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Tova is asleep.

I am aware of what I look like. I have been aware of it since I was fifteen and it has never worked.

It did not keep a husband. It did not get a license approved. It put me in rooms with men who were enormously interested in my face and entirely uninterested in anything I said, and I lasted four years before I decided I would rather do something that required me.

So I left a country and built the thing I wanted, and it came apart in a single evening, and I stayed.

He could not open a door and say goodbye to his own child.

I chose him.

That is the part I have never been able to put down.

There has been nobody since him.

Not for want of offers. I looked at the available evidence, formed a conclusion about my own judgment, and declined to run the experiment a second time.

My body has apparently been keeping its own file the entire time without telling me.

Poor timing.

Monday at eleven thirty.

Chapter three

Colt

Sully puts us into a two-on-two battle drill, because apparently the best preparation for an MRI is getting shoved into the glass first.

Steel cuts hard across fresh ice. Sticks crack. Bodies hit the boards and the sound comes back at us out of the empty seats.

Twenty-seven is still on my back.

That part works fine.

Mack rims the puck behind me. Rydell gets there at the same time and leans through my right side.

The shoulder barks.

My feet do not.

Puck kicks loose.

Rydell gives me another shove after it’s gone, which isn’t about the puck and never was.

There’s room to give it back.

I turn instead.

Two strides. Stick down. Mack cuts middle.

I drag Rydell with me and send the puck through the space he leaves behind.

Mack buries it.

Sully blows the whistle. “That’s the play.”

Rydell circles past. “Getting civilized, Riley?”