. My mother. Laurel. Every reporter I've ever talked to. Every guy on every team I've ever played for. I've spent seventeen years lying so smoothly that I stopped hearing it. It's the one thing I've always been good at, better than hockey.

I never lied to him. Not once. Not even in Nashville. In Nashville I lied to the cameras, and he watched me do it, and he knew.

This time he doesn't know. This time it worked.

It's the worst feeling I've ever had.

He falls asleep on the couch before midnight. I don't wake him up. I get the green blanket and put it over him, and he mumbles something in French about bread, and turns over, and doesn't wake up.

I go into the kitchen. I take the folded MRI report out of my jacket pocket, where Anand's office printed it for me, four pages of words I don't understand and one I do. Replacement.

I open the drawer by the front door. The junk drawer. Takeout menus. Dead batteries. A rubber band ball Webb made me for my birthday three years ago.

Under a menu for the Thai place, there's a blue folder with a sports-drink logo on it.

I look at it for a long time. The Frostline contract. Section nine. The one he hasn't signed and hasn't turned down, the one he put in here so he wouldn't have to look at it.

I put the MRI report on top of it. Then I put the Thai menu back over both of them, and close the drawer.