They meet that evening in the parking garage beneath the Arena, because Jade cannot think of a more neutral location and because it has the advantage of being completely empty at seven-thirty on a Tuesday night. She's sitting on the hood of her car when Nolan pulls in, his black SUV sliding into the spot two spaces to her left with the quiet efficiency of someone who has been parking in underground garages his whole professional life.
He gets out. He's changed since this morning dark jeans, a worn henley, no jacket despite the temperature. He looks at her sitting on the hood of her car.
"Comfortable?" he says.
"I think better when I'm not at a desk."
He leans against the side of his own car, arms crossed, and waits. She appreciates that. He doesn't try to fill the silence with reassurance or jokes. He just waits for her to say what she came here to say.
She lays it out simply. The lie in the corridor necessary, impulsive, not something she planned. Her mother's phone call. Isabelle Moreau's particular brand of love, which expresses itself partly through knowing everything about her daughter's life and partly through Sunday dinners that are non-negotiable once offered. Marc Olivier telling her mother he'd seen Jade with someone. The specific impossibility of walking that back now without causing a conversation that Jade doesn't want to have.
Nolan listens. He doesn't interrupt.
"I know I have no right to ask you this," she says when she's finished. "You did me a favor today and I'm standing here asking for another one. I'm aware of how that sounds."
"What exactly are you asking for?"
"One dinner. Sunday. You come, you meet my mother and my sister, we're convincing, and then we have a very gradual and undramatic off-screen separation in about six weeks." She pauses. "No one gets hurt. My mother stops worrying. I don't have to explain eighteen months of my personal life over rice and beans."
He looks at her for a moment. Not calculating just looking, with that particular directness that she's noticed before, the kind that most people break away from before it gets uncomfortable.
"Okay," he says.
She blinks. "That's it?"
"What did you expect?"
"Questions. Conditions. Some kind of negotiation."
"You want to negotiate?"
"No."
"Then okay." He unfolds his arms. "I want something in return, though."
And there it is. She straightens slightly. "What?"
"Priority treatment schedule for the tournament prep. You pushed me back twice last month for other players."
She pushed him back once, and it was because Enzo had a legitimate soft tissue injury one of his rare real ones and needed the table more urgently. She pushes back other players regularly, based on clinical need, as she has explained to Nolan twice. He knows this. He is using it as a bargaining chip because he wants a bargaining chip, not because he has a genuine grievance.
She lets this pass.
"Fine," she says. "Priority scheduling during tournament prep, within clinical reason. You don't bump emergency cases."
"Agreed."
They look at each other across the concrete space between their cars.
"One more thing," she says. "Rules."
"Of course."
"No unnecessary contact when we're alone. We're colleagues in this building. At family events, we perform that's it. No personal information beyond what we need to make the story consistent. And nothing " She holds his gaze. "Nothing that either of us has to regret when this is over."
He nods, once, slowly. "Anything else?"
"We need a story."
He raises an eyebrow slightly.
"How we got together. Details. My mother is going to ask, my sister is definitely going to ask, and if we contradict each other in the first five minutes this entire thing falls apart."
He pushes off from the car. "So tell me a story."
They sit in her car with the heat running because the parking garage is cold, and they build a version of themselves that is almost entirely made of truths slightly rearranged.
They have been working together for two years. That's real. He trusts her medical judgment more than anyone else on the staff he said this once, in a way that was almost a complaint, and she'd filed it away. She is the only person in the building who will tell him directly when he's wrong about his own body. This is all true.
The fabricated part is the shift the moment when professional became something else. They set it eight weeks ago. A late evening after a home game that ran long, the building nearly empty, she was still in her office finishing notes and he came back for something he'd left. They talked. It was different.
"What did we talk about?" he says.
"Nothing important. That's why it was different."
He's quiet for a moment, thinking this over. Then: "That works."
She notes things on her phone as they go small details that could trip them up. His favorite team growing up, not the Wolves. Whether he's been to Haiti, her mother's home country. He hasn't, but he wants to. She believes this because it's the kind of thing he would say and she's heard him talk about travel before, that low current of wanting more geography in his life that runs under most conversations he has about anything other than hockey.
"How do you take your coffee?" she asks.
"Black."
"My mother is going to offer you coffee with milk and sugar. She considers it a hospitality issue. Let her put the sugar in."
"And then drink it?"
"And then drink it."
He looks at her.
"She'll love you for it," she says. "Trust me."
"What's her name?"
"Isabelle. She'll tell you to call her Belle within ten minutes. Don't do it on the first night wait until she insists twice."
"Your sister?"
"Léa. Twenty-three, studies communications, thinks she's subtle. She will ask you directly whether you're serious about me within the first hour. Answer as though you find the question charming rather than intrusive."
"Am I serious about you?"
The question lands differently than it was probably meant to. She keeps her expression neutral.
"Tell her that's a private conversation," she says. "She'll respect the deflection more than a direct answer."
He nods.
"My mother will also want to know about your family," she says. "You have Théo, your younger brother, he plays defense for the same team. Your parents are" She stops. She doesn't actually know. Two years of appointments, and she doesn't know whether his parents are together, nearby, alive.
"Separated," he says. "Dad's in Toronto. Mom's in Québec City. We're not close."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." He says it without bitterness, matter-of-fact. "It's fine. It's just what it is."
She writes nothing about this. It seems like the kind of information that should not be referenced in a manufactured story.
"My father died eight years ago," she says, without fully planning to. "My mother commemorates it every year. If she invites you to that, you don't have to come."
He looks at her.
"I'm saying it in advance," she adds. "So you're not caught off guard."
"Noted."
They sit in silence for a moment, the heat from the vents filling the small space between them. Outside, the parking garage is grey and still and lit by lights that make everything look slightly too real.
"One more thing," he says.
"What?"
"Your last name. I know it. Do I say it like I know it, or like I've been saying it for a while and it's become automatic?"
She turns to look at him.
"Like it's become automatic," she says.
He nods. He opens his door.
"Moreau," he says, trying it that way. Like it's been in his mouth for months. Like he's said it standing in a kitchen and in a dark car and once when something went wrong and he needed to say it to make it real.
It sounds, she thinks, almost exactly right.
She looks away.
"Sunday at six," she says. "I'll text you the address."
"I'll be there."
He gets out, closes the door, and she watches him walk to his car. He doesn't look back. He gets in, starts the engine, and pulls out of the space with that same quiet efficiency.
She sits in the parking garage alone for a while after his taillights disappear.
She picks up her phone. She opens a new message.
Rule four, she types. No attachment.
She watches it send. She watches the three dots appear.
They stay there for a long time before his reply comes through.
Understood.
She tells herself that's fine. She tells herself the pause meant nothing. She tells herself a lot of things, sitting in a cold parking garage under the Wolves Arena, that she will have to revisit later.
She drives home. Cortex is on the kitchen counter when she gets in, sitting directly on top of the file she left open that morning.
"Move," she says.
He doesn't move.
She stands in her kitchen in her coat, not yet ready to take it off, and she thinks about the word automatic and the way he said her name in the front seat of her car, and she takes that thought and puts it somewhere it cannot cause trouble.
She is quite good at this.
She feeds the cat.