The Wolves' primary jersey sponsor holds three events per season. The first is in September, before the games begin, when everyone is still performing enthusiasm for the season ahead. The second is in late November, and it is this one a cocktail evening in a downtown hotel, the kind of event with passed canapés and ambient music turned to the precise volume at which conversation remains possible but silence becomes uncomfortable.
Jade has attended all of them for two years. She goes because the medical staff is expected to, stays for ninety minutes, speaks to the people she is supposed to speak to, and leaves. It is a predictable, manageable evening.
This time, she arrives with Nolan.
They agreed on this three days ago. It was practical: the event is public, there will be people from the organization there, being seen together in a non-clinical context is useful for the narrative they've constructed. She drives herself. He meets her in the lobby. When she walks in, he is already there dark suit, white shirt, no tie and he turns when he hears the doors and watches her cross the lobby with an attention she registers in her peripheral vision and does not directly acknowledge.
"You're early," she says.
"I'm always early."
"I know." She does know. She's been watching him arrive at appointments for two years. "You've never told me why."
"I don't like the feeling of being behind the room."
She thinks about this as they walk into the event together. It's the most purely honest thing he's said to her in a context that wasn't medical. She files it.
The room is tall-ceilinged and warmly lit, full of the particular mixture of people who fill these events: sponsors and their representatives, management, a selection of the higher-profile players, some sports journalists, a few local-media faces she recognizes without knowing their names. A photographer is working the room in slow circuits. The bar is at the far end, the canapés circulating on trays.
Baptiste finds them within four minutes.
"Nolan." He claps him on the shoulder, then turns to Jade with the uncomplicated warmth of someone who has no agenda and therefore nothing to conceal. "Jade. You're here together."
"We are," Nolan says.
Baptiste looks between them. Something happens in his expression rapid, cheerful, the face of a man who has just confirmed a theory he has been sitting on for a while. "Okay," he says, with tremendous restraint. "Okay. Great." He takes a canapé off a passing tray, puts the whole thing in his mouth, and says something that is unintelligible but sounds positive.
Nolan introduces her to two people from the sponsorship team. She shakes hands, says the appropriate things, and stays close because this is what the evening requires. He keeps her in his orbit naturally not by holding on to her, but by turning slightly toward her when someone speaks, by including her in the conversation without performing the inclusion. It is, she observes, the work of someone who is good at being present.
She knows he's good at this. She's seen him manage journalists and sponsors and difficult coaches with the same quality the ability to give someone enough of his attention that they feel like the specific person he wanted to talk to. It's a skill she respects and considers separate from the man who uses it.
They move through the room.
At some point his hand lands in the small of her back. It's light four fingertips and the edge of his palm, guiding her slightly to the left to make space as a server passes with a tray. The contact lasts two seconds, maybe three.
She counts them.
She counts them and she does not change her expression or her stride and she continues the sentence she was partway through because that is what a person does when a hand touches the small of their back in public at a cocktail event.
The hand is gone.
She keeps talking.
Sofia Vidal is standing near the bar when they reach it.
Jade sees her before Nolan does takes in the dark hair, the quality of the suit, the way she holds a wine glass. She knows who she is: the journalist who covers the Wolves for Le Gardien, the most-read sports magazine in the province. She's read her pieces. They're good.
Nolan sees her.
Something happens brief, not dramatic, just the small reorganization of a person's posture when they register someone they know well. He covers it immediately. To anyone else in the room, it would be invisible.
Jade files it.
"Sofia." He says it warmly. They do the double-cheek greeting. "Good to see you."
"You too. Great start to the season." She glances at Jade a professional glance, curious and non-invasive. "I don't think we've met."
"Jade Moreau. I'm the team's physiotherapist."
"Of course. I've heard your name." Sofia smiles. The smile is real. Jade doesn't find a reason to dislike her, which she notes with the clinical part of her brain and sets aside. "Are you covering the tournament prep?" Sofia asks Nolan, pivoting back.
"We'll be ready for it."
"The shoulder's been holding up?"
"Ask her," he says, tilting his head slightly toward Jade.
Sofia looks at her. Jade says: "He does what he's told and the shoulder responds. So far."
Sofia laughs. "That sounds like a very diplomatic answer."
"It's a very accurate one."
They talk for a few minutes the kind of surface-level, pleasant conversation that event rooms are made of. Nolan stands beside her. His arm is not around her shoulders, his hand is not at her back; they are standing next to each other like two adults who happen to be in the same place, and this is fine, this is appropriate, this is exactly what they agreed to.
When Sofia is drawn away by someone she knows across the room, Nolan and Jade stand at the bar together.
"Old friend?" Jade asks.
"Something like that."
He doesn't elaborate. She doesn't push. She picks up her wine glass and watches a conversation happening across the room between two people she vaguely recognizes from the management team.
Something has shifted in her, slightly and without her permission. She is aware of it the way you become aware of a small stone in your shoe not at the moment it entered, but at some point after, when ignoring it requires more effort than acknowledging it.
She does not look at Nolan.
She does not look at Sofia, who is laughing at something on the far side of the room with her hand on someone's arm.
She takes a sip of wine and says something to Nolan about the canapés and he responds and they are fine. Everything is fine.
In the taxi on the way back, the city moves past the windows in the particular way of late November early dark, the lights of the downtown giving way to residential streets.
"You went quiet," he says.
"I'm tired."
"You went quiet before the tired."
She looks at him in the dim light of the cab. He's watching her with the same level attention he gives everything not searching, just present.
"I'm fine," she says.
"Okay."
She waits for him to push. He doesn't.
This is one of the things about him that she has not yet decided what to do with. Most people, when told someone is fine, treat it as an invitation to determine whether they actually are. Nolan Karev takes I'm fine at face value, in a way that feels like respect rather than disinterest. The effect of this is that she finds herself wanting, occasionally, to volunteer information she didn't intend to give.
"Sofia," she says.
He waits.
"What was that?"
"What was what?"
"The thing that happened when you saw her."
A pause. He looks out the window. "We had something, a few years ago. Nothing serious. It ended clean." He turns back. "It's not a thing."
She holds his gaze. He's telling the truth she has spent two years learning to read his tells, and this is not the face he makes when he's managing information.
"Okay," she says.
He nods.
The taxi stops at her building. She opens the door. She gets halfway out and then stops, because something occurs to her that she's been carrying since the bar and hasn't named yet.
She turns back.
"She put her hand on your arm," she says. "Earlier. Before she came over to us."
He looks at her.
"Just " She doesn't finish the sentence. She doesn't know what she was going to finish it with. She gets out of the cab.
She goes upstairs.
She feeds Cortex, who does not acknowledge her emotional state, which is appropriate because she doesn't fully acknowledge it either. She changes into pajamas. She sits on the couch.
Her phone buzzes.
You okay?
Nolan.
She stares at the message for a moment.
Yes, she types. Go to sleep.
He sends back a single period, which is apparently a full answer, and she puts her phone face-down on the cushion beside her and sits with Cortex on her lap in the quiet apartment and does not think about the hand in the small of her back, or the stone in her shoe, or the way her own voice sounded when she said just and didn't finish.
She thinks about these things for a long time.