Page 83 of The Grumpy Defenseman

Silas was slowing him.

Sandra had brought it to me first.

Evan had not seen it yet.

That meant I still had a window.

Not to erase what had happened. That was gone.

But maybe I could decide what happened next before the machine did it for me.

“What do you need from me?” Sandra asked.

What I needed was simple and impossible: the frame off every deck in the building, Walsh out of it, and enough time to tell Evan myself.

“Time.”

Sandra nodded once. “You’ve got an hour before Walsh expects an answer.”

“One hour,” I repeated.

“Use it well.”

She picked up the tablet and paused at the door.

Then, without turning, she said, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you did this because you’re careless.”

The door clicked shut behind her.

I stood in the middle of the media room with the hum of the computers around me and the terrible stillness that follows a sentence like that.

Because she was right.

It was not carelessness.

It was want, and want had gotten expensive.

I turned back to the monitor and opened the Hold folder.

Frame 187 filled the screen.

Evan looked back at me from the bench, unguarded and unaware, the exact second of him I had no right to keep and had kept anyway.

“Okay,” I said softly to no one. “Great. Fantastic. Let’s go ruin my life responsibly.”

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 of equipment, 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.