Page 84 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“Yes.”
Silence.
The kind that looked empty to outsiders and was not. The kind of quick, invisible math.
He stood up slowly.
“What about it?”
This was the part where a better person would have become instantly eloquent andmorally clear.
Instead, I heard myself say, “Walsh saw it.”
His eyes changed.
Not outwardly, not in a dramatic movie way. Just a hardening so slight that somebody who had not spent the better part of a season studying his face would have missed it.
“How?”
The question came out flat. Controlled. Worse than anger. Anger at least moved. This was the sound of him locking things down one layer at a time.
“I didn’t submit it,” I said quickly. “I need you to hear that first. I didn’t send it, pitch it, export it, or put it in the campaign selects.”
He held my gaze.
“But,” he said.
The hinge word.
The word that drags the truth in behind it by the throat.
“But I kept it.”
Nothing in the room moved.
Not the air.
Not the light.
Not me.
He looked at me for three full seconds, and in those three seconds, I understood every stupid thing I had ever believed about confession making a person feel lighter.
It did not.
It just redistributed the weight.
“Kept it where?”
“In a private hold folder.”
“Private,” he repeated.
It should not be possible for one man to make a single adjective sound that skeptical without raising his voice.
And yet.
“It synced into review when they mirrored the drive,” I said. “An intern was pulling alternates. Sandra found it before it left internal review, but Walsh saw it in the deck.”
