Page 47 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“No.”
“Would he like it?”
“Absolutely not.”
That almost pulled a laugh out of me. Almost.
“Then why?”
Brick looked back at me, and for once there was no joke in him at all.
“I’m tired of watching two strong people bleed quietly in separate corners like that is a personality trait.”
He skated away before I could answer.
I stood at the boards with my camera in my hands and let the cold air press against my face.
Across the ice, Evan stepped out from the tunnel.
He did not look at me right away. He stopped near the boards, adjusted the tape on his stick, and stood there like a man obeying an instruction that cost him something. Not running. Not approaching. Not asking me to make this easier for him.
Just there.
Waiting to be seen.
I lifted my camera because it gave my hands somewhere to go.
He looked up.
Our eyes met across the ice.
I did not smile.
I did not forgive him.
But I did not look away.
And from the far boards, with two hundred feet of cold air between us, Evan McKinney held his ground.
Evan
Icame back too early and she came back too late, and the hallway caught us both.
I had been sitting in the empty-weight room for twenty minutes, pretending to stretch and actually doing nothing except staring at the rack of kettlebells and running Brick’s words through my head on a loop.
Moments like that don’t disappear. You were tested, and you didn’t show up.
The building was quiet in that after-hours way: most of the staff gone, the HVAChumming at a lower register. Sandra’s door was closed. Somewhere deeper in the building, an equipment cart rattled and went still.
I gave up on the pretense of stretching and headed toward the exit.
Then I heard footsteps.
Unhurried. Familiar. The rhythm I had cataloged without meaning to, the gait of someone who walked with purpose and did not apologize for taking up space.
I rounded the corner and stopped.
Samantha was fifteen feet away, camera bag over her shoulder, coming from the media room. She must have been downloading footage or editing the kind of work she did after hours, when the building was quiet enough to think, and no one from the front office could hover over her shoulder pretending not to monitor the results.
