CLAUSE 2. CONDUCT. Neither party shall develop, nor act upon, personal feelings that compromise the objectives of this engagement.

Kasper Lindqvist skated until his lungs filled with knives, which was how he usually settled an argument with himself.

At five in the morning the Tideline practice rink belonged to him and nobody else. The overheads were half on, throwing long pale rectangles across the ice, and every stride echoed off the empty seats like applause from a very small and unimpressed audience. He took a lap hard, another harder, then pulled up at the top of the circle, scooped a puck from the bucket and sent it into the top corner of an empty net with a crack like a snapped branch.

It did not help. Nothing about the net had ever been the problem.

Yesterday he had said no in a room full of glass and lawyers, and he had meant it. He had said it again to the ceiling of his bedroom at two in the morning, and again in the shower, and again in the truck, in a voice that sounded firmer each time and more like someone else's. Forty refusals, perhaps. He was good at refusals. He had made a career out of looking calm while declining to explain himself.

The trouble was what Helena had said afterward, alone with him in her office, with the door closed and her voice as gentle as a hand on the back of the neck.

"Do this, and I will fight for your extension," she had said. "Refuse, and I stop fighting. I like you, Kasper. I would be sorry. But I own a hockey team and the arithmetic is the arithmetic."

His contract ran until the last day of the season. After that, as of this week, he belonged to nobody. He was thirty-two years old, with a left knee that predicted weather and a reputation that two years ago had turned from a cheerful, uncomplicated thing into a headline. The league did not forgive men like him. The league simply stopped returning their calls, politely, over eighteen months, until one morning the man in question was coaching eight-year-olds in a rink with a leaking roof and telling strangers about the time he'd played in the playoffs.

He fired another puck at the net. It rang off the post.

"Big day, Cap."

Walt, the night-shift man who ran the ice resurfacer, had come out to the boards with a thermos in one hand, a gray mustache that looked like it had been installed in 1987, and an expression of avuncular and total innocence. He had worked at the Tideline for thirty years. He had seen four captains, two lockouts and one flood, and he had opinions about all of them, none of which he had ever shared.

"Is it?" said Kasper.

"Papers are full of it." Walt unscrewed the thermos. "'Redemption romance.' They've already got a hashtag, if you can believe it. My granddaughter's trying to explain it to me."

"It's not a romance."

"No?" Walt took a long, considering sip. "Funny. Seems like something that should be."

Kasper looked at him. Walt looked at the ice. Then, magnanimously, he looked at the ceiling, and Kasper understood that he had been let off the hook only because there was no good way to throw a puck at a man holding hot coffee.

He picked up the last puck. He put it in the bucket. Then he went to shower, because at eleven o'clock he was going to sit across a table from the woman who had spent seven thousand, two hundred words dismantling him, and sign something, and the knowledge sat in his chest like a lead weight he had agreed to carry.

She arrived at eleven exactly, and that annoyed him too.

The boardroom had not changed. Same glass wall, same pale ice below, same long, polished table where a great many people had been informed of a great many things. Helena sat at the head. Gideon Hale sat to her left, with a pile of paper and the expression of a man who would be billing for the next several hours of other people's feelings. Kasper had taken the chair at the far side of the table, as far from the door as he could manage, the way a man sits in a restaurant when he suspects the soup.

Noelle Brandt walked in with a binder.

It was a thick white binder, tabbed in colored flags, and she carried it against her chest like a shield. She had changed her clothes. Yesterday, navy. Today, a pale gray jacket over a black shirt, simple and sharp, and her light-brown hair was twisted up in a knot with a pen pushed through it, which struck him as the most honest thing about her. A woman who could not be in a room without a pen. She did not look at him when she came in. She looked at Helena, at Gideon, at the window, at the table, in that precise order, a person confirming the exits.

"Captain," she said, finally, to a point slightly left of his ear.

"Brandt."

"I've drafted a working agreement. Twelve clauses. Gideon has reviewed it." She sat, and slid a copy across the polished wood to him, aligned exactly with the edge. "I'd ask you to read it in full before you say anything, because I suspect you won't like most of it and I'd prefer you not to say so before you understand what it's for."

"That's very considerate."

"It's efficient," she said. "Considerate would be bringing you coffee."

For a moment, in the silence, he nearly smiled. It surprised him enough that he looked down at the paper to hide it.

He read. He had been braced for something cold, legalistic, built to bury him. It was, instead, annoyingly good. Clean language, no padding. Gideon read the clause headings aloud for the benefit of the record, and Kasper followed along with his finger like a boy in a library.

