Page 48 of The Grumpy Defenseman

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.

Chapter twenty-one

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 HVAC humming 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.

She stopped too.

We stood in the corridor, separated by concrete, fluorescent light, and everything that had happened but had not been said.

She was wearing the same jacket she had worn to Paramour. I did not know why I noticed that. I noticed everything about her, which had always been the problem, which was the reason I was standing in a hallway at seven in the evening trying to find words I had never been good at finding.

She started to speak.

So did I.

We both stopped.

The silence stretched for three seconds that felt longer than they were.

She exhaled first. A small release of breath I felt in my own chest.

“I didn’t know you were still here,” she said.

“I came back.” My voice was rougher than I wanted it to be. Everything about me was rougher than I wanted it to be. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this.”

The sentence was not enough, but it was a start.

I was a man who communicated in puck placement and the geometry of defensive zones. Words were not my surface. They never had been.

But she was standing there, tired, guarded, her eyes carrying the same weight mine did, and silence was not going to fix what silence had broken.

“I shouldn’t have said what I said to you,” I said. “Not there. Not like that.”

Her face did not change much. A slight tightening around her mouth. A blink that came half a second late.