CLAUSE 1. TERM. This agreement shall remain in force through the final game of the season, playoffs included, and shall terminate automatically upon the conclusion thereof.

He stood at the edge of the ice for one second, as he always did, and for the first time in his life he did not think about a church.

He thought about her.

It was a Tuesday in mid-December, the night of his return, and the Tideline was a roaring bowl of teal and white. Fifteen thousand people were on their feet. The tunnel behind him was dark and cold and smelled of rubber matting and old tape, and ahead of him the rink lay bright and clean and wide, the surface still faintly smoking from the resurfacer, as bare and perfect as a page on which nothing has been written. He stood on the threshold in full pads, with the brace strapped under his sock and a fresh roll of tape on his stick, and listened to the noise.

They were chanting his name.

It had started in the upper deck when the lights went down, a thin ragged cry, and spread. LIND-QVIST. LIND-QVIST. It rolled round the arena in great slow waves, and he felt it come through the soles of his skates and up through his legs like heat. He had been away for nineteen days. He had watched four games from the sofa, with a legal pad on his knee and a cold cup of tea, while a woman in the next chair took notes in a hand like an engraving and said, at intervals, in a voice of the utmost calm, "He's going to miss that." And he had.

"Cap," said Teo, at his shoulder, in goalie pads and a helmet with a painted snarling wolf. "You ready?"

"I think so."

"You've got a face."

"I'm always..."

"It's the thinking face. It's the one from the rink. Are you thinking about the knee?"

"No."

"Are you thinking about the Calder Ridge guy?"

"No."

"Then you're thinking about the girl," said Teo, with deep satisfaction, and pushed him onto the ice.

The roar broke over him like a wave.

He did not hear it. That was the odd part. He felt it, a physical thing, a great warm pressure on his skin, but the sound itself went dim, as though he were under water. His blades bit the ice. The cold came up. He took a long slow lap of the near boards with his stick in one hand and the other raised, and the whole bright building swung round him, face after face after face, and on the fourth pass, at the glass in front of the family section, he looked up.

She was on her feet.

She was standing in the front row in a white Wolves jersey, enormous, far too big, with the sleeves rolled to her elbows and her hair coming loose from its knot. Across the back, as he saw when she turned to say something to Bea, ran the single word BRANDT, in teal block letters, and under it a number. 30. She had a foam finger. It was, he realized, with a slow warm spreading in his chest, a very large foam finger, with the Wolves logo on it. She was holding it up in both hands like a torch. Her mouth was open. She was shouting, or laughing, or both, and the whole length of her face was alight.

He put up his stick. He pointed it at her.

The building shrieked.

They won four to one.

He scored in the second period. It was a small goal, a scrappy tip-in from the crease on a pass from Rennick, a thing he would not have noticed in the usual way of things. But the puck went in, and the red light came on, and he found himself on his knees on the ice with his arms flung wide and fifteen thousand people screaming, and for a long moment he could not remember what to do. Jonah landed on him. Teo came down the whole length of the ice in a clanking charge and landed on Jonah. Eli Santangelo was crying openly. Somewhere in the pile of arms and sticks and shining helmets, a voice, Rennick's, said quietly in his ear, "Welcome home."

He looked up at the glass.

She was jumping up and down. He had not known she could. She was bouncing like a child, with the foam finger swinging wildly, and Bea was holding her by the back of the jersey to keep her from going over the rail, and when she saw him look, she pressed both hands over her heart and then flung them wide, a huge helpless gesture, a thing with no strategy in it whatever.

It was not for the cameras. It was for him.

He laughed. He could not stop. He lay in a heap of sweating men on the cold ice with a goal behind him and a foam finger in front, and thought, quite distinctly, with a clear bright joy like a struck bell: I could do this for the rest of my life.

They had won eight in a row by the end of the week.

