Page 84 of The Grumpy Defenseman

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.

“You okay?” 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 than they 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.

“Yes.”

Silence.

The kind that looked empty to outsiders and was not. The kind of quick, invisible math.

He stood up slowly.

“What about it?”

This was the part where a better person would have become instantly eloquent and morally clear.

Instead, I heard myself say, “Walsh saw it.”