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He looks at me a second longer. Then he picks up his phone and his wallet and heads for the door, and on the way out he takes the two rejected shirts off my bed and throws them on his own.

"Rule four," he says. "See? Lawyer."

The door shuts.

He's not back by eleven.

He's out with Sorel and Adeyemi and a couple of the other young guys, which is fine. That's allowed. I've been in bed since nine with the book, the same forty pages I've been reading since August, and for the last hour I've mostly been listening to the fountain.

Curfew comes and goes. I turn off the lamp. Then I turn it back on.

I text him. Where are you.

Nothing. Not even Delivered. His phone's off, or dead, which with him is the same thing.

When I can't stand the book anymore, I get up, put on my shoes and a jacket, and go out into the courtyard. It's warm, the desert kind of warm that doesn't feel like nighttime at all. The fountain is lit up blue from underneath. There's nobody out here but a guy from the hotel skimming leaves off the pool with a long net.

I stand there with my hands in my jacket pockets, feeling stupid.

I'm not his father. I'm not his coach. Moretti put him in my room, not in my custody. He's a grown man. He's twenty. At twenty I was dating Laurel, and three years later I married her, and I thought I knew exactly who I was.

A little after midnight a cab pulls up at the front of the hotel. I hear the door slam, and then I hear him laughing, and then Sorel shushing him, and then all four of them come around the corner of the building into the courtyard, loud and happy, carrying takeout bags.

He sees me. He stops laughing.

"Oh," he says. "Hi."

Sorel takes one look at my face, says, "Goodnight, Cap," and herds the other two toward their rooms so fast that Adeyemi drops a container of fries.

It's just us and the fountain.

"Eleven-thirty," I say.

"I know."

"It's after twelve."

"I know. My phone died." He holds it up like evidence. It's black. "We went to this taco place Adeyemi found, and it was across town, and the cab took forever. I'm sorry."

"You could have borrowed a phone."

"I didn't know your number by heart."

"You could have called the hotel."

"I didn't think of that." He shifts the takeout bag to his other hand. "I'm sorry. Really. It's the first time."

"It's the first week."

"So I'm on pace for one a week. That's not so bad." He sees my face. "That was a joke."

"Moretti puts you in my room so you stay out of trouble. First road trip, you're out past curfew in a city you don't know, with no phone."

"I was with Sorel. Sorel's the most responsible man in North America. He brought hand sanitizer to a taco place."

"That's not the point."

"What is the point?" He takes a step toward me. His voice has gotten louder, and so has mine, and the guy with the pool net has stopped skimming. "What happens if I'm twenty minutes late? Does the plane fall out of the sky? Do we lose? Does somebody take a picture?"