CLAUSE 2 (REPRISE). Neither party shall develop, nor act upon, personal feelings that compromise the objectives of this engagement. This clause is non-negotiable and has been re-read by both parties on at least one occasion.

By the second week of November, Noelle had begun to wait up.

She would not have called it that. She would have said that she worked late. Which was true, in a technical, clause-by-clause way: she did work late, at the pine desk, with the lamp on and the plant on the sill and the house gone quiet around her. But on the nights the Wolves played at home, she found that she worked in the kitchen instead. And on the nights the Wolves won, she found that the work never quite required her to go to bed.

They had won four in a row. It was the kind of streak that made the sports pages sit up and take notice, and Kasper had scored in three of them, and the city, which had spent two years being politely suspicious of its own captain, had begun to look at him in the street with an expression of wary, startled affection, like people at a zoo who had just seen the lion yawn.

She was proud of him. That was the problem. It was a clean, simple, enormous pride, and it had grown on her without her noticing, the way ivy grows on a wall, until one morning she looked up and the whole of the brick had gone green.

She sat at the counter with a mug of tea and a stack of printouts, reading the same paragraph for the third time. Outside, the wind had been rising since dusk. It had come in off the water in the late afternoon, a low long moan in the chimneys, and by ten it was throwing handfuls of rain against the windows like gravel. The forecast had said gale. The forecast, for once, had understood the assignment.

At eleven forty the front door opened.

It banged back against the wall in a gust, and Kasper came in with the storm behind him, pulling it shut with both hands. He was soaked. His hair was plastered flat, and his jacket streamed. He stood dripping on the mat, with his kit bag over one shoulder and an expression of damp, exhausted joy, and when he saw her at the counter, he stopped.

"You're up."

"I'm working."

"It's midnight."

"It's eleven forty. And I'm working."

"Of course you are," said Kasper gravely, and a slow grin spread across his face. It was a tired, boyish, unguarded grin, and it hit her somewhere beneath the ribs like a gentle punch. "We won."

"I know. I watched."

"You watched?"

"On my laptop. In the kitchen. For professional reasons." She turned a page. "Your head was up for all three periods."

"I noticed."

"You scored on the power play."

"I noticed that too."

"It was a good goal," said Noelle, to her printout, and heard how her own voice had gone soft. "Teo's going to be unbearable."

"He's already unbearable. He tried to carry me out of the arena." Kasper dropped the kit bag, shrugged off his jacket, and hung it on the hook. He padded across the kitchen in his socks, leaving a trail of small dark prints on the boards, and leaned on the counter opposite, close enough that she could smell the rain on him, and cedar, and cold. "Did you eat?"

"I had soup."

"That's not eating."

"It's a liquid meal."

"It's a medical emergency." He opened the refrigerator. "I'm going to make eggs."

"You're going to make six eggs."

"I'm going to make three eggs, and give you three eggs, and we are going to eat them in silence like civilized people."

"Rule three says you don't speak before seven."

"It's nearly midnight."

"It's a loophole," said Noelle, "I'm allowing."

He laughed. And it came to her, with a kind of sleepy astonishment, that this was the most ordinary thing in the world. A man in socks, making eggs. A woman at a counter, pretending not to watch. Somewhere in the last two weeks the two of them had slipped out of the strange bright airless place where they had begun, the place of clauses and clipboards, and into a quiet and nameless country with no map. They were not friends. She would not have said friends. They were allies, perhaps, with a good deal of history and a peculiar shared language of yellow notes. But the thing between them had a warmth now, a low steady heat like a pilot light, and she did not know what to do with it, so she watched him crack an egg.

The lights went out.

It happened with a soft, definite click, like a switch thrown in a distant room. One moment the kitchen was warm and gold and humming. The next it was black, absolutely black, with the thick, close, woolly darkness of a house in a storm, and the refrigerator's soft hum died away into a silence so complete that she heard the rain.

"Oh," said Noelle.

"Power," said Kasper.

His voice came from somewhere to her left, and it was wrong.

She could not have said how. It was only a single syllable, an ordinary word, flat and quick. But there was something in the pitch of it, a thin, tight, high thread, like the sound of a string about to snap, and she knew it instantly, with a cold click of memory. He is afraid of the dark, which he does not know he is saying when he turns on every light.

She had written that down. In a field journal, on the fourteenth page, in a file she had not deleted.

