Page 15 of The Grumpy Defenseman

My shutter clicked.

I did not need to check the screen. I felt it. The way you feel a perfect exposure before you see it: a rightness in the timing. The image was there. Real. Alive.

“Got it,” I said. “You’re done.”

He stepped off the mark without a word and started toward the door. Then, so briefly, I might have imagined it, he glanced back. Not at the setup. At me.

One look. Quick and unguarded, like a door opening and closing in the same breath.

Then he was gone, and the room seemed lighter in his absence.

I finished the last four players on autopilot. Good work, but my best frame was already in the camera. The one I had taken when Evan McKinney looked at me like I was a question he had not finished answering.

Sandra intercepted me as I was breaking down the rig. “You saved us today. Seriously.” She held up her phone, my tether feed mirrored to her device, one of the McKinney frames already flagged. “This is the cover of the campaign. This is the one that lands the summer push.”

She spoke to me the way one working professional spoke to another: pressure second, praise specific, rooted in the actual image instead of the relief of having survived the day. I liked her better for it.

“I know,” I said, because false modesty was a waste of everyone’s time.

She laughed. “Cocky.”

“Efficient,” I corrected.

Silas appeared as Sandra left, timing his approach with the precision of a man who had been waiting in the wings. He leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed.

“Sandra tells me the work is excellent,” he said. “She’s rarely this effusive. Good.”

I waited for the but.

“Just keep it clean,” he said. “The campaign’s entering a critical window. Contract talks are starting. Sponsors are paying attention. The images need to stay focused on the team.”

He said it lightly. Like a suggestion. Like a passing thought. But his eyes did not match his tone, and I had been reading faces long enough to know when someone was wrapping a warning in gift paper.

“Always,” I said.

He nodded once and left.

I stood alone in the media room, strobes cooling, reflector panels leaning against the wall. The building hummed around me with the post-event quiet of a space that had been filled with energy and was now digesting it.

I made it three steps before I pulled out my phone and texted Bella.

Me: Media day is over. I need legal counsel.

Bella: Did you commit a crime?

Me: Define crime.

Bella: Samantha.

Me: I photographed a man too well.

Bella: That is not a crime. That is your job.

Me: It felt illegal.

Bella: Was this the hockey man?

I stared at the screen.