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She doesn’t say anything else about it. She just puts her duffel down, turns the knob once, listens to it click, and turns it back.

I carry all eleven boxes up the stairs. She tells me she can carry them. I tell her I know. She lets me.

I fly to Buffalo on the last day of May.

She drives me to the airport in my car because I tell her to keep it while I’m gone. She says she doesn’t need it, but I don’t care. I want her to have it while I’m gone.

At the curb, she gets out and comes around the car and stands there in front of me with her hands in the pockets of my hoodie. It’s too big for her.

“Don’t fight anybody,” she says.

“There’s nobody to fight. It’s a hotel.”

“Don’t fight anybody in the hotel.”

I kiss her while the security guard tells us we can’t park here. There’s someone behind us honking. She holds onto my face for one second longer than she needs to. Then she lets go and gets back in my car and drives away. I stand on the curb with my bag and watch my own taillights go around the corner.

The hotel in Buffalo is enormous and beige and full of nineteen-year-olds.

I don’t know what I expected. Something more. But it’s a convention hotel by the water with carpet patterned like somebody threw up in a casino, and the lobby is full of guys my age in team-issued tracksuits, standing around in clumps, looking at each other the way you look at guys on the other bench in warmups. Every one of them big. Every one of them watching every other one.

There are a hundred of us. More. There are kids from Sweden and Finland who don’t talk to anybody. There are kids from the junior leagues in Canada who all seem to know each other, who play cards in the lobby and shove each other and laugh too loud. There’s a kid from Minnesota who played against me in a tournament when we were fourteen and who comes over and shakes my hand and says you slew-footed me in the semis, and I tell him I don’t remember, and he says yeah you do.

Dana Sato meets me in the lobby. She’s smaller than I expected with short gray hair, a Bluetooth earpiece, and a notebook. She walks me to the elevator talking the whole way. Which teams have asked for time. Which ones are serious. Which ones are just doing their homework.

“All of them are going to ask about the fight,” she says.

“I know.”

“Good. Then you’ve had time to think about what you’re going to say.”

I haven’t. I don’t tell her that.

My father is in the lobby on Wednesday morning. I see him from across the room when I come down for breakfast. He’s by the window in a suit with his phone at his ear, standing exactly where the light makes him look like he owns the hotel. Of course. He’s talking to somebody. A man in a team polo with a lanyard. My father is nodding. The man is nodding.

I stop in the middle of the carpet. And brace for the thing that always comes up in me. The heat in my neck. My jaw. My hands. I wait for the old feeling, the one where I’m eleven and he’s at the glass, the one where I’m fourteen and he’s telling me which wing of the house I live in now.

It comes. It’s there. It just isn’t as big as it used to be. It’s like a bruise that’s mostly gone. I can feel where it was.

He sees me. He says something to the man in the polo, shakes his hand, the man goes, and my dad comes across the lobby.

“Rafferty.”

“Dad.”

“I spoke with Mark Morley just now. The Sentinels. I think it would be useful if I sat in on your—”

“No,” I say.

He stops.

“Sato’s sitting in,” I say. “That’s what she’s for. That’s why I hired her.”

“I’m your father.”

“I know.” I look at him. “That’s why you’re not.”

He looks at me for a long time.