Page 73

The number sits at the top of the game report where I do not want it. Earlier in the season twenty-two was normal and some nights it was more. His contract ends after this season, and improved mechanics do not negotiate ice time.

The men who decide that will not watch this sequence. Watching it properly takes forty minutes and reading it takes a decade, and they will be handed the three missing minutes on one page by somebody paid to summarize. They are pleasant men in good suits who have never put a hand on a shoulder in their lives, and they will settle this in a room in under an hour and be home in time for dinner.

I can document what changed. I cannot make the change mean what I want it to mean.

“You’re watching him again.”

Tova stands behind the sofa in flannel pants with one side of her hair flattened from sleep.

“It is film.”

“It’s Colt. You’ve had the same ten seconds on four times, I counted from the hallway, and you do the thing with your mouth right before you take it back three seconds, so.” She comes around the end of the sofa and looks at the paused frame, where his number is across his back in white. “He listens better now.”

Twenty-seven.

“At hockey?”

“At chairs. Like when a person is talking and he doesn’t start talking.” She pulls the blanket off the back of the sofa and gets it around herself one-handed. “He used to do the thing where he’s friendly at you. Now he just sits there. It’s weird. I like it better.”

I do not know what any of that means, and I know better than to ask her anything before breakfast, so I close the laptop halfway.

“Mormor will call.”

“I know. I wrote it on my hand and then it washed off, but I know.”

Then, into the wool, with no run-up at all, she says, “Can I tell her I want to live there?”

The screen goes dark between us. Three weeks have passed since she first put it to me as a choice between here and Sweden, and in those three weeks I have shown her the listing photographs, driven past the house twice, and brought home paint cards as though color could answer geography.

“Yes,” I say.

Her eyes sharpen. “Yes I can tell her, or yes we can go?”

“Yes, you can tell her what you want.”

She looks disappointed and relieved at the same time. She is entitled to both, and I have no intention of resolving it for her.

“I am still thinking.”

“You think slowly. You think slowly on purpose, because then it’s not a no, it’s a thing you’re still doing, and then it’s three weeks and it’s still not a no.” She gets her feet up onto the sofa and under the blanket. “Mormor has a room already. She measured it and she told me the number in meters and I had to go look up how big that was.”

I let that sit exactly where she put it.

“Pancakes?”

“You’re negotiating.”

“Yes.”

I reopen the laptop long enough to save the note, and Tova watches my hand on the lid instead of the screen.

“You like him.”

My fingers stop.

She is twelve and she notices faces and she notices pauses, and none of that makes her my confidante.

“I treat him.”