Page 82 of The Grumpy Defenseman
Despite myself, I barked out a laugh.
“That may be the least comforting sentence anyone has ever said to me.”
“It wasn’t meant to be comforting.” She glanced at the tablet. “It was meant to be useful.”
Right.
Useful.
I forced myself to think in sequence.
Walsh wanted the frame.
Silas was slowing him.
Sandra had brought it to me first.
Evan had not seen it yet.
That meant I still had a window.
Not to erase what had happened. That was gone.
But maybe I could decide what happened next before the machine did it for me.
“What do you need from me?” Sandra asked.
What I needed was simple and impossible: the frame off every deck in the building, Walsh out of it, and enough time to tell Evan myself.
“Time.”
Sandra nodded once. “You’ve got an hour before Walsh expects an answer.”
“One hour,” I repeated.
“Use it well.”
She picked up the tablet and paused at the door.
Then, without turning, she said, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you did this because you’re careless.”
The door clicked shut behind her.
I stood in the middle of the media room with the hum of the computersaround me and the terrible stillness that follows a sentence like that.
Because she was right.
It was not carelessness.
It was want, and want had gotten expensive.
I turned back to the monitor and opened the Hold folder.
Frame 187 filled the screen.
Evan looked back at me from the bench, unguarded and unaware, the exact second of him I had no right to keep and had kept anyway.
“Okay,” I said softly to no one. “Great. Fantastic. Let’s go ruin my life responsibly.”