"It's all right," she said.

"I know."

"It's just the gale. The whole street's gone, look." Through the window she could see nothing but black: no streetlamps, no neighbors' lights, no pale glow from the harbor. Only the rain, hissing sideways through a darkness so deep she could not have said where the garden wall ended. "Do you have a flashlight?"

"There's one in the hall closet."

"Where?"

"Second shelf. Behind the..." He stopped. She heard him breathe. It was a small, uneven, controlled breath, the kind a man takes when he is counting. "I can get it."

"I'll come with you."

"I'm fine."

"I know you are," said Noelle gently. "I'd just like to come."

She slid off the stool and found, by a mixture of luck and instinct, his sleeve in the dark. His arm was rigid. She did not let go. They moved down the hall together in single file, with her hand on his forearm and his hand out in front of him, feeling the wall, and the floorboards creaked comfortably underfoot, and she felt the tremor in the muscle under her fingers, fine and fast as a plucked wire.

The flashlight was where he'd said. She found it on the second shelf, behind a box of tape, and when she thumbed the switch a thin cold cone of yellow light sprang out and fell across the hall. It lit his face from below, strange and flat and very pale. His eyes were wide. He looked, for an instant, no older than a boy.

"There," she said. "See? Light."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

He let out a long breath. He seemed to come back into himself by degrees, the color returning to his face. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's stupid. I've never liked it. I leave the lights on. I know that. It's a, it's a kid thing."

"It's not stupid."

"It's a bit stupid."

"It's a perfectly reasonable response to a situation in which one cannot see," said Noelle, "and I'd consider you a fool if you didn't mind. Come on. I'll make candles."

They did not have candles. They found, between them, one flashlight, a box of birthday candles in a drawer, a half-melted tea light, and a camping lantern from a closet which gave a small green glow and a smell of old plastic. They carried them all into the living room and arranged them on the coffee table in a ring, and the room came up around them out of the dark, soft and low and gold, like a cave in a story. The wind banged at the windows. Rain ran in sheets down the glass.

He sat on the sofa, a big, deep, gray linen thing that she had never seen him sit on. She stood a moment in the lantern light. Then she sat down beside him, at an ordinary distance, with her knees drawn up.

"Say one true thing," said Kasper.

She turned her head.

His face was in profile, edged with candlelight, and he was not looking at her. He was looking at the ring of little flames. "You made it a rule," he said. "In the cannery. I've been thinking about it. I never did my turn."

"You said I write in short sentences."

"That was a gift. This one's the real thing."

"All right," said Noelle.

He took a long time.

"I can't be on the ice forever," said Kasper at last, very quietly. "I know that. I'm thirty-two. The knee is going. In a year, or two, it'll be someone else's name on the sweater. And I lie awake and think, who is the guy after that? Who is that? I don't know. I've been the Captain since I was twenty-four. I've been on a rink since I was four. It's all the lights. It's the only room in the world I know how to be in." He smiled, thinly, at the candles. "I'm afraid of the dark, Brandt. I'm afraid of what's in it when the lights go off. I think it's me. I think it's an empty room."

There was a silence. The storm banged on the roof.

"I don't think so," she said.

"You don't know."

"I've been watching you for four weeks. Professionally." She rested her chin on her knees. "I've seen what you do when the building empties. You stay. You put the pucks in the bucket. You teach a nineteen-year-old to turn his stick in a circle forty-one times. You buy skates and pretend they're surplus. Kasper, that's not what an empty room looks like. It's what a house looks like with the lights left on for someone else."

He did not move.

"It's very long," she said, "for a short-sentence person. Sorry."

He gave a small broken laugh. His head went down. He put the heel of his hand against one eye and sat that way for a moment, with his shoulders shaking, and she did not touch him, because she was afraid that if she did she would not be able to stop.

"Your turn," he said, thickly.

"I told you mine."

"You told me about me." He lifted his head. His eyes were wet and very blue. "I want a true thing about you."

She had her father's photograph in her mind, the one on the desk, the man in the squinting sun with a coffee in one hand. She had not meant to say it. But the dark was soft and the lamps were low, and the wind was wearing at the edges of her like water on a stone, and something that had been locked for a very long time came loose in her chest and slid into her mouth.

"My father was a newspaperman," said Noelle.

He said nothing. He waited.