Clause One, Term: through the final game of the season, playoffs included. Clause Two, Conduct. Clause Three, Rings: worn at all public appearances. Clause Four, Statements: all public remarks on the engagement subject to review by Ms. Brandt. Clause Five, Residence: shared accommodation, separate private spaces. Clause Six, Public Affection. Clause Seven, Backstory: both parties to follow an agreed account. Clause Eight, Social Media. Clause Ten, Confidentiality. Clause Eleven, Observation. Clause Twelve, Termination.

He stopped.

"There's no Nine."

"There is," Noelle said. She leaned across and tapped the page, and he saw it: Clause Nine, followed by a blank line and a single sentence in small type. Reserved for the Captain's additions.

He looked up.

She had her pen in her hand now and was turning it in her fingers, end over end, a small, tight, absent-minded rhythm. "It seemed unfair," she said, "for one side to write the whole contract. You get one clause. Anything you want. Within reason, and subject to Gideon's opinion on what reason is."

He had come into the room braced for a trap. What he had found, folded neatly into the paperwork, was a door.

It was irritating in a way he could not immediately categorize. He kept reading.

She had anticipated everything. That was the part that slowly got under his skin. There was a section about what happened if photographs leaked. There was a section about what happened if he lost his temper in public, precisely worded and not unkind, ending with a procedure for the next seventy-two hours that read like a flight checklist. There was a line about illness on a press day. There was a line, God help him, about what to do if one of them forgot the other's birthday. She had thought about the worst version of every day, and then she had made a plan for it, and then she had left a space at the bottom for him.

He had spent two years being written about by people who had never considered him a real person. And she had drafted twelve clauses of pure forethought and apparently considered, with chilling thoroughness, the possibility that he had a bad knee and a bad morning and a birthday.

"You've thought about this a lot," he said.

"It's my job to think about the worst case." She did not look up. "Somebody has to."

Kasper put the paper down. He thought of the file, as he sometimes did, uninvited, on the nights when sleep would not come: a plain gray folder, a stamp in the corner, and seven years of making certain that nobody who opened it ever got as far as a certain page. She had got further than anyone. She had got to the settlement, to the statement, to every sealed and buried layer, and then she had printed everything and stopped, a page short of the one line that might have cleared him. Or she had never reached that page at all. He did not know which, and the not knowing was a small cold stone he had carried around for two years.

He picked up the pen Gideon had left beside the paper and wrote on the blank line, in handwriting like a series of aggressive fence posts:

9. No one mentions my family.

He turned the page around and pushed it back across the table.

Noelle read it.

The pen stopped.

It was so slight that someone who had not been watching would have missed it, a half-second in which her fingers went still and the little tireless engine of her hand simply ceased, and her face did something he could not name. A flicker, there and gone, like a bird passing a window. If he had had to describe it he would have said she looked as though someone had pressed a finger against a bruise she had been carrying under her jacket.

"Define family," said Gideon.

"My mother," Kasper said. "My sister. Anyone with my last name. Nobody asks about them, nobody photographs them, nobody quotes them. Not in an interview, not in a caption, not in a joke. If a reporter brings it up, we leave."

"Agreed," said Noelle.

She said it quickly. Too quickly. It was the first thing she had agreed to without a counter, a trade, a note in the margin. He watched her write something small in the margin of her own copy and then cross it out, and he filed the whole thing away in a drawer in the back of his mind, the drawer where he kept things he did not yet understand.

"Clause Six," Gideon said briskly. "Public Affection."

Kasper made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Here we go."

"It's very simple," said Noelle. "In public, you will be seen to be affectionate. Hand-holding, arm around the shoulder, a kiss on the temple. When more is required, a kiss, for instance, at a charity event, or in front of a camera, I'd like forty-eight hours' notice."

"Forty-eight hours."

"Yes."

"You want me to schedule the romance."

"I want not to be blindsided in public by a man I don't like," she said evenly, "in front of nine cameras."

"I could get good at being blindsided," he said. "People do."

"I'm sure you could."

"Your problem," he said, leaning back until the chair creaked, and enjoying, to his considerable surprise, the sensation of being, for the first time in two days, slightly on the offensive, "is that you'll have to look like you like me."

Her chin came up. "I've done harder things for less money."

"Name one."

"Covered your playoff run," she said, "from the press box, in a Merrow February, with a broken heater."

He laughed. It came out of him before he could stop it, a short, genuine bark, and Helena looked up from her phone with an expression of dawning, cautious optimism. Noelle was looking at the table. But the corner of her mouth had gone tight in the way a mouth does when it is working very hard not to turn up.

The pen was going end over end in her fingers, faster now. Too fast. She pressed it flat against the paper to stop it, and he saw that she knew he'd noticed.

