“I get restless,” he said. “I’ll probably just stand here or walk around.”

The usher shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

After that he felt frozen, a newly dead creature at the summit of the stadium, aerial view of a lake of tiny faces, bodies, and on the field, at last, the sky-blue uniforms of the Tar Heels, one of them Ben; he could pick out the number. Ben stamped one foot and then another on the sidelines, stretching, looking at the sky. Hard to stare at him and think of the facts of the matter. Kathy will be riding with us, Nina had said, and she would only be going to the game because of Ben. She was the one he had called. Sometime since he got back to town; she was the one he had talked to, they had gone out together, he’d opened up to her, and she had helped him get through his grief. The two of them hand in hand under the trees of McCorkle Place, walking and talking in the moonlight, the twilight. Ben found the strength to call Kathy but not Ronny, who was nothing, after all, just an episode, something Ben had to get out of his system.

But the other night. Ben so broken on the stairs. What was that about? Guilt? Ronny tried to stop thinking, climbed down from the top of the stadium, moved along to another section of stands, into the Duke section; cheers for the kickoff, then silence. He descended as far as he could go, nearly to the fence, joining a smattering of people there. He watched Ben as though he were a stalker; nothing mattered but fixing his eyes on that figure in his uniform; like the other games he’d seen this season, breathless at the fact of him, at being in the same space again. Ben charged off the defensive line, hurtling toward a receiver on the Duke team, taking him down, thud, onto the turf, then picking himself up, trotting back, doing it again; on the sidelines sipping water, talking to the other guys, often to Tate, or the other defensive linemen. He was closer today than he had often been. Worried that Ben might see him—pick out his tiny, unimportant face among so many others. Halftime, the team trotted into the visitor part of the field house, leading on the scoreboard, and Ronny wandered along the fence where the photographers were standing around, some of them snapping pictures of the crowd.

Somebody there called his name, Maggie from The Tar Heel, carrying her camera bag, trotting toward him. Waving wildly. “Look at you!” she shouted. “Did you come here to yell at me or something? I’m not going to miss my deadline.”

“Your deadline is not until tomorrow,” he said. “I just came to watch the game.”

“Cool. You having fun? You drunk?”

“Nope. Sober as anything. Game’s okay though.”

“Where’s your seat?”

He pointed to the upper section of the pond of Carolina blue. The Duke band was high-stepping onto the field, playing something martial. “Way up there.”