The sports pages did not know what to say. They had been prepared for a redemption story, and they had it, in spades, but nobody had been ready for the shape of the thing: the Captain on the ice, his head up, scoring on his first night back; the woman in the Wolves jersey with the foam finger; a city that had spent two years looking sidelong at a man it did not trust and now found itself, to its own bewilderment, in love. They ran headlines. They ran a poll. Walt had cut out a photograph from the Ledger of Kasper on his knees with his arms wide and stuck it on the wall of the break room with a note that read, in square pencil capitals, I TOLD YOU SO. HE'S A GOOD KID.

On the Saturday, the whole team gathered at Teo's.

It was a loud crowd. It had a keg and a mountain of pasta and an enormous sheet cake with a wolf on it. Bea had banned the television. Rennick had brought his guitar. Jonah Ames was explaining, in some detail, to three astonished wives, how he had once accidentally apologized to a referee. Kasper stood at the edge of it all in the doorway of the kitchen with a glass of something cold, watching, and felt the whole house hum around him like a hive.

Noelle was on the sofa.

She sat between Bea and Eli Santangelo with a plate on her knee and the white jersey pulled down over her hands, and she was, of all things, laughing. It was a loose, easy, unguarded laugh. She had her feet tucked up under her. She was telling a story, with gestures, and the rookie was hanging on every word, and Bea was shaking silently, with her hand over her eyes. She looked like she had lived there all her life.

Teo came up beside him with a beer.

"I have a confession," he said.

"Do you?"

"I've been watching her for two months. Professionally. Like a hawk." He took a swig. "I've been trying to find the angle. The thing she wants. Because I've known a lot of people, Cap, and everybody wants something, and I've always, I couldn't work out what the reporter wanted from you."

Kasper said nothing.

"And I've decided," said Teo, "that I was looking for the wrong thing. She's not after anything. She's just, I think she's just a person who ended up somewhere she didn't plan to be and decided to stay." He glanced at his friend, and the big face was unusually grave. "I want to say I was wrong about her. I want to say it to your face. I'm sorry I made her sweat at dinner."

"She didn't sweat."

"She sweated a lot."

"She handled it."

"She really did," said Teo, and went off, sniffing, to put his arm around his wife.

At nine, with a great deal of ceremony, Teo clapped for silence.

"Right," he said, standing on a kitchen chair with a beer in one hand and a flat brown parcel in the other. "Right. Everyone. Quiet. Quiet! This is important. There's a presentation."

"Oh, no," said Noelle.

"There's a presentation, and it's going to the woman on the sofa." He held up the parcel. "Noelle Brandt. Come here."

"I'm fine where..."

"Come HERE."

She rose, with a face of crimson horror, and picked her way across the crowded floor, and was pushed, by about eleven pairs of hands, to the front of the room. Teo stepped down from the chair. He gave her the parcel. It was heavy, and wrapped in teal paper, and she held it a moment as though it might go off.

"Open it."

She did. Inside, in tissue, lay a jersey.

It was a real one. It was a full team jersey, white and teal, with the wolf on the chest and the C on the shoulder and all the stitching of the genuine article. It had been made, by the look of it, by hand. Across the back, in the same block letters, ran BRANDT. Beneath it, in a smaller type, a number.

30.

"We looked at it for ages," said Teo. "Which number. The Captain's nine. I thought about giving you ten, 'cause it's the one next door. But Bea said it should be thirty."

"It's the number of her years," said Bea, softly.

"It's also," said Teo, "the goalie's number. And I'd like it noted that I'm the one who lives in the net. I want you to know that you're, you're our thirty. You've got my back." His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat with an enormous effort. "That's all. That's the speech. I wrote four pages and it's, that's all I've got."

There was an enormous silence.

Noelle stood in the middle of the room, in the glow of a dozen small lamps, holding the jersey against her chest. Her eyes were very bright. She opened her mouth, and shut it, and opened it again.

"I've never been on a team," she said.

Her voice was small.

