Chapter 5
Samantha
The bus smelled like Icy Hot and a cologne that seemed to come standard with every professional sports contract.
I climbed aboard and felt the room adjust: twenty-six heads clocking the new variable and returning to whatever they had been doing once they decided I was not interesting enough to stare at.
Standard protocol. I had boarded enough team buses to know the hierarchy: rookies up front, the untouchables in the back row where the speakers were loudest, and the supervision was thinnest.
Evan sat alone near the rear exit. Hood up. Tension registering through every line of him. He did not look at anyone. He looked at the window like it owed him money.
Good morning, Mr. Sunshine. So glad to see you’ve embraced the joy of community outreach.
Brick waved me toward the middle section like a man directing air traffic. “Cole! Sit with me. I need someone with an IQ above room temperature.”
“That eliminates most of this bus,” I said, dropping into the seat across the aisle.
“Exactly my point.”
The bus lurched out of the parking lot and into San Antonio traffic. I settled in, camera bag between my feet, mentally reviewing the shot list for the community appearance. Standard setup: players interacting with kids, photo ops, the whole machine of organized goodwill.
My phone buzzed.
Bella: I looked up your hockey team. One of them goes by brICK. I need you to confirm he’s as ridiculous as that nickname suggests.
Me: More.
Bella: I need to come to a game. For legal research purposes.
Me: You’re a prosecutor. What legal research?
Bella: I’ll think of something. Go be brilliant.
I pocketed my phone and looked out the window as the city scrolled past: taquerias, a church with a sign that read GOD LOVES YOU BUT I’M HIS FAVORITE. San Antonio had a sense of humor about itself that I appreciated. No pretense. Just a city being exactly what it was.
The community center was the kind of city-funded building that had survived four decades of budget meetings by refusing to age gracefully: bleach-smelling tile, scuffed baseboards, a ceiling fan that clicked on every rotation.
Somebody had hung paper streamers in Stampede green from every available hook, and the effect was exactly the kind of earnest that ownership paid photographers to capture. It was already buzzing when we arrived.
Posters lined the walls. Kids in oversized jerseys vibrated with the frequency of children who were about to meet their heroes and might actually explode from the anticipation.
I moved through the crowd, camera up, finding the rhythm of the room.
Brick was immediately swarmed, three kids hanging off his arms while he pretended to struggle.
I got six frames of it, each one better than the last. Across the room, Mack had stationed himself behind a folding table and was working through a long autograph line with the patience of a man who had done this more summers than he would admit.
He signed jerseys, programs, and at one point a small child’s cast with the same steady handwriting he used on everything.
Two rookies were teaching a group of girls how to tape a stick, which was going badly and hilariously. I shot that too.
Community days always did this to teams. The extroverts got mobbed first. Staff hovered at the edges, pretending any of it was spontaneous while quietly steering the order of things.
Somewhere in every room, one player became the unofficial translator between the public and the men who would rather block a slapshot than make small talk.
On this team, that player was obviously Brick.
And then I saw Evan.
He had positioned himself near the back wall, of course he had, with the same exit-adjacent posture I had come to recognize as his default setting. Arms crossed. The human equivalent of a CLOSED sign.
But a boy had broken through.
He was maybe eight. Big eyes. Bigger jersey, a McKinney 44 that hung past his knees like a dress. His father hovered a few feet behind, wearing the nervous expression of a parent who had watched his kid walk up to a stranger and was now holding his breath.
“Mr. McKinney?” The boy’s voice was small but steady. “Can you show me how to shoot like you?”
Evan’s whole body went still.
Not the guarded stillness I had seen before. Something different. A calculation happening behind his eyes that had nothing to do with exits or threats. He was deciding something: not whether to engage, but how.
“Where’s your stick?” he asked.
The boy held up a youth stick so beat-up it looked like it had been through a war. Blade chipped, tape frayed, the kind of equipment that said this kid played every day on whatever surface was available.
Evan took it. Weighed it like a craftsman inspecting a tool. Then he grabbed an adult stick leaning against the wall and crouched down to the boy’s level.
“Watch,” he said.
No smile. No warmth for the cameras. Just measured instruction, the same precision I had seen on the ice, scaled down and softened for a child who was looking at him like he had hung the moon.
He positioned the boy’s hands. Nudged his feet into alignment with a tap of the stick blade, patient and exact.
“Relax your shoulders,” he said. “Don’t muscle it. Let the stick do the work.”
The boy swung. Missed the target.
“Again,” Evan said.
The boy swung again. Connected. The ball rolled to the wall.
His father’s breath caught audibly.
Evan did not react. No high-five. No celebration for the cameras he had to know were watching. He just nodded once, the same nod he gave when a drill went clean, and said, “Again.”
The boy hit three more in a row.
Then Evan did something I did not expect.
He took the adult stick, pulled a marker from his pocket, and wrote something along the blade. His hand moved quickly. Not a signature. Something longer. When he finished, he held the stick out to the boy.
The father stepped forward. “We can’t…”
“It’s his,” Evan said. Quiet. Final.
The boy hugged the stick against his chest like he had been handed Excalibur.
I had been shooting the entire time. My finger found the shutter the moment Evan crouched down, and I fired steadily through the whole sequence: the swings, the nod, the handoff. Thirty frames, maybe forty. My best work happened when my conscious mind stepped aside and let instinct run.
I zoomed in on the last frame, trying to read what he had written on the blade. The angle was wrong. I had been slightly behind and to the left, and the text was facing the boy.
Of course. Mr. Sunshine writes a private message on a hockey stick for a kid and positions it so the photographer can’t read it. Even his generosity has a security perimeter.
The boy and his father walked away, the kid already swinging the stick in slow motion, reenacting the lesson with the focus of someone who would remember this day for the rest of his life.
Evan stood. In the time it took him to straighten his spine, the entire man rearranged.
His guard returned. Eyes resumed their sweep of exits and angles.
The version of him who had crouched on a gymnasium floor and taught a kid to shoot, with the quiet tenderness of someone who remembered exactly what it felt like to be eight years old and desperate to learn, was gone.
The guard was back.
But I had seen what was behind it. Again.
Brick materialized beside me, protein bar in hand.
“You get that?”
“All of it.”
“Good.” He took a bite, chewing thoughtfully. “He won’t admit it, but that’s who he is.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Brick looked at me with that sharpness he hid under the jokes. “Because most people see the walls and stop. They don’t stick around for the rest.”
I did not answer. The honest version would have revealed more about me than about Evan, and I was not ready for Brick to see that.
He seemed to understand anyway. He nodded once, clapped me on the shoulder, and wandered back into the crowd.
I looked down at my camera, scrolling through the frames. The boy’s face, lit with uncomplicated joy. The father’s hands, pressed to his mouth. And Evan, gentle in a way that did not fit anything the media had ever written about him.
I saved every frame. Then I created a separate folder, moved the best twelve images into it, and labeled it with two words I had never used for a client file before.
For me.