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“You play hockey. The regular season ends in April.” She had her hands folded on the table and there was no apology anywhere in her voice. “I would be giving up a lease and moving into your house.”

No one had asked me that either.

I ran it while she sat there. Iris would be almost ready for kindergarten by then. There’d be a casita in May with a woman’s things in it and no season left to explain why they were there.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

Her hands didn’t move. Her jaw set, and she said, “Okay,” and moved on to a smaller question, which was whether Iris had any allergies.

She’d spent a few seconds on it, no more. She’d put the only real question in that room on the table, and she’d let me off it so fast I nearly missed being let off.

“What’s the second thing?” I said.

“Does she have a bedtime you actually keep, or a bedtime you tell people about?”

I laughed out loud, once, in a meeting room in August, and Cole set his cup down blind and turned clear around in his chair with the coffee forgotten behind him.

“Eight-thirty,” I said. “Kept.”

“Every night?”

“Every night I’m in the building.”

“Good,” she said. “The ones who lie about it are the ones I can’t help.”

I would hire her. I’d known it since the doorway, and I kept asking questions anyway.

I asked about pickup logistics, then emergency contacts, then the school run, and then the school run again. The second time she answered it straight through without pointing out that she’d given it to me before. I was asking so she’d keep talking. I knew it while I did it. I had a third question lined up and shut my mouth on it.

She would be living in my casita, on the other side of my kitchen, with one door between her and the rest of my house.

I thought about that door longer than a man conducting an interview had any reason to.

The knock came in the middle of a sentence.

Maren leaned in with Iris on her hip and Gerald clamped under Iris’s arm, his orange felt compressed from the trip. A row of staples ran up the dragon’s belly, silver and crooked, four of them, one standing proud of the felt.

Then Iris’s eyes got to Delaney and stopped.

She tilted her head. She took Delaney in from the shoes up, got to the hair, and stayed there.

Delaney turned in her chair. She didn’t reach for her. She didn’t climb into the voice adults produced around small children, the one that turned every one of them into a hostage negotiator on a slow day. She turned and she waited.

“You have red hair,” Iris said.

“I do.”

Iris turned Gerald around and consulted him at close range, nose to snout, until she had a ruling. “Gerald likes red,” she said, holding him up. “He wants to know if you like dragons.”

Delaney smiled. It was fast and unguarded and the real thing, and it left her face before she’d finished having it.

I wanted that one pointed at me. I sat there wanting it and told myself to quit, and didn’t.

“I love dragons. I don’t know much about them, though. I’d need somebody to teach me.”

Iris was off Maren’s hip and across the room before the sentence landed. She got two of Delaney’s fingers in both hands and pulled with her body weight. Her hands would be sticky. By midmorning they always were. Her voice was pitched for a yard, and in a small hard room it registered in my back teeth.

“Come on. Gerald knows everything.”