Everybody else in this whole thing was somewhere else deciding about me. You were the one standing next to the bed.”

They ordered pizza, because the rice was gone.

In November, Lily started coaching.

Not competitively and not for money — a Saturday-morning program at the community center on Fifty-Second for eight-to-eleven-year-olds, most of whom had no idea who she was, which she has described as the single greatest feature of the job.

She can’t demonstrate much. She shows them footwork and she can shoot standing still and that’s about the limit of it, and the first Saturday a nine-year-old asked her why she never played in the scrimmage and she said, “Because I got hurt,” and the kid said “oh” and went back to what he was doing, and Lily said afterward that it was the best conversation she’d had about it in two years.

She goes to the court behind the elementary school on Fifty-Second by herself on Thursday evenings now. Just to shoot. She’d driven past it for eighteen months.