The horn went four minutes ago, and the Ropewalk is emptying the way it does every night: in threes and fours, up the concrete steps, past the retired numbers, into the cold. Your bag is on the seat beside you in section C. The crew is taking the lights a bank at a time from the north end.
Down in the crease he will not leave, Jerome Vachon is finally pulling his glove off. Thirty-three saves and an overtime win, and he looks like a man who lost.
"Four weeks."
He taps the butt of his stick twice against the boards, flat, the way a man knocks on a door he owns.
He is six-two and deep brown, sweat still running off his jaw, the two bleached streaks in his black hair gone grey under the last bank of lights, the white shoulders of his jersey the only bright thing left in the building. He skates two slow circles through the ice you cut at six this morning, already chewed to slush, and stops at the boards below your seat.
"Four weeks of you in C nine with that bag, and you have not once come down past the gate."
He pushes his glove under his arm and sets his blocker on the boards, deliberate, like a man laying down a bet.
"You cut this ice. Six in the morning, before any of us, and you leave the gate on the latch instead of locking it. I know, because I'm the one who checks it."
The lights go off over row twelve, and neither of you moves.
"So I've had four weeks to work out what that means, and I get nothing. No read on you. Nothing."
He skates to the penalty box, steps in, and sits down on the bench with both hands on his knees.
"Here's the deal. I sit here until you come down the steps. Ice crew, no crew, I don't care what the sign on the door says. The lights are going off anyway."
He leans back against the glass and tips his chin at the gate.
"Don't make me watch you leave."