Page 41 of The Grumpy Defenseman
I drove home with the windows up and the radio off.
I sat on the couch in the dark and did not turn on a lamp.
My phone was face down on the coffee table. I picked it up. Opened the thread.
Sam.
I set the phone down on the coffee table, screen-up, where I could see it.
Then I sat in the dark and let the guilt stay where it belonged.
I did not text her.
I did not sleep either.
Tomorrow, when she walked into the rink, I would hold my ground and tell her the version that cost.
Samantha
Iwore my armor the way you wear a second skin, so close to the body no one could see where the real person ended and the performance began.
Hair back. Coffee black, because anything with sugar in it felt like a concession to softness I could not afford. I walked into the Stampede’s training facility at seven fifty-eight, two minutes before anyone expected me, because punctuality was a weapon when wielded correctly.
The weight room was already populated. The clang of plates. The low grunts of men who believed pain was a productive use of their morning. Standard atmosphere. Standard day.
Except it was not.
Evan was at the cable machine, back to the door. He did not turn when I walked in.
He always turned when I walked in.
Not dramatically. Not the way Brick waved or the rookies nodded, just that fractional adjustment in his posture, the slight rotation of attention that said he had registered my presence in the room.
Today, nothing.
I set up my equipment in the far corner. Checked my settings. Adjusted the white balance. Did everything I always did, with the hands I trusted to do it.
Brick spotted me from the squat rack. His face did something complicated, a quick sequence that translated roughly to concern, decision, restraint. He did not come over. He did not wave. He just metmy eyes for a second and gave me the smallest nod I had ever received from a man his size.
Players rotated through their circuits. I moved through the room, shooting with the surgical efficiency of a woman being paid to produce images, not feel things. I captured Brick mid-rep, shirt dark at the collar. Colt spotting Mack at the bench press with the casual competence of men who had done this long enough to talk through it without looking worried. Ryan correcting Finn’s form with one quiet word and a tap to the shoulder, while Finn absorbed the note like criticism, challenge, and kindness at once.
Silas found me near the free weights. No preamble.
“Yesterday made it to my inbox by lunch. Sandra has fielded three questions from beat writers. Walsh wants to know whether the campaign calendar needs to be adjusted.”
He was not angry. He was moving pieces on a board that had rearranged itself overnight.
“It was a moment,” I said. “Not a pattern.”
“From where I sit, those look identical until the pattern proves itself. I need him to look like an athlete, not a distraction. If anything resembling yesterday happens again, we will be having a different conversation, with more people than just me.”
“Understood.”
He nodded once and moved off. On his way to the exit, he glanced across the room at Evan: the briefest check, the look of a man who had been watching this defenseman perform under pressure for nine years.
Then he was gone, and the room kept working, and I went back to my angles.
I did not shoot Evan McKinney.
