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He doesn't answer my text that night. Are you ok? Delivered. Nothing.

He doesn't answer the next one either, in the morning. We should talk.

At the Saturday game he sits at the far end of the bench from me. Not next to me, where he's sat every game since opening night. At the other end, by the door, next to Kowal. He plays well. He plays like a machine, like he did the day of the deposition, every puck exactly where it's supposed to go, and he doesn't look at me once. Not on a line change. Not on the power play. Not when I score in the second, a boring goal, a rebound I shovel in from the side of the net while standing exactly where he taught me to stand.

Everybody taps my helmet. He doesn't.

"What'd you do to him?" Sorel asks me in the room after. He's pulling off his shin pads and trying not to look like he's watching Hale, who's already showered and dressed and halfway out the door.

"Nothing."

"You did something. He's been weird since yesterday."

"How do you know? You weren't there yesterday."

Sorel stops with one shin pad in his hand. "There was a yesterday?"

"No. There wasn't a yesterday. Forget it."

"Rémy."

"There wasn't a yesterday, Sorel."

Sorel looks at me for a long time. Then he shrugs and goes back to his shin pads, but I can feel him thinking. He's the most responsible man in North America. He thinks very loudly.

Sunday we fly to Toronto.

On the plane, Hale sits in his seat in the second row and puts on headphones and closes his eyes, and he doesn't open them until we land. I sit in the back next to Sorel and watch the back of his head for two hours.

At the hotel, Beth's handing out key cards by the elevators the way she always does. I'm near the back of the line. Hale's near the front. I watch him get to Beth, and lean down, and say something low.

Beth shakes her head.

He says something else. She shakes her head again, and says, loud enough that I can hear it from twenty feet back, "Coach's orders, Owen. I don't have a single. Take it up with him."

He takes the key. He doesn't look back at the line. He gets in the elevator alone.

He tried to switch rooms. He tried to get away from me.

I stand there holding my bag while the line moves up around me, and something in my chest goes hot and hard, like a skate blade pressed flat against my ribs.

"Castel," Beth says, holding out my key. "Twelve-oh-six. With Hale."

"I know," I say. "I heard."

He's standing at the window when I come in, looking out at the lake. The room's the same as every other room: two beds, a desk, a TV. His suitcase is already open on the bed by the door. Everything's folded.

He doesn't turn around.

I drop my bag on the floor. Not by the door. Right in the middle of the room, where he'll have to step over it. Rule four.

"You tried to switch rooms," I say.

He doesn't say anything.

"I heard Beth. The whole line heard Beth. Brandt heard Beth, Owen. He was standing right behind me. He's probably texting Kowal about it right now."

"I needed some space."