"I mean it. Not a, I was an only child. I was a reporter. You don't get a team. It's all, you stand at the back of the room and you take notes." She drew a breath. "I don't know what to say. I don't have a speech. I'm just, thank you. I don't know what I did to deserve it."

"You showed up," said Rennick, quietly, from the corner.

The room made a sound, a deep warm collective murmur. And Kasper, in the doorway, with his glass halfway to his mouth, felt his own throat close, and could not for the life of him have said why.

They went home at midnight, laughing.

It was a short walk, and cold, and she wore the jersey over her coat, with the sleeves hanging to her knees and the number on her back, and every few yards she stopped and turned a slow circle in the street like a child in a new dress. He walked beside her with his hands in his pockets. The knee was singing. He did not care. The night was clear and bitter and full of stars, and her breath went up in a little silver plume, and she was telling him, in a rush, that she was going to wear it to bed.

"You're going to wear a hockey jersey to bed."

"It's a very good jersey."

"It comes to your knees."

"It's an excellent length," said Noelle, with dignity. "It's practically a dress."

"You look like a small shipwreck."

"I look like a captain's lady."

"You look," said Kasper, and stopped, because he had run out of words.

She laughed. She caught his hand, and swung it, and he let her.

It was nothing like the first time. He understood that, afterward, in the long soft hour of the night: how the thing had changed. It was not the careful, reverent, trembling thing of the first night. It was warm and quick and giddy. She pulled him up the stairs by the sleeve, giggling, with the jersey slipping off one shoulder, and when they reached the landing she turned and put both hands flat on his chest and said, breathless, "Heads up," and he said, "I've got the memo," and they both fell against the wall, helpless.

"I'm in charge," said Noelle, when they reached the bedroom.

"Are you?"

"It's my turn. I read it in the, it's in the clauses somewhere."

"It's not."

"It's an emergency amendment." She pushed him, with a small determined hand, backward onto the bed. He went. His knee gave a mild complaint, and he said so, and she said, "Don't you dare," and then she was kneeling over him in the lamplight with her hair loose and her eyes brilliant and the number thirty still crooked on her shoulder, looking down at him with an expression of such fierce, delighted, proprietary tenderness that his heart turned right over.

She kissed him. It was long and slow and entirely unhurried, a kiss that took its time. It said, I know you. It said, I'm not afraid anymore. It said a good many things that he could not afterward have written down. He put his hands at her waist. She laughed, low, against his mouth, and he felt it go through him like a warm wire.

There was nothing grave in it, that night. It was a thing of laughter and heat and unselfconscious joy, a long slow play of touch and answer, in which she led and he followed, and all the careful distances of the first time dissolved like sugar. He learned things about her that he had not known. That she was ticklish, behind the knee. That she hummed, very faintly, when she was happy, without knowing. That she said his name differently now, with the stress on the second syllable, softly, like a sentence that has finally found its end. She wore his scar like a medal. He lay with his hands in her hair and the ceiling swimming above him, and thought, with a dazzled and quite helpless clarity, that he had been a fool, for thirty-two years, to imagine that he knew anything at all about being happy.

Afterward she lay across his chest with her chin on her folded hands and her hair in her eyes, looking at him with an expression of mild and thoughtful content, like a cat that has eaten the cream.

"What?" said Noelle.

"Nothing."

"You're staring."

"I'm looking."

"It's the same thing."

"It's a different thing." He pushed a lock of hair from her forehead. His thumb lingered on her cheekbone. "I'm memorizing."

"What for?"

He opened his mouth.

And it came up in him, plain and sudden and enormous, like a bubble rising through deep water. It was not a decision. It was not even a thought. It was only the thing that was there, the thing that had been there for weeks, in the dark under every other word, and it rose to the surface of him, and stood in his mouth, and would not be swallowed.

"Noelle," he said. "I think I'm in..."

She put her finger on his lips.

