Chapter 3
Evan
Five forty-seven. The rink was mine.
I pushed off hard from the boards, blades cutting a clean line through ice that had been resurfaced twenty minutes earlier.
Glass-smooth. Perfect. The Zamboni had left the faint mineral smell I had known since I was old enough to stand on skates: engine exhaust and something chemical I would recognize anywhere.
My mother worked nights at St. Vincent’s.
So, from the age of four, I went where Dad went.
He set me on the ice with a stick and a puck after the last session cleared out, and I skated alone for an hour while he drove the machine in slow, overlapping circles, smoothing out everything that had been torn up during the day.
I had learned to love empty rinks not for what they contained, but for what they did not. No voices. No audience. Just blades on ice and cold air in my lungs.
Twenty-five years later, the ritual was the same.
I ran through my warm-up laps. Slow at first, then building.
My edges bit into the turns with the precision of ten thousand hours of practice: crossovers, backward-to-forward transitions, motions so automatic my legs ran them while my mind went elsewhere.
Which was the point. The ice was the only place my head went quiet.
After the laps came shooting. I lined pucks along the far blue line.
Forehand. Top right.
Forehand. Bottom left.
Backhand. Five-hole.
The net caught them with a satisfying snap. One after another. Mechanical. Precise.
I did not hear the door open.
I did not hear footsteps on the rubber matting along the boards.
I was running a breakout drill, retrieving the puck behind the net and driving it up the ice with the acceleration that separated adequate defensemen from reliable ones, when something at the edge of my vision registered.
Not movement. Stillness. A body at the boards that had not been there thirty seconds ago.
I completed the drill, because that was what you did. You finished the play. Then you assessed.
Samantha Cole stood at the boards near center ice, camera bag on the bench beside her, camera hanging at her side. She was not shooting. She was not adjusting settings or doing any of the things photographers did when they arrived at a location.
She was just standing there. Watching.
I coasted to a stop. My breath clouded in the cold air between us.
She did not say anything. Did not wave or fill the silence with nervous chatter. She stood there with an expression I could not place. Not calculating. Not performing interest. Something quieter. Like she had walked into a room she had not expected to find and was still deciding what it meant.
I skated toward her. The sound of my blades in the empty arena was the loudest thing in the building.
“Morning,” she said when I was close enough to hear her at a normal volume.
I nodded.
“You ready?”
“No.”
Her mouth nearly twitched. “Honesty. That’s new.”
I stopped at the boards. The plexiglass between us was scratched and cloudy near the bottom from years of puck impacts.
She stood on the other side with her arms loose at her sides and none of the tension I had seen in PR handlers and the endless procession of people who wanted something from me and could not hide it.
She did not want something from me. Not in the usual way.
That was the unsettling part.
“How long were you watching?” I asked.
“Long enough.”
“You didn’t shoot.”
“No.”
I waited for an explanation. She did not offer one. Just held the silence like she owned it.
“The session,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
“Skate,” she said. “Like you were skating before you knew I was here. Forget I’m in the building.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“It is today.”
She picked up her camera, adjusted something on the body without looking at it, and moved along the boards toward the far end. Giving me space. Not crowding. Not directing. Just positioning herself and waiting.
I should have objected. Should have insisted on the scripted version: stand here, hold this pose. That was the transaction. I gave them the images they wanted, and they left me alone.
Instead, I pushed off the boards and started skating.
Laps first. The rhythm I had carved into my nervous system since childhood: edges finding their grooves, the ice responding to every adjustment in weight and pressure.
I heard the shutter clicking somewhere in my periphery, faint and steady, but quieter than I expected.
She was not firing in bursts the way most photographers did, spraying frames like they were looking for a needle in a haystack.
She was waiting. Taking single shots. Patient.
I moved into puck work. Handling drills: figure eights around the face-off circles, crossovers with the puck on my forehand, then switching hands entirely.
The kind of close-quarters work that built the muscle memory needed to protect the puck in traffic, when two-hundred-pound forwards were trying to strip it, and the only things between you and a turnover were steady hands and balance.
I forgot about her.
Not all at once. In pieces. First, the camera’s awareness faded.
Then everything except the ice and the puck dissolved into the background hum of the refrigeration system, and I was alone the way I had been alone since I was four years old on a rink in Clearfield while my father made the surface new again.
When I finally stopped, chest heaving and stick resting across my thighs, I found her at the boards again. Closer this time. She had moved without me noticing.
Her camera was down. She was looking at me with that same expression from before, the one I could not file into any category I understood.
“Your defensive positioning,” she said. “When you run the breakout drill. You build a wall with your body before you even touch the puck. Every angle covered. Every lane closed. It’s like watching someone construct a fortress in real time.”
I stared at her.
“The question is,” she continued, her voice dropping into something softer, “whether you’re keeping people out or keeping yourself in.”
The words hit the ice between us and did not bounce. They just sat there, absorbing cold, waiting for a response I did not have.
Behind me, the arena door banged open, and two familiar voices spilled into the silence like water into a crack.
“McKinney!” Brick’s voice ricocheted off the rafters. “The hell are you doing here at…” He spotted Samantha. The grin went nuclear. “Oh. Hello again.”
Mack came in behind him, coffee in hand, his gaze moving between Samantha and me with veteran interest.
“Didn’t know we were doing private shoots now,” Mack said.
“We’re not,” I said.
“Kinda looks like you are.” Brick leaned against the boards. “What happened to the ‘I’d rather eat glass than be photographed’ policy?”
“It’s for the campaign.”
“At six in the morning?”
“Fewer distractions.”
Brick and Mack exchanged a look that contained an entire conversation. Mack took a sip of his coffee.
“Heard Vane’s riding everybody about campaign timing,” Mack said. “Walsh is asking questions.”
I filed that. Vane’s problems were not my problems. But if David Walsh was leaning on the campaign during a contract year, the temperature in the organization was climbing.
“Well, don’t let us interrupt.” Brick pushed off the boards. “We’re just here to work out. Pretend we don’t exist.”
“When have you ever let anyone forget you exist?”
He clutched his chest. “Wounded, McKinney. Truly wounded.”
They disappeared through the gym entrance, Brick’s laugh echoing behind them. The arena settled back into quiet, but the quality of it had changed. The seal had been broken. The world had leaked in.
Samantha was packing her camera into its bag.
“You’re done?” I asked.
“I got what I came for.”
She zipped the bag, slung it over her shoulder, and met my eyes one more time. Not warm. Not cold. Steady.
“Thanks for the ice time,” she said, and walked away.
I stood there as her footsteps faded down the tunnel. The rink hummed around me, the cycling refrigeration system, the ice already beginning to show the marks I had carved into its surface.
She had watched me skate and seen something I did not show anyone. She had described my position with more precision than most coaches I had known over the past nine years. And she had asked a question that was still lodged in the center of my chest, cold and heavy.
Whether you’re keeping people out or keeping yourself in.
I grabbed a puck from the boards and drove it into the empty net, hard enough to hear the crossbar ring.
The sound traveled through the arena and came back thinner, like everything else in the building.