Page 43 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“What?”
“You texted me asking if my offer to send a detective still stood. That’s not not sad. That’s pre-criminal.”
I rested my head against the window, watching the city pass by: storefronts, a bakery shutting for the night, and a busy taqueria illuminated by a neon beer sign. Pedestrians went about their lives, unaffected by the need for a quick kiss or the weight of public shame.
“Tell me what happened,” Bella said, softer now. The prosecutor’s voice was gone. Just her.
So I told her.
The snap. The silence. His voice was cold and wrong, unlike anything I had seen from him before. The room doing that hockey thing, where twenty men pretended not to stare while feeling every shift in pressure anyway. Me keeping my camera up because that was the only thing I knew how to do when the ground moved.
Bella listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she was quiet for a full block. Then she exhaled, the controlled breath of a woman organizing her thoughts.
“You’re not wrong to be hurt,” she said. “And you’re not wrong to pull back. Both of those things are true.”
“But.”
“No but. That’s the whole sentence.” She turned down the music. “You are allowed to be hurt, Sam. Full stop. You don’t need a reason, and you don’t need to justify it by comparing it to what happened with Case Whitfield. This thing hurt on its own terms. You’re allowed to feel that.”
The hurt had landed in a shape my body already knew, but I was not the person Case had left three years ago.
The bar she had chosen sat on the far end of the St. Mary’s Strip, far enough off the Stampede player circuit that no one in the room looked like they spent their winters under arena lights. That alone told me this had beenstrategic.
It was loud and warm, smelling like hops and poor decisions. A live band in the corner played something country-adjacent, and between sets the jukebox offered the kind of mix only San Antonio would put together: Tejano, George Strait, then something in Spanish with accordion that made two women at the bar sing along without looking at each other.
A girl worked the room with hand-stamped flyers for a show the next weekend tucked into her bra strap, which was both practical and deeply unsanitary. The crowd skewed young enough to make me feel experienced and old enough to make me feel relevant. The lighting made everyone look fifteen percent more attractive than they deserved.
Bella installed us in a booth, ordered two drinks without consulting me, and arranged herself like she was settling in for a deposition that happened to have a drink menu.
“Okay,” she said. “New rule. For the next two hours, we do not say the name Evan McKinney. We do not say, Mr. Sunshine. We do not discuss hockey, photography, or any man whose primary form of communication is controlled silence.”
“That’s a lot of rules.”
“I’m a lawyer. Rules are my love language.”
The drinks arrived. I took a sip. The warmth spread through my chest, not healing anything, just taking the edge off the cold that had been sitting there since yesterday.
We talked. Not about Evan.
About Bella’s new case, something involving embezzlement and a man who had hidden money inside a taxidermized moose. About the restaurant she had discovered at the Pearl that served the best tamales she had eaten outside her grandmother’s kitchen. About the condo she was furnishing with estate-sale pieces because, according to Bella, newfurniture had no character and she refused to live somewhere that looked like a hotel lobby.
I laughed. Actually laughed. The sound surprised me. It came out rougher than usual, like it had to push past something to get free, but it was real.
A man materialized at the edge of our booth. Good smile. Easy confidence. The kind that came from either genuine self-assurance or a careful avoidance of introspection.
“Hey,” he said, directing his attention at me with a warmth that felt unearned but not unwelcome. “Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to say you look incredible tonight.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m Noah.”
“Samantha.”
Bella kicked me under the table with the subtlety of a freight train.
“He’s cute,” she whispered when Noah went to get us drinks we had not asked for. “And breathing. You owe the other one nothing.”