It was very gentle. It was the lightest of touches, a single fingertip laid across his mouth, and it stopped the sentence as surely as a wall. He looked up at her. She was still smiling, but the smile had changed. It was bright and brittle and trembling at the corners, and her eyes were wide, and in them, with a pang that went through him like cold iron, he saw something that looked very much like fear.

"Don't," said Noelle, softly. "Don't say it. Not tonight."

He said nothing. He could not have spoken.

"Please. I'm not." She drew a long unsteady breath. "I'm not saying I don't, I'm not saying it isn't. I just. I can't hear it yet. I want to, God, I want to so much it hurts. But there's a thing I have to do first, there's something I have to, and I can't take it from you before I've. I'd feel like a thief."

"A thief."

"I'd be taking something I haven't paid for." Her finger trembled. "Please don't ruin it. Not tonight. Let me have it exactly as it is. Let me have one more night where nothing is wrong."

He lay very still under her hand.

He thought about the note in the cabinet. Rider B. Three. There are no feelings involved. He thought about the thing she had told him in the kitchen, on the night of the storm, in the dark, I've been carrying something. He thought about the ghost in her eyes in the sink window, the flicker of grief behind the love. And a cold small voice, very far down, said: she's going to tell you something that will change everything.

He took her wrist. He drew her finger gently from his lips, and kissed the tip of it.

"All right," said Kasper.

"You're not angry."

"I'm not angry."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure." He smiled. It cost him an effort so great that he could feel it in the muscles of his jaw. "I can wait. I'm very good at waiting. It's, it's on the list of things I'm good at. Between eggs and falling over."

She laughed, a short wet breath, and put her face down against his chest. He held her. He lay with his arms round her and his eyes on the ceiling and a feeling in him like a held note, a quiet and unbearable tension, as of a bow drawn tight.

She slept first. He lay awake.

It was the calendar that he saw.

He saw it, in his mind's eye, quite clearly, a big square paper thing hanging by the refrigerator in the kitchen below, with its columns of days and its months in teal and its games marked in bold. She had drawn a red circle round the last square. It was in May. It was the final possible date on which the Wolves might play. She had circled it in the first week, in a neat unemotional ring, with the notation END OF TERM, and he had walked past it every morning since without looking.

He looked at it now.

He counted. He could not help it. It was the habit of a man who lived by schedules, who knew to the day how many games were left and how many minutes a period. He counted the squares from the date on the page to the date in the ring. January. February. March. April. The long white road of the winter, laid out in rows.

One hundred and forty-eight.

It seemed so few. That was what struck him, in the dark, with her hair across his arm and her breath going warm against his ribs. It was not so many days. It was nothing. It was a season, a little longer than a long run of away games, a little shorter than a good tour of the coast. It was a stack of squares you could cover with your hand.

At the end of it was a clause.

Clause One. This agreement shall remain in force through the final game of the season, and shall terminate automatically upon the conclusion thereof.

He had signed it. He had put his big hasty name on the line, beneath hers, in a boardroom in October, without a thought in his head but a vague stubborn anger and a mild curiosity about his own survival. He had not read it twice. He had not understood that a sentence could sit for months in a drawer, a small black seed, and grow, and put out roots in the night, and tighten in the dark.

He turned his head. He looked at the sleeping woman beside him.

There was one thing he knew, absolutely, with the whole weight of his body. He was not going to let it end. Whatever she was carrying, whatever lay in the thing she had to do, whatever the sentence was that she could not yet hear, he was going to ask her. Not as the Captain. Not in a boardroom. He was going to ask her, plainly, with his heart in his hand, in a way that she could not mistake for a clause.

Before the last square. He would do it before the last square.

But not tonight. He had given his word. She had asked him for one more night in which nothing was wrong.

He pulled the quilt up over her shoulder. He lay back on the pillow. He closed his eyes, and counted, one more time, slowly, like a man telling beads, the number he had learned by heart, and found it had not changed.

One hundred and forty-eight.