He has been to a lot of dinners.
Sponsor events at restaurants where the tables cost more per night than some people make in a month. Post-game meals with the team in cities he's already forgotten the names of. Media dinners where everyone is performing and everyone knows everyone is performing and no one mentions it. His mother's kitchen in Québec City, two or three times a year, where the food is good and the conversation runs about four inches deep before it hits bedrock and stops.
He has not been to many dinners like this one.
The kitchen is small and warm and the table wobbles slightly when Léa puts her elbows on it, which she does constantly. Isabelle Moreau has been feeding people in this room for a long time and it shows in the practiced ease of how she moves from counter to table, how she knows without checking how much is left in the rice pot, how she refills water glasses preemptively rather than waiting to be asked. She fed him like she was genuinely glad to, which is not the same as feeding someone politely, and the distinction is one he doesn't have a word for but can feel.
He watches Jade at the table.
This is the thing he's been doing all evening without quite deciding to tracking her the way he tracks play development on the ice, peripheral and constant. How she responds to her mother. How she eats, which is slow and attentive in a way she is not in her office, where she eats standing at her desk in approximately four minutes because she considers eating a logistics problem to be solved rather than an experience. How she handles her sister, which involves a specific mix of genuine exasperation and something softer underneath it that she does not show elsewhere.
He knows a version of Jade Moreau. He's been working with her for two years. He knows the professional version precise, direct, difficult to impress, quick with a refusal and quicker with a diagnosis. The version that told him his recovery timeline three months before anyone else was willing to, and told him in terms that didn't soften what he had to do. He respects that version enormously.
This version is not entirely different. But she is less armored here. The things she keeps at exactly the right temperature in the Arena her voice, her expression, the precise angle of engagement that says professional without ever having to state it they're still present, but turned down slightly. Like the same music played at a lower volume, where you can hear parts you couldn't before.
He finds this more interesting than he expected to.
Léa is telling him about her thesis project in the kitchen, which involves a content analysis of how professional athletes are portrayed in French-language media, and she wants to know if he'd be willing to look at a section of it because she's having trouble with the framing of one of her arguments. He says yes before she finishes the sentence. She looks at him like she's waiting for him to change his mind. He doesn't.
"You actually want to read it," she says.
"It's a relevant subject."
"Most of the players Jade knows would say yes because she's my sister and then never follow up."
He dries the last plate and sets it on the stack. "I'll follow up."
Léa looks at him in the particular way she has been looking at him all evening, the one that's less critical than it is evaluative running some kind of ongoing calculation. She pushes off the counter.
"You know," she says, "Jade had this thing she did with Marc Olivier."
He waits.
"When he said something she disagreed with, she'd just go quiet. Not argumentative quiet, just gone-slightly-elsewhere quiet. Like she'd decided the effort wasn't worth it." Léa is looking at the dishes now, not at him. "She doesn't do that with you."
"She tells me when I'm wrong," he says.
"Yes." A pause. "She does."
He carries the dish stack to the cabinet. "That bothers you about the last guy? That she went quiet?"
"It bothered me that she thought it was normal." She opens the cabinet for him. "She's not a quiet person by nature. She became one."
He thinks about this. He thinks about Jade in the Arena, who absolutely does not go quiet when she has something to say who will walk into the middle of a post-game analysis to tell him his ice time needs to be redistributed based on his left shoulder mechanics, who told Dumas last spring, in front of the entire medical staff, that the tournament scheduling was going to cause three injuries and was correct about two of them.
"She's not quiet with me," he says.
"I know." Léa hands him a glass to dry. "I wanted to make sure you knew."
In the living room, Isabelle has put on music something quiet and percussive and Jade is on the couch with her legs folded under her, half-listening to a story her mother is telling about a former colleague at the hospital. She looks up when he comes in from the kitchen.
He sits beside her. Not on the other end of the couch close enough that their shoulders almost touch. This is deliberate, and they both know it's deliberate, and neither of them mentions it. They are performing a new relationship. New relationships sit close.
Her shoulder actually touches his when she turns to respond to something her mother says, and she doesn't move away.
He notices this.
He notices it in the specific way he's been noticing things about her all evening quietly, filed away, not acted on.
They leave at nine-thirty.
Isabelle hugs him at the door, which is not something he was prepared for. Not a performance hug a real one, brief and warm, the kind his mother used to give before things got complicated. He accepts it without stiffening. Léa punches his arm lightly, says thesis, which means she's holding him to the reading, and steps back.
They walk to the car.
The street is cold and quiet, the temperature having dropped in the hours they were inside, their breath visible in the dark air. Jade has her coat buttoned to the collar. She walks with her hands in her pockets.
She says nothing until they're in the car.
He starts the engine for the heat. They sit.
"You told her you'd read her thesis," Jade says.
"I will."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
A pause.
"She said something to you in the kitchen," Jade says. It's not quite a question.
He looks at the dark street ahead. "She said you're not quiet by nature."
Silence.
"She's right," Jade says. It costs her something small, this admission. He can hear it the very slightly too-careful tone of someone stating a fact about themselves they've had to work to see.
"I know she is," he says.
More silence.
And then he doesn't see it coming and he doesn't think she does either she says something about the moment after dinner, her sister's face when the overtime game was brought up, the expression Isabelle made when Jade tried to claim allergies. She says it in the voice she uses when she thinks something is funny but isn't committing to it yet. He responds. She responds to that. And the laughter comes up suddenly from both of them, real and unhurried, filling the car in a way that has nothing to do with tonight's performance and everything to do with something else, something underneath tonight, something he'd been circling for a while without quite naming.
They laugh until they're out of breath.
And then the laughter fades, and the car is warm and quiet, and they are parked in front of her mother's house with the engine running and neither of them making any move to leave.
He turns to look at her.
She's still smiling the real one, the one that doesn't get used often, that changes her face in a way the professional version doesn't allow. She's looking at the windshield.
He looks at her for too long.
She feels it. He can tell the way her smile doesn't change but something else does, some small repositioning, some awareness entering.
She reaches for the door handle.
"Good night, Karev," she says.
She gets out of the car.
He watches her walk to the front door, key already in hand, and he thinks about what Léa said she doesn't do that with you and he thinks about the moment at the table when he said I know and she looked down at her plate.
He thinks about the space between her shoulder and his on the couch and the fact that she didn't move away.
He puts the car in gear.
He tells himself it's nothing. He's good at telling himself things. He drives home.
At midnight, lying in his too-quiet apartment with the city grid lit up beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, he picks up his phone.
He types: Your sister is going to read every post-game interview I give for the next two years.
Jade's reply comes after three minutes.
She already does. You didn't know?
He stares at his ceiling.
Good night, Moreau.
Good night.
He sets his phone face down on the nightstand.
He lies awake for a while.