Page 43 of The Grumpy Defenseman

Samantha

Bella drove the way she argued in court: precise, fast, and with total disregard for anyone who was not ready.

She pulled up at eight on the dot in her black Audi, music already loud enough that I could hear it through the closed windows, and tapped the horn once. A sharp prosecutorial summons disguised as a car horn.

I came out in the jeans and black top she had specifically forbidden me from wearing. She looked at me through the passenger window, sunglasses low, assessment complete in under two seconds.

“I said don’t wear emotional body armor.”

“This is my going-out top.”

“This is your hiding top. There’s a difference.” She unlocked the door. “Get in. We’re going somewhere with music, questionable lighting, and men who don’t play hockey.”

I got in. The music wrapped around me, something from the late 2000s, unapologetic and loud, the soundtrack of a woman who had decided tonight was going to happen whether I cooperated or not.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Somewhere you haven’t been sad yet.”

“I’m not sad.”

She shot me a look over her sunglasses, the kind of look cross-examined witnesses probably saw right before they changed their testimony.

“Samantha.”

“What?”

“You texted me asking if my offer to send a detective still stood. That’s not not sad. That’s pre-criminal.”

I rested my head against the window, watching the city pass by: storefronts, a bakery shutting for the night, and a busy taqueria illuminated by a neon beer sign. Pedestrians went about their lives, unaffected by the need for a quick kiss or the weight of public shame.

“Tell me what happened,” Bella said, softer now. The prosecutor’s voice was gone. Just her.

So I told her.

The snap. The silence. His voice was cold and wrong, unlike anything I had seen from him before. The room doing that hockey thing, where twenty men pretended not to stare while feeling every shift in pressure anyway. Me keeping my camera up because that was the only thing I knew how to do when the ground moved.

Bella listened without interrupting.

When I finished, she was quiet for a full block. Then she exhaled, the controlled breath of a woman organizing her thoughts.

“You’re not wrong to be hurt,” she said. “And you’re not wrong to pull back. Both of those things are true.”

“But.”

“No but. That’s the whole sentence.” She turned down the music. “You are allowed to be hurt, Sam. Full stop. You don’t need a reason, and you don’t need to justify it by comparing it to what happened with Case Whitfield. This thing hurt on its own terms. You’re allowed to feel that.”

The hurt had landed in a shape my body already knew, but I was not the person Case had left three years ago.

The bar she had chosen sat on the far end of the St. Mary’s Strip, far enough off the Stampede player circuit that no one in the room looked like they spent their winters under arena lights. That alone told me this had been strategic.

It was loud and warm, smelling like hops and poor decisions. A live band in the corner played something country-adjacent, and between sets the jukebox offered the kind of mix only San Antonio would put together: Tejano, George Strait, then something in Spanish with accordion that made two women at the bar sing along without looking at each other.

A girl worked the room with hand-stamped flyers for a show the next weekend tucked into her bra strap, which was both practical and deeply unsanitary. The crowd skewed young enough to make me feel experienced and old enough to make me feel relevant. The lighting made everyone look fifteen percent more attractive than they deserved.

Bella installed us in a booth, ordered two drinks without consulting me, and arranged herself like she was settling in for a deposition that happened to have a drink menu.

“Okay,” she said. “New rule. For the next two hours, we do not say the name Evan McKinney. We do not say, Mr. Sunshine. We do not discuss hockey, photography, or any man whose primary form of communication is controlled silence.”