“It’ll be okay,” Adam said.

“He’s always in the game by now. What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pete shouldn’t be playing.”

Adam didn’t bother responding. Pete caught the ball and threw it to a teammate in the most routine play imaginable. From across the field, Gaston shouted, “Wow, helluva play, Pete!” and high-fived cousin Daz.

“What kind of grown man calls himself Daz?” Adam muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Corinne gnawed on her lower lip. “We were a minute or two late, I guess. I mean, we were here fifty-five minutes before game time, but the coach said an hour.”

“I doubt it’s that.”

“I should have left the house sooner.”

Adam felt like saying that they had bigger problems, but maybe for now, this distraction would be helpful. The other team scored. The parents moaned and dissected what their defensemen had done wrong to cause the goal.

Thomas ran onto the field.

Adam could feel the relief coming off his wife in waves. Corinne’s face went smooth. She smiled at him and said, “How was work?”

“Now you want to know?”

“Sorry. You know how I get.”

“I do.”

“It’s kinda why you love me.”

“Kinda.”

“That,” she said, “and my ass.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“I still have a great ass, don’t I?”

“World class, prime Grade A, one hundred percent top sirloin with no fillers.”

“Well,” she said with that sly smile she broke out far too little. “Maybe one filler.”

God, he loved the too-rare moments when she let go and was even a little naughty. For a split second, he forgot about the stranger. A split second, no more. Why now? he wondered. She made remarks like that twice, thrice a year. Why now?

He glanced back toward her. Corinne wore the diamond studs he’d bought her at that place on Forty-Seventh Street. Adam had given them to her on their fifteenth anniversary at the Bamboo House Chinese restaurant. His original idea had been to stick them in a fortune cookie somehow—Corinne loved opening, though not eating, fortune cookies—but that idea never really panned out. In the end, the waiter simply delivered them to her on one of those plates with a steel covering. Corny, cliché, unoriginal, and Corinne loved it. She cried and threw her arms around him and squeezed him so hard that he wondered whether any man in the world had ever been hugged like that.

Now she only took them off at night and to swim because she worried the chlorine might eat away at the setting. Her other earrings sat untouched in that small jewelry box in her closet, as if wearing them in lieu of the diamond studs would be some kind of betrayal. They meant something to her. They meant commitment and love and honor and, really, was that the kind of woman who would fake a pregnancy?

Corinne had her eyes on the field. The ball was down at the offensive end, where Thomas played. He could feel her stiffen whenever the ball came anywhere near their son.

Then Thomas made a beautiful play, knocking the ball out of a defender’s stick, picking it up, and heading for the goal.

We pretend otherwise, but we watch only our own child. When Adam was a newer father, he found this parental focus somewhat poignant. You would go to a game or a concert or whatever and, sure, you’d look at everyone and everything, but you’d really only see your own child. Everyone and everything else would become background noise, scenery. You’d stare at your own child and it would be like there were a spotlight on your kid, only your kid, and the rest of the stage or field or court was darkening and you’d feel that warmth, the same one Adam had felt in his chest when his son smiled at him, and even in an environment loaded up with other parents and other kids, Adam would realize that every parent felt the exact same way, that every parent had their own spotlight directed at their own kid and that that was somehow comforting and how it should be.

Now the child-centricity didn’t feel quite as uplifting. Now it felt as though that concentrated focus wasn’t so much love as obsession, that the single-lens single-mindedness was unhealthy and unrealistic and even damaging.

Thomas ran down on the fast break and dumped a pass off to Paul Williams. Terry Zobel was open to score, but before he could shoot, the referee blew the whistle and threw the yellow flag. Freddie Friednash, a middie on Thomas’s team, was sent off for a one-minute slashing penalty. The fathers in the corner had a group conniption: “Are you kidding me, ref?” “Bad call!” “You gotta be blind!” “That’s BS!” “Call them both ways, ref!”

The coaches caught on and started in too. Even Freddie, who had been jogging off at a brisk pace, slowed and shook his head at the referee. More parents joined the chorus of complaints—the herd mentality in action.

“Did you see the slash?” Corinne asked.

“I wasn’t looking over there.”

Becky Evans, Tripp’s wife, came over and said, “Hi, Adam. Hi, Corinne.”

Because of the penalty, the ball was in the defensive zone now, far away from Thomas, so they both glanced toward her, returning the smile. Becky Evans, mother of five, was almost supernaturally cheerful, always with a smile and a kind word. Adam was usually suspicious of the type. He liked to watch these happy moms for the unguarded moment, when the smile would falter or grow wooden, and for the most part, he always found it. But not with Becky. You constantly saw her cruising the kids around in her Dodge Durango, the smile alit, the backseats loaded up with kids and gear, and while these mundane tasks eventually wore down most in her maternal order, Becky Evans seemed to feed off it, to gain strength even.

Corinne said, “Hi, Becky.”

“Great weather for a game, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” Adam said, because that was what you said.

The whistle blew again—another slashing call on the away team. The fathers went nuts anew, even swearing. Adam frowned at their behavior but stayed silent. Did that make him part of the problem? He was surprised to see that the jeers were being led by the bespectacled Cal Gottesman. Cal, whose son Eric was a quickly improving defenseman, worked as an insurance salesman in Parsippany. Adam had always found him to be mild-mannered and well-meaning, if not somewhat didactic and dull, but Adam had also noticed of late that Cal Gottesman’s behavior had grown increasingly odd in direct proportion to his son’s improvement. Eric had grown six inches in the last year and was now a starting defender. Colleges were buzzing around him, and now Cal, who had been so reserved on the sidelines, could often be seen pacing and talking to himself.

Becky leaned in closer. “Did you hear about Richard Fee?”

Richard Fee was the team goalie.

“He’s committed to Boston College.”

“But he’s only a freshman,” Corinne said.

“I know, right? I mean, are they going to start drafting them out of the womb?”

“It’s ridiculous,” Corinne agreed. “How do they know what kind of student he’s going to be? He just got into high school.”

Becky and Corinne continued, but Adam was already tuning them out. They didn’t seem to care, so Adam dutifully took this as his cue to leave the ladies and maybe stand by himself for a bit. He gave Becky a quick cheek peck and started on his way. Becky and Corinne had known each other since childhood. They had both been born in Cedarfield. Becky had never left the town.

Corinne had not been so lucky.

Adam moved toward a spot halfway between the moms and the dads in the corner, hoping to carve out a little space for himself. He glanced over at the group of fathers. Tripp Evans met his eye and nodded as though he understood. Tripp probably didn’t want the crowd either, but he was the guy who drew it. Local celebrity, Adam thought. Deal with it.

When the horn blew, ending the first quarter, Adam looked back toward his wife. She was chatting away with Becky, both women animated. He just stared for a moment, lost and scared. He knew Corinne so well. He knew everything about her. And paradoxically, because he knew her so well, he knew that what the stranger had told him had the echo of truth.