Page 27 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“You thought about it.”
The accuracy of that was annoying.
“Occupational hazard,” I said lightly.
His spoon stilled against the bowl. For a moment, the café noise seemed to pull back from the table.
“Some moments shouldn’t become evidence,” he said.
There was no anger in it. That made it worse. Anger I knew what to do with. This was quieter. Older.
I let my hands stay folded around my water glass. “Then they won’t.”
His eyes held mine for one careful second, like he was deciding whether to believe me.
Then he nodded once and went back to his soup.
But the light stayed where it was.
So did the warning.
We kept eating. He told me about Tommy’s moat at Frost Bank Center, and the way he described his nephew’s engineering ambitions—precise and fond in a way he did not seem to know was visible—made something in my chest go soft in a way I was not prepared to examine.
I told him about the lioness in Kenya. Then I told him about the time I accidentally shot the first twenty minutes of an entire wedding with the lens cap on and had to reconstruct the ceremony from the remaining angles.
He almost laughed at that one.
The corner of his mouth moved, and for Evan McKinney, that was basically a standing ovation.
I wanted to touch it.
I asked him what normalmeant to him.
“My sister’s kitchen,” he said. “The dog. Fixing things that break.”
“That’s not a definition. That’s a list.”
“It’s the same thing.”
Maybe normal was not a concept. Maybe it was an inventory: a camera, a friend with emergency wine, a city I had not left yet, and a man eating soup in sunlight.
We walked back in comfortable silence, our steps falling into sync under the heavy San Antonio sun.
Our hands did not touch.
They did come close enough that I noticed.
He stopped at the facility entrance. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For coming.”
I watched him walk inside, the door closing behind him, the sunlight cutting across the entrance and dividing the world into the bright side where I stood and the dark interior where he disappeared.
My phone buzzed.
Bella: Update on Mr. Sunshine, or I’m filing a missing persons report on your emotional intelligence.
