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“If I feel weird I call you and you come.” She recited it at the porch ceiling, bored. “Any time. Even the middle of the night.”

“Okay.”

She hugged me around the neck, hard, for about two seconds. Then she leaned back, put a palm on each of my cheeks, and looked at me with total seriousness. Both palms were sticky. One of them covered most of my ear.

“Don’t be sad,” she said.

“I’m not sad.”

“Gerald said you’d be sad.”

“Gerald is a dragon and he doesn’t know anything about it.”

“He knows a lot,” Iris said.

Then she handed me her backpack, pulled it back off me, handed me her jacket, hung on to the backpack, lifted the sleeping bag off my shoulder with both arms, and hauled the lot of it in through the door. The bag was bigger than she was and the tail of it caught on the threshold, and she leaned her weight forward and dragged it over. I gave the jacket to Beth. Then the door shut.

I got in the truck and put both hands on the wheel. The top of it had heated past holding, so I laid them palms-down on my thighs instead.

She hadn’t checked over her shoulder. She trusted the ground to stay under her. It had taken her life so far to build. It was the bath and the book and the water she asked for and didn’t drink, the same order at the same hour, until she quit needing to check whether it would all happen again tomorrow.

It worked. She didn’t check.

I’d have denied the next part under oath. I wanted her to. I stood on Beth’s porch in a suit at three in the afternoon wanting my kid to turn around at the door and come back for one more thing, and she didn’t, and I couldn’t make myself glad about it.

I sat in Beth’s driveway for a minute or two with the engine off, and I’d have paid a month’s pay for somebody to open the front door and hand her back.

I got two blocks before I pulled over and got my phone out.

Me: dropped her off. she didn’t look back

Delaney: that’s the goal

Delaney: how are you doing with it?

I sat at the curb with my thumbs over the screen and didn’t type. Nobody had asked me that, not once, about anything, in years. My mother asked about Iris. The team asked about the ice. Katya asked about the calendar. My life was full of people who wanted a status report on one department of it, and not one of them had ever asked after the man running the departments.

I wanted to be in my kitchen with her. It was the answer, and I wasn’t sending it.

Me: I’m fine

Me: back around ten thirty. don’t wait up

I read that last line twice before I sent it. There was a version of the sentence that closed the evening and a version that left it open. I sent the second one, dropped the phone on the passenger seat, and put the truck in gear. It buzzed once before I’d checked my mirror.

Delaney: ok

It was two letters, and I read them as if there were more.

It was a short drive from Sophia’s front door to the players’ lot, and I didn’t turn the radio on for any of it.

This was how the last few weeks had run, and I’d worked it clean. Every morning I set a cup of coffee down in front of Delaney and slid it the length of the counter. In between the handoffs I put in a professional day. Then at some point in every twenty-four hours I’d be standing in a hallway or a shower or a hotel elevator and the wanting would land all at once. I’d take it apart, set it down, and get on with the day. It had worked for a while, and it had stopped being worth what it took.

The arithmetic was simple. Iris was in Peoria until noon. Delaney would be in the casita from dinnertime on, down the hall from my kitchen, with an empty evening and the two of us alone in the house, and I’d told her not to wait up in words I’d chosen before I typed them.

I made myself a rule for the evening, out loud, in an empty truck.

Nothing was going to happen tonight.