"Tom Brandt. He edited the Courier's city desk for thirty years. He was a, he was the best man I ever knew. Funny, and kind, and tired, and incredibly stubborn. He used to say that a newspaper was a promise." She watched the flame of the tea light lean in a draft. "When I was fourteen, a reporter on his desk got a story wrong. A small thing. A man in town, a contractor, said to be skimming from a school fund. They ran it on page one. Dad signed off. It was based on one source, who was lying. The contractor lost everything. His business, his name. His wife left. He, he didn't get through it."

"Noelle."

"They ran a correction. It was four lines. On page eleven." She let out a breath. "My father never forgave himself. He didn't edit anything after that. He went to a desk in the corner and read proofs. He died two years later. It was a heart attack. But I was fourteen, and I knew what it was. It was a sentence. It was a sentence that wasn't true."

The candles flickered.

"So I made a rule," she said. "I wouldn't print anything I couldn't prove. Not a word. Not a comma. Not if I believed it, not if everyone knew it. If it couldn't be shown, it didn't go in. It's a good rule. It's saved me. It's why every sentence I wrote about you was true." She swallowed. "I thought that made me safe. I thought if every word was true, then nothing I wrote could be a lie."

"Noelle."

"But it can. That's the thing. I know that now." Her voice thinned. "You can write a sentence that is entirely true, and still make a false thing. You can stand behind every word and still leave a person in the dark. I wrote that article because I believed in it, and I thought I was being honest, and I wrote the story not to hurt you, I swear to God I didn't, but I think I left, there was something..."

"Don't."

He had said it very low. He had turned on the sofa. His hand came out and closed around hers, quick and warm and a little rough. It was the first time he had ever touched her without a camera, or a cause, or a clause. It was a hand around a hand. It was just that.

"Not tonight," said Kasper.

"You don't know what I'm..."

"No. I don't." His thumb moved over her knuckles. His face was very close in the lamplight, and he was looking at her steadily, with an open, painful tenderness that shook her to the soles of her feet. "But I think it's the thing in the margin. The thing I wrote at the bottom of the page. I think you've been carrying it a long time, and I think it's heavy, and I'd like to hear it. I would. But not tonight."

"Why?"

"Because tonight the lights are out," said Kasper, "and for the first time in my life I'm not alone in it. I'd like to have one night. One. Where that's all it is."

She could not answer. The wind went by the window like a long drawn breath. She had a hundred things in her throat, a hundred true things, and she could not say a single one. She understood, quite clearly, that it was not a pardon. He did not know what he was refusing. But it was a gift, and she had never been given one like it, and she took it. God help her. She took it with both hands.

"All right," said Noelle.

"All right."

"Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow," said Kasper, and did not let go of her hand.

It was nearly two when they noticed the window.

The wind had begun to find the guest room. She heard it first, a long thin whistle from down the hall, and then a sound that did not belong to the storm: a steady, patient, intimate plink. A drip. She got up and took the flashlight, and he followed her, and they stood together in the doorway of the little room with the beam of light on the ceiling.

A dark bloom was spreading above the window, damp and brown, and under it a long slow bead of water was gathering on the sash. It fell. It struck the pine desk with a small flat clap. Beside it, on the sill, the little blue pot trembled in the draft, and the single stubborn plant leaned, in the gleam of the light, with an air of grim indomitable resignation.

"Oh, no," said Noelle. "Oh, you poor thing."

She went and gathered up the pot in both hands. It was cold and damp, and the plant gave a small shake, and she held it to her chest, quite without thinking, like a baby. Behind her, Kasper was already stripping the quilt off the bed.

"It's leaking onto the mattress. You can't sleep here."

"I'll make do."

"You'll catch pneumonia."

"I'll sleep in the kitchen."

"You'll sleep in my bed," said Kasper.

The words fell into the little room like a stone into a pool. Both of them stood very still. The drip fell again, clap, on the desk. He seemed to hear what he'd said a moment after she did, and a slow dark flush climbed from his collar to his hairline.

"I mean," he said, "I'd sleep. Not. I'd take the couch. Obviously. You'd have the bed, and I'd, it's a very good bed. The sheets are clean."

"I can't take your bed."

"Then I'll take the floor."

"You have a knee."

"Then," he said, with the air of a man backed to the wall of a cul-de-sac, "I don't know. Tell me what to do."

