She sets down her chopsticks and puts her chin in her hand. “Do you believe in fate?”

“Um…?” Do I? “Not really.” Although every time Sylvie smiles, I’m not sure of anything anymore.

“My mother did. She raised me in a very spiritual household. And now that she’s gone, I think about it all the time. So when I got the call to come to Brooklyn, I thought it meant something big, you know? That my life was on a path to move forward.” She makes an exasperated face. “Ten days in, and I’m not sure anymore.”

“Ten days, huh?” I nudge her shoe under the table. “Well, I guess you gave it a thorough try.”

She smiles at me suddenly, and I feel it warming me like a heat lamp. “No lectures from you.”

“That’s not a lecture. That’s sarcasm.”

She beams. “Fine. So I shouldn’t throw in the towel yet. What is your story? What happened last year?”

I’m not looking forward to telling a pretty girl how I fucked up. But I suppose it’s only fair. “This will be my third season in Brooklyn. My rookie year I worked hard, and I had some early luck, I guess. But then I let myself slide. I took the summer off. And when I came back in the fall, I partied too hard.”

“Oh boy.” She points at the last dumpling. “This one is yours.”

I push the platter toward her instead. I would feed this girl a mountain of dumplings if she’ll just smile at me again.

She nabs it, and—bam—big smile. I almost forget what I was talking about.

Oh right. Failure. “It didn’t go well for me last season. My stats sucked, and we were all adjusting to Tank’s style of play.” Tankiewicz is a veteran defenseman we got in a trade a year ago. “He’s a great player, but it caused some adjustment on the ice.”

It was the kind of wrinkle that teams experience all the time. But I’d already been off my game. “I didn’t catch on fast enough. None of my tricks were working. And at the end of January, Coach shipped my ass down to the minor-league team in Hartford.”

Sylvie flinches, even though she’s known hockey all her life, and has probably heard tales of woe like mine before. “You’re back now, though.”

“Yeah, Coach told me if I worked my ass off all summer, I might make it back.”

“And that’s what you did?”

“You bet. I found a trainer here in Brooklyn and basically lived at the damn gym. It was such a grind. But every morning I asked myself whether I wanted a real career, or whether I wanted to be one of those guys who has to frame his jersey and hang it on the wall, because everybody already forgot his name.”

“And here you are,” she says.

“For now,” I add, because I’ve learned not to take a thing for granted.

“My fitness is a problem, too,” she says, pouring more tea out of the pot for both of us. “It turns out that a year of mourning wasn’t very good for my game.”