They worked through the rest of it in an hour, quarrelling about commas and commas' consequences. Clause Three would require the ring to be worn at all public times, and she handed him a small black velvet box with a prop ring in it, plain and thin, which she insisted he hold for a moment so he understood it was not a gift. Clause Four he lost entirely, and he did not much mind. Clause Seven, Backstory, she would draft by Friday and they would learn it like actors. Clause Eight, Social Media, she would review all posts. Clause Eleven, Observation, which she explained would allow her to attend practices and watch him work so that her narrative would be grounded in something real.

"Real," he said.

"Observed," she corrected. "Real is a stronger word than I'm authorized to use."

At ten past twelve Gideon laid the document in the center of the table and put a pen beside each of them as though setting out a duel.

Noelle signed first.

He watched her do it because there was nothing else to look at. She bent over the page, and her hair came loose from its knot on one side, and the pen moved. Her signature was small and tidy and upright, every letter separate, like a row of children waiting for a bus. It was the handwriting of a person who had spent most of her life ensuring that nobody could ever say she had been vague.

Her hand was shaking.

It was only a tremor, very fine, barely more than a tightening in the tendons, and he would not have noticed at all if he had not spent half his career watching goalies' hands to learn which way they would break. She noticed it herself a moment later. She pressed her left hand flat over her right, hard, so that for the length of one signature she was holding herself still, and then she lifted the pen and set it down and put both hands in her lap.

And Kasper Lindqvist, who had not wanted to touch her, who had told himself forty times that he would not so much as accept a handshake without a contract in place, felt an impulse so clear and so ridiculous that it was almost funny: he wanted to reach across the table and take that hand, and hold it until it stopped.

He signed. His own name sprawled across the line in the gesture of a man swatting a fly, huge and hasty, leaning off the edge of the page into the margin.

"Congratulations," said Gideon, in the voice of a man who had no idea what he was congratulating. "You're engaged."

Nobody laughed. Helena smiled, gracious as a bank. Noelle gathered her binder against her chest and rose, nodding to the room in general, and said to a point just past his shoulder, "Captain. I'll send the schedule. Our first photographs are Thursday."

"Brandt."

She paused at the door.

He did not know why he had said it. He could not think of the next word. For a moment she stood with her hand on the frame, looking at him properly for the first time since she'd walked in, and her eyes were hazel and clear and very tired, and he saw that she was waiting, half-braced, for something he had no idea how to say.

"Thank you for leaving Nine," he said.

She looked at him for another second, and something moved across her face, quick and complicated, like a cloud shadow crossing the harbor.

"It was only fair," she said, and went out.

The room was quieter without her. Gideon began to shuffle papers. Helena was reading something on her phone with elaborate disinterest. Kasper stayed where he was, because his legs had not entirely agreed to carry him, and slowly, without precisely deciding to, he pulled the contract toward him across the polished wood and looked at the signature at the bottom of the page.

Noelle Brandt. Small, tidy, upright.

He had been angry at that name for two years. He had said it to himself the way a person presses on a tooth. He had read her article in the dark, and in the truck, and in the team hotel in Calgary at four in the morning, until he knew where each paragraph fell. And the damnable, quiet fact that had followed him through all of it, that he had never said out loud to anyone, was that she was the only person who had ever written about him whom he could not refute. Not once. Not a line. Everything in it had been correct. Everything but the thing that was missing, and she had been the only one who had come close enough to know it was missing at all.

Why had she stopped? That was the question he had never been able to put down. She had had the documents. She had been the best investigative reporter the Courier had in a decade, and she had been one page away. And she had stopped, as if there had been a line drawn on the floor that she had chosen not to step over.

He did not know whether it had been carelessness, cowardice, or something else, something he did not have a word for, and he had two hundred and forty days to find out.

"Kasper," said Helena, without looking up.

"Yes."

"That went very well."

"It went like a car wreck."

"Mm." She turned her phone face-down on the table. "That is generally what I mean."

He picked up the copy of the contract. His eye fell, as eyes will, on the second clause, the one Noelle had put there in careful, precise, unlovely language, before he had written a single word of his own. Neither party shall develop, nor act upon, personal feelings that compromise the objectives of this engagement.

It was the dumbest clause in the whole document. It was a clause written by a woman who knew exactly what could go wrong with a story and had tried, in good faith, to make it impossible.

He read it a second time.

It had lasted, he calculated, until the first signature. Until the moment her hand began to shake and he had wanted, with a force that made his own hand curl on the table, to cover it with his own.

That was a breach. It was a breach before the ink had dried. It was a breach that nobody would ever see, filed under no clause, witnessed by no one, and it lay in the middle of his chest all the way home, as quiet and as heavy as a signature.