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I stay crouched on the stairs for a second longer. I look down at my hand. It's just my hand. It looks the same as it always does. But I can still feel his heart in it, the way you can still feel the ice under your skates when you take them off at the end of a long day.

Then I get up, and I follow him.

We don't talk in the elevator. We don't talk in the room. He goes into the bathroom and runs the sink, and I sit on my bed with my phone face-down on my knee and look at the door.

Somebody knocks on the other one, the hallway one. I get up and open it a crack.

It's Webb. He's still got his bag on his shoulder. He looks past me into the room, at the closed bathroom door, at the sound of the water.

"He okay?" he says, very low.

"He's okay now."

"Now." Webb's eyes come back to me. "What happened?"

I think about the stairs. My hand on his chest. His hand on my hand.

"He needed a minute," I say. "He had it. He's okay."

Webb looks at me. It's the same look he gave me on the walk back from the steakhouse in Denver, the one I couldn't read. I think I can read it a little better now.

"You went out there," he says. "In front of the cameras. Right in front of him."

"Somebody had to."

"Yeah," Webb says. "Somebody did." He pauses. "It's usually him, you know. For everybody else. Seventeen years, it's always him going out first."

"Then it was somebody else's turn."

Webb nods, slowly. He shifts the bag on his shoulder.

"Sorel's got the whole thing on video, by the way. From the bus window. He's not going to post it. I made sure." He almost smiles. "You were pretty good. The thing about the vests."

"I meant it. They have so many pockets."

He does smile then, quick, and goes down the hall to his own room.

I close the door and lean on it until the water stops running.

When he comes out, he looks normal again. The captain. The closed restaurant.

"Thank you," he says, at the door, not looking at me. "For outside."

"For outside?"

"The stairs, too."

"You can say it, you know. Nobody's listening."

He finally looks at me. For a second I think he's going to say something real.

"Game's at seven," he says. "Bus at four-thirty. Take a nap, Rémy."

It's not even noon. He already used today's name.

I lie down on top of the covers and close my eyes, and I don't sleep at all.

Chapter Eleven