She looked at him. She looked at the water dripping off the desk. She looked, for a moment, at the plain truth of the thing: a storm, a cold house, two tired people and a sofa the size of a small boat.

"Couch rule," said Noelle.

"What?"

"The sofa's big enough. We'll both use it. We'll put a pillow in the middle. That's the line. A pillow is a perfectly respectable boundary." She shifted the plant to one arm. "It's a joint arrangement for an emergency. It would, I believe, fall under Clause Five, subsection b. Shared facilities. In a spirit of cooperation."

"I've read the clause."

"Then you know it's binding."

He looked at her for a long moment. The lantern light lay across his face in a warm green wash. Then, slowly, like a man who had stopped fighting a current and discovered that it was warm, he began to smile.

"Couch rule," said Kasper.

They built the line with great ceremony. There was a long gray cushion from the sofa, laid lengthwise, a wall of linen down the middle. There were two blankets, his and hers, one navy, one an ancient quilt in faded squares that had come out of a trunk in the hall. There was a short and dignified argument about which of them would take the end near the window. She lost. She lay down with her back against the armrest and the plant in its pot on the floor beside her, where she could see it, and drew the quilt up to her chin.

He lay down on the other side. The pillow stood between them like a very small and very ineffectual fence.

For a while neither of them spoke. The storm moved off a little, grumbling toward the hills, and the rain fell into a long soft drumming. The candles guttered. One by one they went out, and left only the green lantern on the table, a small, steady sea-colored glow.

She could hear him breathing. It was slow and quiet, and a little unsteady, and after a while she realized he was awake, and listening to hers.

"Noelle?"

"Yes."

"Thank you for the flashlight."

"You're welcome."

"And the other thing. The, what you said. About the house with the lights on." He paused. "I'm going to think about that for a long time."

"Don't think too hard. It's two in the morning. I probably meant it metaphorically."

"Did you?"

She looked at the ceiling. The lantern threw a pale circle on it, wavering and gold.

"No," she said.

He did not answer. She heard him turn onto his side, and then the long quiet exhalation of a man who has put something down.

She did not mean to sleep. She meant to lie awake for an hour, and listen to the wind, and think very hard about Clause Two. But the quilt was warm and the sofa was soft, and the sound of him breathing, three feet away across a linen pillow, was the most peaceful thing she had heard in two years, and in the end it simply carried her under.

She woke with the light.

It came in pale and clean through the tall windows, the thin rinsed gold of a morning after rain. Somewhere a gull was shrieking, and the whole street dripped, and the refrigerator, miraculously, had begun to hum in the kitchen. She lay with her eyes closed and her cheek against something warm, and for a few drowsy seconds she did not know where she was.

Something was holding her.

She registered it slowly, like a person feeling for the edge of a cliff. A weight, heavy and warm, across her shoulders. An arm. It lay over her, curved around her back, the hand spread open between her shoulder blades. She was lying on her side with her face turned into a soft gray sweater that smelled of rain and cedar, and her own hand was curled in the front of it. Her knee had gone over his. Her head fit, precisely, with a kind of terrible rightness, into the hollow of his shoulder.

The pillow was on the floor.

She did not move. She did not breathe. She lay in perfect, rigid, absolute stillness, with her eyes squeezed shut, and every nerve in her body rang like a struck glass. Against her ear she could hear a heartbeat. It was slow and steady, and then, as she listened, as she lay there, it began to quicken.

He was awake.

She knew it. She knew it the way she had once known when a source was about to lie: by something in the quality of the silence. His arm had not tightened. His hand had not moved. But the breath above her head had gone careful and even, the breath of a man who was concentrating very hard on appearing to sleep.

He knew she was awake. She knew he knew.

Neither of them moved.

The light crept across the floor. The gull shrieked. A long way off, the ferry sounded its horn, a low, mournful, familiar note, and the morning went on being morning, as if nothing at all had happened. And in the soft gold hush of the room, with her cheek against his chest and his hand warm between her shoulder blades, Noelle thought, with great and weary clarity, of a sentence in a contract. A sentence she herself had written. Neither party shall develop, nor act upon.

She had not acted. She was lying perfectly still.

It was, she supposed, a technicality.

Above her, very softly, so softly that she might have imagined it, she felt him let out a breath, long and slow and shaky, and she felt his fingers, without moving, close a quarter inch against her back.

Neither of them said a word. Neither of them let go.