Page 83 of The Grumpy Defenseman
I found him before Walsh did.
That was the only real victory available to me, and it was small, but I took it.
The practice rink was dark except for the strip of light spilling out from the video room. The building had that after-hours hush I was beginning to think of as its truest state: the hum of vents, the far-off rattle ofequipment, the faint chemical cold of resurfaced ice settling into the concrete.
I followed the light.
Of course, he was there.
Evan sat alone in the video room with his elbows on his knees and the remote in one hand, paused frame on the screen in front of him: a defensive-zone sequence frozen mid-read, three bodies in motion, and his own highlighted in a clean digital circle. Hockey reduced to geometry. Angles and decisions. A world where the answer was always somewhere in the tape if you were disciplined enough to keep looking for it.
He heard me in the doorway and turned.
The second his eyes landed on my face, something in him changed.
Not fully open.
Something worse.
Recognition. The kind that said he already knew, on instinct, that whatever had brought me here was not going to leave either of us cleaner than it found us.
“Youokay?” he asked.
There were very few moments in life when the right answer was so clearly no that saying anything else became an insult to language.
“No.”
He set the remote down.
I stayed in the doorway for one extra second, which was cowardly, and I knew it, and apparently still did it anyway.
“Sam.”
Just my name. Low. Careful. Not impatient yet.
I made myself walk into the room.
The door clicked softly shut behind me, and that sound hit harder than it should have. Small room. One couch. One screen. Too much air between us and somehow not enough.
“There’s a frame,” I said.
He did not move.
Not even a little.
Because he was Evan, and because words meant something different in his hands thanthey did in most people’s, that stillness did more than panic would have.
“What frame?”
“The bench shot from practice.”
His face stayed unreadable for one beat too long.
Then: “The one from the other day.”
Not a question.
He knew which one. Of course he did. He knew exactly when and where he had been most visible, just as I did. Men like him tracked exposure the way other people tracked weather.
