Page 79 of The Grumpy Defenseman
For the first time in three days, I stopped waiting for the decision to become something else.
It was what it was.
Not certainty.
Direction.
Samantha
Monday morning, I knew something was wrong before Sandra said my name.
It was not her face. Sandra’s face was professionally competent. You could tell her the arena roof had collapsed, and she would still look like she had a spreadsheet for it somewhere.
She was standing in the media room doorway, clutching her tablet too tightly. Usually, people hold iPads like that only when they’re trying not to throw them oravoid handing them to someone who warrants even worse treatment.
“Hey,” I said, because apparently I was still attached to false optimism as a lifestyle. “If this is about the sponsor crops, I fixed the logo spacing.”
Sandra did not move.
“It’s not about the sponsor crops.”
The sentence dropped into the room with the exact weight of something about to become somebody’s problem.
I straightened in my chair. The monitor in front of me still held half a dozen near-identical practice frames I had been sorting for web use: Brick at the dot, Mack at the bench, Finn mid-turn. The normal, clean, forgettable machinery of team content.
Sandra walked in and shut the door behind her.
Well. Great. Love a closed-door meeting before noon. Historically excellent for women in creative professions.
“What happened?”
She looked at me for one second longer than usual, which was Sandra’s version of panic.
“Walsh saw the McKinney frame.”
My stomach dropped so hard it was insulting.
There were at least nine McKinney frames in the current working folder. Forty if you counted alternates. Twenty-seven if you counted the community selects.
I knew exactly which one she meant.
I still asked anyway.
“Which frame?”
Sandra’s expression did not change, but something in her expression stopped trying to protect me from the answer.
“The bench shot.”
Of course.
Frame 187.
Held. Hidden. Not submitted. Not exported. Not delivered. Still retained without consent, which was the breach.
I had spent three years swearing I would never be Case Whitfield, and yet here I hadbeen, sitting on a frame the subject had not given me, telling myself the rules did not apply because my reasons were better.
The image that had sat in the private little quarantine folder on my desktop like a live wire I kept promising myself I would deal with later, as if delay could turn a consent problem into a professional one.
