It starts with a look.
Not a dramatic one Jade has no time for dramatic things. It is a small look, incidental, the kind of thing that happens in the space between other things and is gone before you've decided whether it counts. She is at the supply cabinet at the far end of the corridor when Nolan comes out of the locker room after the Thursday practice, and she is reaching for a compression wrap, and he passes close enough that she is briefly in his peripheral vision and he in hers.
He slows. Just enough. Just slightly.
She closes the cabinet.
They walk in opposite directions.
She gets back to her room, closes the door, sets the compression wrap on the counter, and stands with her hands braced against the edge of the sink for a moment, looking at the wall in front of her.
She is aware that something is building. She has been aware of it for days the way you become aware of barometric pressure changing before rain arrives. It is an awareness she has been managing with the same tools she uses for everything she doesn't want to address: she names it clinically, she assigns it to a category, she manages it with routine and work and the careful organization of her attention.
It is getting harder to organize.
Camille and Priya come to the Arena on Friday afternoon. This was Priya's suggestion we're not sitting in a restaurant while you spend forty minutes telling us you're fine, we're coming to you, at least the drive-away option is available and it is the kind of logic Jade doesn't argue with because it is efficient and correct.
They bring food. Priya brings takeout from the Korean place near the hospital. Camille brings wine in a bag with a thermal liner, which is both impractical and entirely characteristic.
They eat in Jade's office, which fits three people if one of them sits on the supply shelf, which is where Priya installs herself with no comment.
"Okay," Camille says, once everyone has food. "Tell us."
"I don't have that much to tell."
"You texted me at seven-forty-eight on a Monday," Priya says. "You only text before eight when something happened. You texted me at seven-forty-eight on a Monday saying 'something small happened' and then you didn't call for five days. That's not nothing."
Jade picks up a piece of japchae and says nothing for a moment.
She tells them the shape of it without all the detail. The dinner at her mother's. The way the evening went better than expected, the laughter in the car, the text at midnight about Léa's thesis. She tells them that Isabelle texted Nolan directly to confirm his food preferences for the next dinner, that the next dinner has now apparently been scheduled without her direct involvement, that her mother looked at her over a coffee cup Sunday night and said he watches.
Priya eats in silence throughout this.
Camille says: "The laughter in the car."
"What about it?"
"You used the word unhurried."
"Did I?"
"You did. You said the laughter was 'unhurried.' You don't describe things like that. You describe things precisely. Unhurried is that's a feeling word."
Jade looks at her takeout container.
"I also want to note," Priya says from the shelf, "that you ran on Monday."
Jade looks at her.
"You don't run on Mondays," Priya says. "I have been friends with you for three years. You don't run on Mondays. You came back from that dinner and you ran six kilometers at five-forty in the morning on a Monday."
"I wanted some air."
"You have windows."
"The air inside is different."
"Jade." Priya sets her food down on the shelf beside her. "Look. I'm not going to tell you something is happening because you already know something is happening. What I want to know is what you're planning to do about it."
She says nothing.
"Because option one," Priya continues, "is that you acknowledge it, you manage it, and you see where it goes. Option two is that you continue to insist that nothing is happening until something happens anyway and it's considerably messier than it would have been if you'd acknowledged it in the first place."
"You make it sound simple."
"It is simple. It's complicated, but it's simple." Priya picks up her food again. "You made a contract with someone you already had complicated feelings about. The feelings got more complicated. That's not surprising. It's not a crisis."
"He's my patient."
"He's a colleague who you also treat. There's a rule, yes. The rule is also a reason to slow down, not to pretend you're made of stone."
Camille, who has been quiet for a moment, says: "When David and I when things started going wrong. Do you remember what I said to you?"
Jade looks at her.
"I said I knew. I said I'd known for months that something was off and I kept telling myself it wasn't what I thought it was, because admitting it would mean doing something about it." She picks up her wine. "I'm not saying it's the same. I'm saying: the thing you know, that you're calling a small something it's usually the size of what you know it is, not the size of what you're willing to call it yet."
The office is quiet except for the faint, constant sound of the Arena beyond the walls the ventilation, the distant percussion of skates on ice, the muffled voices of people in the corridors.
Jade thinks about the corridor outside the supply cabinet. The slight slowing. She thinks about the car after the family dinner, and about his voice saying her name in the parking garage like it had been in his mouth for months. She thinks about how many times in the past two weeks she has been in the middle of a completely unrelated task and arrived at the thought of him without being able to identify the path that got her there.
"He's not making it easy," she says.
"Good," Priya says.
"That's not what I it would be easier if he was easier to dismiss."
"Yes," Priya says. "That's what I meant."
After they leave, Jade finishes her documentation for the week. She cross-references the tournament protocols. She updates Enzo's file with a note about increasing the frequency of his sessions over the next month genuine sessions, actual work, even if the presenting complaints are fictional. She writes this into his protocol in clinical language that communicates nothing about why she's actually done it.
She is locking her office when she hears footsteps in the corridor.
Nolan.
He's coming from the direction of the ice, post-practice, stick bag over one shoulder, the particular purposeful walk of someone who knows exactly where they're going. He slows when he sees her.
They stand in the corridor. The lights above them hum.
"Heading out?" he says.
"Yes." She has her bag on her shoulder, keys in her hand.
"Good session today." He means the practice she was on the bande for the last forty minutes, watching mechanics per her standard tournament-prep protocol.
"Your left shoulder held up under load," she says. "The modified drill sequence is working."
"You were watching for that specifically."
"I'm always watching for that specifically."
He nods. He shifts the stick bag on his shoulder. He is about to say something she can see it, the slight gathering of intention and she waits for it without quite deciding to.
"Your friends came today," he says instead.
"They did."
"I saw them in the lobby. The tall one looked at me like she was deciding something."
"That's Priya. She's always deciding something. Don't take it personally."
"I didn't." He pauses. "Did you tell them about"
"Some of it."
"And?"
She looks at him. In the fluorescent light of the corridor, his eyes are more grey than green the color shifts in artificial light, she's noticed. His expression is open in the particular careful way of someone who is asking a question they have decided to ask.
"They think I'm handling it very sensibly," she says.
The corner of his mouth moves. "Do they."
"Priya used the word 'simple.'"
He considers this. "Is it?"
She thinks about what Camille said in the office. The thing you know is usually the size of what you know it is.
"No," she says. "But it might be manageable."
He holds her gaze for a moment. Just a moment the kind that doesn't require a decision about what it means because it's over before you have to make one.
"Good night, Moreau," he says.
"Good night."
He turns down the corridor toward the east exit. She turns toward the west.
She is three steps away when her phone buzzes in her bag. She takes it out.
Nolan.
My mother called tonight. She wants to come to Montreal for the tournament.
She stops walking.
She doesn't come to games, she types. You said
She doesn't. First time in two years.
A pause.
She saw a photo. Someone posted from the event Thursday and we were in the background.
Jade stares at the message. She looks up at the empty corridor. She looks back at her phone.
How much of the background?
Enough, he sends. My mother is going to want to meet you.
She stands in the corridor under the fluorescent lights for a long moment.
Then she types: We're going to need more rules.
His reply is instantaneous.
Or fewer.
She reads those two words three times. She puts her phone in her bag without answering.
She walks to her car.
She drives home.
She feeds Cortex, who is on the kitchen counter, and stands at the window with her coffee and thinks about two words for a long time, and does not decide what to do with them, and goes to bed.
She does not sleep for a while.