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His left hand comes up to my jaw. I notice which hand it is, because I am still his therapist, and I lean into it anyway, because I am not only that.
He waits.
I lift my face and he comes down to meet it, and I want his mouth with a plainness that frightens me.
And a room I have never seen, in a city I left, with a number in meters my daughter had to go and look up.
At the last second I turn my head.
His mouth lands at the corner of mine.
He stops immediately. My hand is still fisted in his jacket. For one breath neither of us does anything about any of it, and then he takes his hand off my face.
“Okay.”
I open my eyes and find him waiting for me to be the one who speaks.
I give him the smallest of my reasons.
“I do not know how to do this while you are still my patient.”
He looks at me, not triumphant and not wounded. “Then we don’t do it yet.”
Yet.
I feel the word everywhere.
I let go of his jacket one finger at a time. “Drive carefully, Riley.”
“You too, Astrid.”
He steps away before I have to ask him to, and I get into the truck and shut the door and keep both hands on the wheel until he has reached his own.
At home there are three paint cards on the kitchen table and a note asking which green is least ugly. I take off my coat. I answer her question. I check the front door. I put my bag beside the chair.
I touch the corner of my mouth.
January twenty-third is on the calendar above the counter, and I do not need to count the appointments between now and then, because I already know what the number is.
Chapter fourteen
Colt
Nashville gives us four seconds, an empty net, and a draw in the left circle.
Their center comes to the dot with his feet too narrow and his top hand loose, which means he wants to pull it straight back and he’s told me so before the linesman has even set up.
“Back door,” Mack says behind me.
“I see it.”
“Then win it.”
“Demanding.”
The linesman drops the puck. I get under the other center’s blade, turn my right skate, and pull it through my own feet instead of fighting him for the clean win, and Mack arrives exactly where I left it for him. One touch to Brick. Brick shoots before Nashville can close.
The puck hits the crossbar hard enough to ring through the building, and every man in white looks up at it like it owes them money. The rebound kicks over the glass. The horn goes before they can reset.
